Halfway through Peter Carey’s new novel, “Amnesia,” I began to
worry I was suffering from it.
Who wrote this tedious mess?
Where was that two-time Booker winner who gave us such spectacular
novels as “Oscar and Lucinda” and “Jack Maggs”?
Readers may have trouble remembering the jacket copy, too, which
describes “Amnesia” as a
cerebral thriller involving cybercrime and international intrigue. That’s true
for about 20 pages. Carey, a former advertising executive, knows the importance
of a great hook, and the opening of “Amnesia” couldn’t be more relevant and
exciting:
“It was a spring evening in Washington DC; a chilly autumn morning
in Melbourne; it was exactly 22:00 Greenwich Mean Time when a wormCar entered
the computerised control systems of countless Australian prisons and released
the locks in many other places of incarceration, some of which the hacker could
not have known existed.”
Because those computer systems had been designed by American
firms, the worm instantly spreads through the United States, too, breaking open
thousands of prisons, including secret black sites in [REDACTED] where the CIA
keeps [REDACTED]. On computer screens across the world, the group behind this
apocalyptic amnesty announces: “The corporation is under our control. The Angel
declares you free.”
Who you gonna call — James Bond? Ethan Hunt? Jason Bourne?
No, this is a job for a glib, left-wing writer named Felix Moore,
“the most controversial journalist of his generation.” He’s just been
financially ruined by a defamation case (his 99th), which makes him especially
grateful for the support of a rich old friend, Woody Townes. Bereft of money, home
and family, Felix could use a big project to rehabilitate himself, and for his
own mysterious reasons, Woody wants Felix to write a flattering biography of
the Angel computer hacker. “The defendant won’t talk to anyone but you,” Woody
tells him. “I bailed the bloody Angel before the US could touch her.”
Her. Yes, the Angel is a young woman.
“Australianize her,” Woody demands. “Make it up, and most of all
make the bitch lovable,” so lovable that the CIA won’t be able to spirit her
away without causing national outrage. Because this isn’t just any young woman.
She’s Gabrielle Baillieux, the daughter of a famous actress that Woody and
Felix knew (and loved) in their radical student days. Writing an exculpatory
biography about the young computer criminal will be an audacious and dangerous
literary stunt, but it also promises to bring Felix back in touch with the
girl’s mother.
This exhilarating setup is infected with all kinds of destructive
malware, but for a while, the story races along Carey’s fiber-optic lines.
Woody is a lot more threatening than he first appears. Young Gaby is aligned
with some awfully unsavory figures, and she seems unwilling to participate in
the sugarcoating of her life story. Most troubling of all, Gaby’s mother, the
famous actress, is surely manipulating everyone involved. Even before Felix can
figure out whom he’s really working for, he’s given miles of meandering
audiotape and whisked away to an undisclosed location, where he’s ordered to
start writing — fast — on a manual typewriter (the last defense against the
NSA). It doesn’t take a computer genius to realize that whatever he composes is
likely to get people — starting with himself — killed. But he knows, “This was
the story I had spent my life preparing for.”
Truth and deception have long been adulterous lovers in Carey’s
fiction. He lashed together a similarly treacherous triangle a few years ago in
a svelte novel about art crooks called “Theft.” And in “My Life as a Fake,” he
nested deceptions within hoaxes surrounded by monkey business to write about
literary fraud. Those novels, though, no matter how much they feinted, were
always fantastically engaging.
“Amnesia” may leap off today’s front-page headlines, but it
quickly gets lost in Felix’s dull recreation of Gaby as a young hacker in the
early days of personal computers. This teen drama — think “DOSon’s Creek” —
can’t possibly compete with the chaos we’re asked to imagine is now ravaging
the world’s computer systems.
It doesn’t help that “Amnesia” is predicated on a largely
forgotten political conflict between Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam
and President Richard Nixon. Old spooks and students of Asia-Pacific politics
will remember what Felix calls “the traumatic injury done to my country by our
American allies in 1975”: The CIA conspired with MI6 to bring down Whitlam in a
bloodless coup designed to protect Pine Gap, America’s secret listening post in
Alice Springs, Northern Territory. That evil footnote in our nation’s
diplomatic history received a bit of new attention in 2013, when Edward Snowden
revealed that Pine Gap is now part of the PRISM program that allows the NSA to
spy on almost everyone all the time. But U.S. and British fiddling with
Australian politics in the mid-1970s might as well remain classified information
for all its currency among American readers — and Carey’s elliptical and
erratic narrative does little to draw back that veil of secrecy.
What a missed opportunity for one of the best writers in the
world. With his story of the muckraker and the cyberterrorist, Carey might have
given us a provocative update on Janet Malcolm’s “The Journalist and the
Murderer.” Or he could have breathed life into that forgotten coup of 1975 the
way he reimagined the folk hero in “True History of the Kelly Gang.” But
instead, all the potentially fantastic elements of “Amnesia” are minced and
scrambled and finally overwhelmed.
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