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[This web-exclusive interview is the first in a continuing series of web-exclusive reviews and interviews to appear on the KR Web site.]

When Sidney Nolan’s paintings of Australian bushranger Ned Kelly appeared at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, Peter Carey played tour guide. He showed the paintings to his American friends, telling them Kelly’s story and its role in Australian history and legend. Through his retelling, Carey realized the power of Kelly’s story. This led him to write True History of the Kelly Gang, his second Booker Prize-winning novel.

Throughout his career, which spans story collections, a young-adult book, several works of nonfiction and nine novels, Carey has remapped his country’s landscape, often reinventing history though tales of tricksters, legends, and suburbanites in order to find the hidden layers that construct the emotional life of Australia.

Peter Carey lives in New York City. Jennifer Levasseur and Kevin Rabalais spoke with him at his home in 2003 and again in Melbourne and New York in 2006.

Jennifer Levasseur & Kevin Rabalais: You’ve talked about wanting to become an organic chemist when you were a university student, but you faked your experiments because they were too much of a hassle. Were those your first experiences in writing fiction?

Peter Carey: It’s a neat way to think about it, and of course it would have been, but I was just desperate. Have you ever tried to fake a science experiment? It is so hard. You’d think it would be easy. Maybe you want to get the result for the value of G, which is 980. But you don’t want to get that exactly. You want to get about 900. So it is like a work of fiction. The Periodic Table has an extraordinary beauty. Structure does predict performance and character.

JL & KR: One of the themes of your second novel, Illywhacker, is that we become what we imagine. You’ve said that fiction can become fact for those who read and accept it. How has that idea shaped you as a novelist?

PC: There is a great responsibility in what you imagine. We novelists are prey to a sort of magical thinking--the feeling that what you imagine may come true. That, of course, is imagining the future. Imagining the past is just as loaded. How, for instance, should Australian writers imagine the hugely important fact of our history--the dispossession of the indigenous people? On the one hand, this must be imagined. On the other, one has to be careful about how one imagines. One is forever teetering on the edge of wishful thinking, sentimentality and other forms of cultural imperialism.

JL & KR: The bushranger Ned Kelly is an important figure in Australian history. Was re-imagining his life in True History of the Kelly Gang ever overwhelming? Were you concerned that your fictional portrayal of him might displace the historical record?

PC: Some people do read that novel as fact. The thrilling and disturbing part of the Kelly book--in Australia, anyway--is that a lot of people who never read novels are reading it, and, alas, some of them take it literally. I’m sorry about that, but a novelist cannot work without the expectation of an intelligent, literary reader. If you want to find out about Richard III, you don’t go to Shakespeare.

Just the same, I was keenly aware of the facts of Kelly’s life. I tried to work strictly within the limits of what was known and then felt free to imagine things in the unrecorded dark. My book is part of a dialogue with history. It exists together with a lot of other opinions and arguments about Kelly. And I would love to think that people who read my novel must be curious enough to read other books about Kelly. Then they’d see how clever I was!

JL & KR: What are a novelist’s responsibilities when working with the lives of historical figures?

PC: To imagine that these characters had emotional lives. For instance, Ned’s close relationship with his mother. It’s clear. It’s in our face. No one would say I made it up, but before me no one had imagined it. Without our emotions, what are our lives? A series of mysterious actions? I don’t know. But, of course, the lives of all these characters can be imagined in other ways, and I’m sure other writers and artists will do exactly that.

JL & KR: After True History of the Kelly Gang, you took on another iconic Australian story--the Ern Malley Affair--in My Life as a Fake. But unlike the representations in True History, you took the figures involved in this famous 1944 literary hoax and created your own story and characters based loosely on that event. How long had you been thinking about that story?

PC: From the moment I knew about the story, I thought James McAuley and Harold Stewart were bastards. [Note: McAuley and Stewart were Australian writers who created a fictitious everyman whose sister found his poetry after his death. They cobbled the poetry from magazines and scientific texts and submitted it under the name Ern Malley to Angry Penguins, a literary journal, for publication. When the hoax was uncovered, Max Harris, the journal’s editor, was humiliated and later put on trial for printing obscenity.] It seemed to me that McAuley and Stewart were fighting actively against risk, adventure, and modernism, and I didn’t like them for doing that. I suppose you could say that I had already emotionally entered into that combat even though I didn’t find out about it until the 1960s. And then, when I start to think about McAuley and Stewart’s conservative politics—they thought it was a joke that an artist could come from the Ern Malley background that they suggested, a garage mechanic, which they knew the left would love—I hated them even more. In a funny way, I came from an Ern Malley background, as did many Australian artists and writers of my age. So I believe in Ern Malley. If you look at the poems, they’re pretty good. I thought of Ern Malley as a real person, and I saw the whole thing, the way his poetry ended up being read as a vindication of him. You can see how emotionally involved I am in it. Then to go to the next step and write the story from his point of view is not strange, but it was a long, long, slow process, which I’m only finally beginning to understand myself.

JL & KR: Why do you think it took you so long to fictionalize that story?

PC: The Australian publisher Michael Heyward was living in New York in the early ’90s writing a book on Malley. He gave it to me and asked if I would make suggestions. I remember reading the manuscript and thinking it’s such an interesting story, and his book is very good. I didn’t consciously think about it then, but I had got myself emotionally and, in a sense, artistically involved in the story by thinking about what Michael was doing in this non-fiction account.

JL & KR: Those two stories, Ned Kelly and Ern Malley, are still very close to the Australian consciousness. Do you feel a sense of duty to tell them and give them to the rest of the world?

PC: No, not at all. They’re all I’ve got! Quite seriously. It would be very tedious to have a sense of responsibility to act as some sort of cultural interpreter or ambassador. We all play with what we’ve got, with what we’ve been given. These are stories that Australians have been given, and it’s fun to mess with them. The more I thought about Ned Kelly, I realized how complacent we were about that story, just generally how lazily we imagined him and how little we thought about what really might have happened. And then there’s the whole issue of his language, which, for me, was very strong.

JL & KR: You’ve said that something changed around the time you wrote True History of the Kelly Gang. Did that change have to do with language?

PC: When I think of the things that made me want to write, certainly Joyce, Faulkner and Beckett had a lot to do with it. There’s a lot of rule-breaking in their sentences. Their voices are very distinct. They helped show me what I wanted to do. But The Kelly Gang was really the first time I ever did it. That was very liberating for me.

JL & KR: Are you talking about voice?

PC: I’m talking about nailing things down, the way you join words, like with Kelly’s unpunctuated language. This provided me with an opportunity to do something new and something that felt, at the same time, very Australian.

JL & KR: About True History of the Kelly Gang and Theft, you’ve said that there aren’t sentences like those in Australian literature. Is that a goal for you?

PC: If the thing that gets you out of bed in the morning is to write something new and beautiful, then yes. And that is the thing that gets me out of bed in the morning.

JL & KR: Because the factual stories of True History of the Kelly Gang and My Life as a Fake are well known, particularly in Australia, what do you think about the way those novels were received?

PC: The really big problem in Australia, in terms of how journalism deals with literature, is that no one wants to allow for the possibility that it really is made up, and that this indeed is the real magic of literature. The whole thing about the Kelly Gang, as far as I was concerned, is that it was hugely made up. I was very proud of what I had done. Also, for anyone who knows the story, the characters do walk in the door at the right time and say the right things, but out of the dark this whole wild world has been invented that respects the truth. I thought, This is a different kind of Ned Kelly. Then when you think that he wore that boy’s sash on the day he was captured, well, he was a boy still. What did the newspapers do? Well, they brought out the photographs of the bearded bushranger and the man in the iron mask. Those are the lazy ways that we think about him. What I couldn’t believe was that, after spending three years writing the novel, the first thing the reviewers thought was, How can we undo this? The second thing is that they tended to review the history of the story.

JL & KR: Did reviewers evaluate the novel by checking the facts, looking for what you may have gotten right or wrong?

PC: There were reviewers who had a sense of what I was doing, but for the most part, if you looked at those reviews, you wouldn’t know if I had made a work of art or that it might even be a little interesting. A similar thing happened with My Life as a Fake. They tended to worry about the historical story that I left behind and not really think about what I had actually done. They just wrote about what they knew. But in the end, literature is not made by journalists or profilers. It is, weirdly, made by readers. You can’t stop that.

JL & KR: Did the response to True History of the Kelly Gang prevent you from writing a novel directly about Ern Malley?

PC: Well, my character isn’t Ern Malley. With the Kelly Gang, I had to have the right number of Kelly siblings and the places had to be right. The pleasure in taking these points and accepting them is part of the discipline, and then you invent what is possible in the unimagined dark. I like all those names to be there and those things to be said, as they were in court documents and so forth. In My Life as a Fake, I was intrigued with the notion of my identification with Ern Malley. I thought, How would you feel if you woke up at age twenty-four and everybody started telling you that you’re a fake? You’d be furious. And you would have been made to appeal to the sympathies of the left, so you’d be visually and visibly a member of the proletariat. I began to write about this character in a rage. I didn’t need the historical story, but I had to acknowledge it at the back because Australians would know where it came from. And those who did know the story would get an extra layer of pleasure. In a way, I would have rather not had the acknowledgement in the American edition. I still had to acknowledge that I had stolen a poem or two. Even though those two novels seem remarkably similar in many respects, to me they felt different.

JL & KR: You’ve written other books--Illywhacker, for instance--in which the narrator claims to be deceitful and says that he can’t remember the truth.

PC: In Illywhacker, I wished to highlight that. In True History of the Kelly Gang, I wanted to alert the reader relatively early to the fictional nature of the project. One of the three, four or five reasons that the book is addressed to Kelly’s daughter was because Australian readers would immediately know that Ned Kelly didn’t have a daughter. That, I hope, destabilized the narrative a little bit. But in Illywhacker, of course, lying is the subject.

JL & KR: Incident, not character, is often the seed for your work. But your novels are character-driven. Many of your titles even refer to the characters. At what stage do you know your characters?

PC: My books normally begin with an idea, and I discover the characters along the way. I ask myself, Who are the people who have done these ridiculous things? A lot of my work is discovering the deep wellspring of action, the complicated characters that make sure my people are not puppets on strings. It’s not until the end of that process that I discover who my characters really are. And in the end, that’s what I’m pleased with and that’s what I remember. But going into it, what often concerns me is an idea. That idea then leads to the birth of the characters.

JL & KR: How concerned are you with plot when you’re discovering your characters? When you begin, do you have a sense of where you’re headed?

PC: It’s always different, but my ideal example is Oscar and Lucinda. Before writing that novel, I lived in the country and saw a little church that was going to be moved away. I thought about how strange it was that the indigenous culture had been destroyed so that the church could be there. Then I imagined the church floating through the landscape like a box full of Christian stories, sliding through this landscape of indigenous stories. I found that interesting, and I was moved to find a reason why a church might ever float on a river. I thought of something prefabricated, something Victorian, and I ended up with this ludicrous thing, a glass church. Glass, symbolically, is interesting. I knew I had a book because I had a folly. From that point, I had to think, Who did this? Why did they do it? I invented Lucinda, who inherits the glassworks. Then I went back and figured out who the characters were and I tried to make them real. One of my first feelings about this narrative was that it should be told by a descendant whose ancestor, Oscar, spawned and then died like a salmon, as the narrator says. So even before I knew who he was, Oscar never had a chance. Oscar and Lucinda can’t finally be united in conjugal bliss because a contrary idea rules the narrative, and the characters’ destinies are made by that idea.

Of course, nothing can be worked out in advance. I always imagine I have only to realize that I don’t know anything. I’m researching all the time. I’m writing all the time. I’m aware that I’m faking it. I can’t bear that feeling, but the truth is that to write is to fail every day and it isn’t until the final draft that the work begins to feel authentic.

JL & KR: It seems that the story of the church also relates to your body of work as an invention and discovery of Australia.

PC: I always think of myself as a writer who doesn’t write about his life. I would be bored to write a novel about myself because I know what’s going to happen. For me, the excitement of the novel is that it’s totally made up. But I write about my life in another way: I’m writing about my country. So I’m just as narcissistic as the next novelist, except that in my work personal identity is somehow mixed with national identity. Who am I? Who are we? In other countries, what can seem like a 19th century quest for national identity is still a mystery to contemporary Australians.

JL & KR: You mentioned research. What kind of research do you undertake for your novels? Are you hands-on? For instance, in Theft, did you stretch canvas in order to know what the artist Butcher Bones must know?

PC: No! I would never do that. I want to know about the physical factors of a character’s life. When I was writing Jack Maggs, for instance, the character had to write with a quill. If you’ve got to write with a quill, that changes your life. Your actions are going to be different than if you write with a pen. What you find out in research changes and makes what you’re inventing in the fiction. For instance, in Theft, the house on the Never Never River in Queensland was based very closely on the house built for me on the same river. It was a fabulous place. But I was talking to my friend Stewart Waltzer, who is an art dealer, and he said, “No. A painter doesn’t want natural light. He wants electricity.” New York painters paint with electric lights because that’s the light galleries use. So I took all of the information I could from Stewart about what this character would want to do, and then I acted. Butcher then had to hang the lights, mess up the floor. All of the physical realities of his life had to bear on the place that I wanted to set it. Out of that, I get something that’s very physical. Also, I express his character. That’s lovely, when the things you find out all help to create action in the work. Stewart and I were having lunch two or three times a week, and we were talking about those sorts of things. I also met with a very respected New York conservator. I started to think of conservators when I was starting to write the trap that the characters set for the conservator in the novel. The nature of a conservator is so at odds with Butcher’s character, which is reckless and compulsive. So he talks of the conservator as a nervous hamster. That comes from reading about conservation. I read what I could. But I didn’t do anything.

JL & KR: Your drafts are incredibly detailed with research notes, photographs and drawings.

PC: With My Life as a Fake, every time I knew I was lying about Malaysia—if I knew I was just making things up—I went over the sentence with a highlighter. I then listed all of the things I wanted to know, and I set up meetings with people who would know. I interrogated people who would tell me, “You can’t do this. You can’t have a piano in a whorehouse.” “Well why not?” “Because it’s culturally inappropriate.” “Was there a cabaret?” “Yes, there was the Green Parrot.” “How did that work?” I arrived in Penang with a piano in a whorehouse. By the time I left, I had a cabaret with taxi girls. I knew where it was. I knew who had sung there. And the book is much better for it.

JL & KR: Are there different responsibilities when you’re doing this kind of research as compared with writing a book such as The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith, which is set in the fictitious country of Efica?

PC: Part of it has to do with responsibility. But part of it is that the truth is so much richer than anything you can invent. In the case of Malaysia, one thing I was really concerned with was people telling me that I behaved like a cultural imperialist and that I had gone there and raided the country for color and effect without having taken the trouble to respect the place itself. So in that case, it was really important to me that someone who had lived in Penang all of his life could look at the book and say, “Yes.” I did not hear a single negative thing about that.

You also don’t want to be a fool. If you’re writing a book like the Kelly Gang, you want horsemen and farmers to be able to read the book and agree. There’s something interesting that comes with the pressure of my wanting to imagine something one way and the world in the way it is. Something will pop out of that which is new. Any time someone tells me when I’m researching something, “Well, that’s impossible. You couldn’t do that,” I ask, “Can you just think of a way in which it might be able to happen?”

JL & KR: The idea of an audience seems to be important in your work. Your novels are often addressed to someone particular, placing the reader in a voyeuristic position.

PC: When I wrote the first draft of the Kelly Gang and was thinking of Kelly’s own writing, I started to write the book in his style. But after a hundred pages, the prose was just like Ned’s, and it was unreadable. Then I started asking questions: Who is this for? Why is he writing? To what reader? The historical character is writing for the newspapers, for the judiciary, but novels don’t work that way. Then I decided that he was writing it to the future, maybe even a better future, and he was writing it to a child. I made the child a girl, which goes against the local expectation because Kelly’s such a masculine figure that you’d expect he’d have a boy.

JL & KR: How did you discover and maintain Kelly’s voice throughout the novel?

PC: His voice is very strong. If you’re Australian, you can read it now and still feel connected to it. It’s close to us. There were all sorts of problems with writing this voice, not the least making it readable. I proceeded for most of the book using commas in places where I would normally use full stops, but these really served as scaffolding which I could later remove. One source of inspiration was Kelly’s Jerilderie Letter. [Note: The letter, which Ned Kelly dictated, has been described as his manifesto. It passionately articulates his pleas of innocence and desire for justice.] The other, and probably the most comforting, was that I grew up in a small country town, Bacchus Marsh, in Victoria, where lots of kids spoke the way my Kelly does: “I came into the room and there he were.” That would not be uncommon. In a funny way, I realized that I could take that voice and not feel like I was inventing anything. I was filled with both Ned Kelly’s writing and my own past. So for me, the voice was direct and simple. And although writing the book was naturally filled with difficulties, being in touch with that voice was never one of them.

After a reading in St. Louis, someone asked me to talk about the problems of writing the book in dialect. The question really shocked me. It never occurred to me that this was dialect. It was our language. If you look at the early Australian reviews of the book, no one was able to see what I had done with language. They had no idea that this was a hugely invented book. Why is there no mention of the most startlingly obvious feature of the novel--its language? I’ll tell you why--because it is deeply rooted in the Australian vernacular, in the Australian soil. They didn’t see that there are no sentences like that in Australian literature.

JL & KR: Even though Kelly is a national figure, is it true that the details of his life aren’t well known?

PC: Everybody thinks they’re well known, but they aren’t. What would be an American equivalent? Maybe it’s something in literature like Huckleberry Finn, which everyone thinks he knows but doesn’t really know. None of the reviewers of the book actually went back to the histories. And so they thought I hadn’t made anything up. Not knowing what was recorded, what was known, they could have no notion of the invention.

JL & KR: How different was the experience of creating this language and world for Kelly from the invented country in The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith?

PC: In some ways, it’s never different. There are two things I can remember about Tristan Smith. One has to do with language. After working on it for a long time, it slowly dawned on me that I had not even begun to think about how the people in these invented countries spoke. Obviously their English would be different, growing out of their cultures. In the end, language was one of the things I enjoyed most about the book. I was so ridiculously proud of the glossary at the end.

The other thing I remember is its contrast to the previous novel, The Tax Inspector, which had made me miserable. It sucked me into a place that was far darker than I ever wanted to go. I was actively unhappy writing that book. I continually questioned whether it was even worth finishing. I get angry when I see a film like The Silence of the Lambs, wondering why anyone would invent such a world. The film seems, to me, evil, and I often worried that The Tax Inspector might be leading the same way. Leaving this dark, gritty realistic world, and going on to Tristan Smith was a pleasure. These are the things I remember about that book. I haven’t looked at it in a long time. Why would I?

JL & KR: Is that comforting for you, to forget your novels after a while?

PC: No. If you don’t read something, you start to look at it in the light of what people say to you, which is not always a reliable way to look at anything.

JL & KR: Do you know where certain obsessions originate--for example, the prevalence of orphans in your novels?

PC: I used to think that there were so many orphans in my work because I was lazy and I didn’t want to invent families. Now I know this is not true. My personal trauma, going off to boarding school, made a sort of orphan of me. Of course, that’s lucky. ?t happens to echo one of the big traumas of my country. But I didn’t realize the connection until late. Now I see that my departure from home at the age of ten is played out in my work as a series of orphanings. However, I don’t feel myself a better writer for knowing where it comes from. Obviously, it makes you a better human being to know where these things originate, but I don’t think it makes you a better writer. I’d rather not be self-conscious about what I’m drawing up from the sludge at the bottom of my river.

JL & KR: Aside from the many orphans who populate your books, you also seem to focus on the renewing influence of children. You’ve already spoken about Kelly writing to his unborn daughter. A child is born at the end of The Tax Inspector. Even after such a dark story, the birth in The Tax Inspector offers a sense of redemption.

PC: Having children relatively late in life had a huge effect on me. Maybe I wouldn’t have been ready for it at age twenty or thirty. I think The Tax Inspector was something that was written and influenced by the birth of my first son. I have certainly looked through the work since then and seen that children and birth have been hugely important to me. One would just have to say life has affected me.

JL & KR: You’ve said, “The folks in my country who got off the boat were not religious refugees but convicts, and it’s not unreasonable to think that we’ve been affected by that forever.” How do you believe the convict background affects the whole of Australia?

PC: Everybody in America understands that the influence of the folks who got off the Mayflower continues to affect political and social life in some way to this day. In Australia, few people actually descended from those convicts, and yet the psychological and cultural effects continue. In both countries, you would expect successive waves of immigration to eliminate or diminish the influence. And so you could look at Australia and talk about the Ned Kelly story and say, “Surely it doesn’t matter anymore.” But in fact, those stories continue to matter.

One of the consequences of the convict culture is a huge sympathy Australians have for what Americans call losers. This is not exclusively Australian--it’s slightly Irish, too--and it probably doesn’t come solely from this background. All of our stories are about loss and defeat, in contrast to those in American popular culture, which are about success. And that comes out of the convict culture and the landscape. Look at “Eric the Eel” from the Sydney Olympics. He was an African who represented his country [Equatorial Guinea] in swimming, only he’d just learned to swim. He got into the pool and damn near drowned. People slow clapped, but then they suddenly realized that he might not reach the other end--and they loved it. He went on to be a huge celebrity in Australia. This connects directly back to those convict beginnings, the celebration of the underdog. The crowds at the Olympics were modern, multi-cultural Australians, but they were carrying some of the values of our first fleet.

At the moment, Australian culture is thin. You can draw a clear line from the beginning to now and see the past clearly affecting the present. In the 1950s--and into the ’70s--you’d see two men hail a cab, and one had to sit in front with the driver, the other in the back. And if it was a man and a woman, the man would sit in the front. You couldn’t humiliate the driver by making him a servant.

JL & KR: In a way, you are creating a body of work that is an attempt to give a voice to the voiceless.

PC: I now understand that True History of the Kelly Gang is a product of ideas and emotions that made me want to be a writer in the first place. This has to do with language, what I liked in Faulkner and Joyce, the idea of giving voice to those people who you wouldn’t necessarily think had a voice. This didn’t occur to me while I was writing True History of the Kelly Gang, but when it was all over, I was at dinner in New York, sitting next to an editor who I know rather well, and I found myself saying, “I think this is the book I’ve waited my whole life to write.”

JL & KR: The American edition of Wrong About Japan, your account of traveling to Japan with your youngest son, doesn’t mention the fictional character in the story. At what point did you decide to introduce a fictional character into an otherwise factual travel account?

PC: Early. I wouldn’t think of doing it any other way. I wouldn’t know how else to do it. I didn’t realize this until the American edition was published, so I had to acknowledge this everywhere I went to read because I couldn’t bear the thought of tricking readers. It’s OK to play games or trick the reader when you say, “I’m going to play a whole lot of games here, and I’m going to tell you lies,” but for something to be published as one thing that it’s not was really disturbing for me. So every reading and interview that I did, I had to say, “This character is made up.”

JL & KR: This is similar to the contract you make with the reader in True History of the Kelly Gang. The facts are there, but you’ve interpreted them differently.

PC: I think that if you’ve written a novel and you call it “True History,” you’re making your intentions relatively clear to a literary reader. Also, no academic would ever call anything a “true history.” From the point of view of a literary readership, which is all I was thinking about, I’m sending a very clear signal about what’s going on.

JL & KR: Theft is a turn for you, perhaps the closest you’ve come to writing a thriller. It’s much more plot-driven than your other books.

PC: When people say it’s a thriller, basically that sounds like it would be easy to read and maybe somebody will buy it. In a way, what you would call the thriller aspect of it—what’s hidden, what’s revealed—might not be all that different from My Life as a Fake. What is different is the language and storytelling. There’s something about My Life as a Fake that makes it feel high-cultured, whereas Theft has certain elements that you might associate with a thriller, like the theft of a work of art and Marlene being a classic femme fatale. I quite like this. I get better at learning to withhold information. For me, in learning how to write literature, my first inclination is to just say it, and the notion of holding something back took me a long time to learn.

JL & KR: Do you go straight into a new book once you finish?

PC: One thing publicity makes you realize is that it’s all about the writing, and of course it is. You just forget how hard the writing is. I’ve had a good two days’ work. Before that, I had a pretty shitty three days’ work. But it’s better than not writing, as I was for four months.

JL & KR: What about discoveries in reading? Have any writers surprised you lately?

PC: I just read Colum McCann’s novel Zoli, and I think it’s a great book. I don’t write blurbs because the requests to do so get out of control, but I did write a blurb for that novel because I think it’s amazing. McCann does that thing, which is so interesting, to be other than himself. He does all of this research, and he invents. I think he’s a great writer. I’m reading a new book by Claire Messud, whom I’ve always liked and who writes beautiful and elegant sentences with a wicked sense of humor and wonderful observations. The sentences are almost Jamesian, and you forget there’s a razor in between the lines. I think she’s great. I’m reading The Moon and Sixpence. I probably should have read it before I wrote Theft. During the promotion of Theft, I reread Don Quixote. Being what it is, it’s the sort of book you can read four pages of and then put down for a while, and the new Edith Grossman translation is wonderful.

JL & KR: You’ve said that you don’t write stories anymore because you’ve become addicted to the “dangers and pleasures” of the novel. What are some of those dangers and pleasures?

PC: The dangers are part of the pleasures. You’re constantly taking big risks. You’re doing something that you don’t really know how to do, and you don’t really know where it’s going. You can crash and burn after a year’s work. I’m writing a book now, and it’s scary still because even though I’ve been through stages of being immensely pleased with it, I also at times don’t know what I’m doing. The dangers of writing My Life as a Fake and setting a big portion of it in Malaysia was a big risk. Messing with Charles Dickens in Jack Maggs was a big risk. Or even having a character in My Life as a Fake who’s been invented and comes to life was a risky thing. It’s fun and it’s exhilarating and terrifying and stimulating. Unlike writing a short story, you know what you’re going to do every day. It’s like having a job at a bank. You go to work every day for three years. You’re going to solve problems and create worlds. That’s quite pleasing to me. One pleasure is, of course, having begun with an idea, then coming out at the end with people, characters whom I’ve never met, whom I’ve never seen, who are not based on anybody but live absolutely in my head, and I don’t know where they came from. This is why it’s completely enraging when people claim my work is autobiographical. Every day, I want to be not me. I want to be outside of myself. That’s the big pleasure of it. To overlook that aspect is to overlook literature.

JL & KR: Can you talk about the book you’re working on?

PC: When I leave you, that’s what I’ll go back to fiddle with, so I won’t say much. Some of it is set in northern Queensland in the early ’70s.

JL & KR: What do you miss about Australia?

PC: It gets more and more complicated. I love New York City. But I love Australia, too. I’m in touch with my friends there all the time. I get there three times a year. I think there’s something that happens in your gut, in your muscles when you step off a plane in a place that you know. There are storm clouds in the sky. It’s warm. The grass is spongy, and there’s a smell that speaks to you of your place that causes you to go limp. Certainly when I think of places in the world, when my mind seeks a place to relieve stress, it’s Bellingen--where Oscar and Lucinda lived--or somewhere north of there.

JL & KR: You said earlier that Australians haven’t even begun to understand their great figures. How important is it for a country to have a body of literature that speaks of its emotional life?

PC: When was the last time you saw a writer on the front of The New York Times? Who? Was he dead? Did he win the Nobel Prize? Was it Norman Mailer stabbing his wife? Once, when I was back in Australia, I turned to page three of a newspaper and saw this huge picture of David Malouf feeding the pigeons in Trafalgar Square. He’d just won the IMPAC Award. It was weird. The photograph was so big. Of course, when I saw it I didn’t think about David at all. I thought about me. And I felt vulnerable. Ours is certainly a culture in which journalists are often hostile to writers of fiction. But here’s this huge picture of a fiction writer, and I do think that no matter what the complications are in this, something is going on in which writers of fiction are thought to have some effect on the shaping of the country, of the country’s idea of itself.

PETER CAREY was born in Bacchus Marsh, Victoria, Australia, in 1943, Carey worked in advertising before and during the first stages of his career as a fiction writer. His novels include Illywhacker, The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith, Oscar and Lucinda, winner of the 1988 Booker Prize, and Jack Maggs, which received the 1998 Commonwealth Prize. His most recent novels are My Life as a Fake and Theft.

JENNIFER LEVASSEUR AND KEVIN RABALAIS’s interviews with Richard Ford and William Gass have appeared in previous issues of The Kenyon Review. They are co-editors of Novel Voices (Writer's Digest, 2003), conversations with award-winning American novelists.