Peter Carey blurs life and the art of the hoax

In his latest book, My Life as a Fake, a novel inspired by the Ern Malley affair of 1944 in which two anti-modernists hoaxed a literary publication with a fake poet, Peter Carey has succeeded in writing a haunting story. It begins in 1972 with Sarah Wode-Douglass, the young editor of a British poetry magazine, agreeing to travel to Malaysia with John Slater, the much older man whom she believes is directly responsible for her mother’s suicide. While Sarah despises Slater, she agrees to accompany the aging poet in the hope that he will finally discuss her mother’s death. Far from talking about her mother, Slater checks Sarah into a hotel in Kuala Lumpur and then disappears for several days. A self confessed bad traveller, she is left to discover Kuala Lumpur alone.

It is in these lone wanderings that Sarah stumbles across a, “middle aged white man in a dirty sarong.”(p 6) Curious, Sarah wonders briefly what has brought him to live in such a place. Later, when Slater finally returns from his “artistic journey”, the two of them cross paths with the white man once more. This time he gives a gesture of recognition to Slater who bundles Sarah away quickly and denies knowing the stranger. It is obvious to Sarah that he is lying and her desire to know the truth comes alive. Carey begins to draw you into a tale that is so fantastic and unbelievable you cannot put the book away.

Eager to know who this strange man is, and perhaps even more eager to know how he is connected to Slater, Sarah takes him a copy of her magazine The Modern Review. He does not reveal anything to her, but hearing what she has done Slater begins to tell the story. “Have you heard of the McCorkle hoax? No? Well, our Christopher Chubb was the villain.”(p 17) And so we learn that the white man is in fact Christopher Chubb, an Australian poet responsible for constructing an infamous hoax in 1946. When Chubb contacts Sarah he is eager to tell his own version of the story, eager to explain the events that led him to such a life. Wanting to expose the shallow editor of an Australian poetry magazine, Chubb had created a fake poet. A dead poet in fact, named Bob McCorkle. Chubb explains how his nightmare began when the editor was put on trial over the content of the poems, and the reader begins to view Chubb in a much darker light.

The ensuing trial saw a character similar to the fake photograph Chubb created of McCorkle emerge, and the lines between fantasy and reality began to blur. As McCorkle took on a life of his own he began to demand things of Chubb. Small things at first, and then finally… a childhood. Chubb’s infant daughter was kidnapped and the chase that would consume his life began. This is an ingenious twist from Carey as it leaves the reader torn between feelings of sympathy and loathing for Chubb. Can we pity a man who has hurt so many others?

What follows is a vivid description of Chubb’s desperate, passionate search for his daughter. His fear that the child will be harmed, and his wavering belief that he truly did create a monster of flesh and bone, drive him on. Ironically, the creature he created destroys Chubb’s very life. He is doomed to live in the shadow of a man he imagined from nothing. When his story is told, Sarah and Slater too have become involved in the life of Bob McCorkle. Sarah cannot clear Chubb, his daughter or McCorkle from her mind and neither can the reader. Chubb’s fate and McCorkle's very life remain with you long after the last page has been turned. Peter Carey succeeds in creating story so vivid that you cannot help but wonder who Bob McCorkle was? Did Chubb imagine him, or did he exist? I challenge anyone to read this book without wondering what is real …and what is simply imagined.

Nadia Booton

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