A Novel as Rich as London
ALLEN, BROOKE
Writers & Writing A NOVEL AS RICH AS LONDON By Brooke Allen The question of how much or how little "real life" influences the construction of an author's characters has long been debated by...
...Maggs, although frequently misguided, remains steadfastly true to his principles and unflinching in his pursuit of them...
...Oates proves vacillating, panicky and treacherous when faced with pressure...
...As the book progresses it becomes apparent that the author, who lives in New York and has set this work primarily in London, is writing from the point of view of his native land...
...His eyes were dark, inquiring, and yet there was a bruised, even belligerent quality which had kept his fellow passengers at their distance all through that long journey up from Dover...
...At the same time, however, it is the place where he was free to make a fortune completely unhampered by his origins or his accent, and where the question of whether he was a gentleman was on the whole meaningless...
...I am an old dog," he says, "who has been treated bad, and has learned all sorts of tricks he wishes he never had to know.' Equally important to Carey's contention is the question, Who is the stronger man...
...He is a mild-mannered fellow with literary interests who fancies himself a patron of the arts...
...Tobias Oates is a great artist and on some level that excuses his portrayal of Maggs...
...When the odd-looking footman collapses in a fit of tic douloureux while waiting on Mr...
...In Jack Maggs (Knopf, 306 pp., $24.00), a historical novel that is partly an homage to Dickens' Great Expectations, the Australian novelist Peter Carey—whose previous books include Oscar and Lucinda—enters the fray by inventing a fateful meeting between a figure very much like Charles Dickens and one of his great characters, the convict Abel Magwitch...
...Years earlier, when he was being taken by coach in manacles to the port where he would be shipped out, a little orphan boy named Henry Phipps showed him a momentary kindness...
...In particular, he cultivates writers who have not quite arrived and plays host at what he flatters himself is a salon...
...Under hypnosis the ex-convict slowly begins to reveal his secrets...
...there is no welfare system for the destitute except the poorhouse and the prison...
...Maggs, who had been deported from England to the Australian penal colony of New South Wales, has come back— surreptitiously and under threat of execution—to satisfy an irrational longing...
...After being pardoned, but required to remain in Australia, Maggs did indeed make a fortune as a brick manufacturer...
...he sought out executions, reporting them with a magistrate's detachment" Jack Maggs personifies the poverty, rage and despair Oates dreads, as well as the strength that attracts him...
...In introducing Oates to Maggs, Carey cleverly imagines the effect a powerful and suggestive personality might have on a receptive artistic consciousness...
...It may be a fluid society that permits even Buckle, Phipps and Oates to rise to the rank of "gentleman," but despite this potential for mobility, class lines, once established, are absolute...
...It is effective, too, as straight historical fiction...
...Abandoned as a baby on the mud flats under London Bridge, he was brought up by a tough abortionist and her sinister son, and apprenticed to a silver thief...
...he would be the surgeon of this soul...
...What a puzzle of life exists in the dark little lane-ways of this wretch's soul, what stolen gold lies hidden in the vaults beneath his filthy streets...
...This prompts him to run off, first to an underground "gentleman's club" ( for Phipps is homosexual ), then to the Army, where he purchases a commission in a secondrate regiment...
...a man from even 15 years before would have been confused...
...The Industrial Revolution is in full swing and London, the epicenter of the industrialized world, is in the process of radical change...
...In plot, incident and irony Jack Maggs is as entertaining a piece of work as the Victorian novels it is modeled on...
...Carey is more interested in raising than settling questions, though, and undercuts Oates' ideas about his craft...
...Of course, there is nothing so simple as a criminal, or a noncriminal, mind...
...Oates and the other frequenters of Buckle's salon are titillated but disturbed by the unfolding tale...
...Writers & Writing A NOVEL AS RICH AS LONDON By Brooke Allen The question of how much or how little "real life" influences the construction of an author's characters has long been debated by both readers and writers...
...As long as Maggs was a safe distance away, Phipps could go about his dissipated life in peace...
...The handsomely underwritten Phipps has developed expensive tastes and come to view himself as a true gentleman...
...Nevertheless, they continue to protect him from the law...
...It is 1837, the year of 18-year-old Victoria's accession to the throne...
...It turns out he endured a childhood that, for want of a better word, one can only describe as Dickensian...
...He sees his greatest character to date in the making...
...The poor are everywhere...
...Phipps is now living in style in a handsome establishment on Great Queen Street...
...His brows pushed down hard upon the eyes, and his cheeks shone as if life had scrubbed at him and rubbed until the very bones beneath his flesh had been burnished in the process...
...When he receives a letter announcing that Maggs is planning to return to London, he realizes he will not be able to keep his place in society if he is forced to share it with a brutish former thief...
...His job was to climb down the chimneys of fashionable houses and to let in the thief's daughter Sophina, with whom he would proceed to rob the house...
...he wrote passionately about the poor...
...Formerly a humble grocer, Buckle came into an unexpected inheritance and was elevated to the rank of gentleman...
...Meanwhile, Maggs begins to uncover the truth about the man he looks upon as his son, and it is not pretty...
...He hopes and believes he will one day make his name "not just as the author of comic adventures, but as a novelist who might topple Thackeray himself...
...Which ending, the author is clearly asking, is more appropriate...
...Buckle's guests, Oates decides that Maggs is an ideal subject for the study of mesmerism...
...The image of the innocent child haunted him throughout his lengthy incarceration...
...Carey reveals the "real" and much less dramatic story: Maggs lives out his days back in Australia as an unremarkable paterfamilias...
...There are no unions to uphold the interests of the working class...
...they worry that Maggs is a dangerous man...
...Morally and emotionally vulnerable, he becomes entangled in activities that can be construed as criminal and finds himself fleeing with— and at the mercy of—Maggs...
...Before long we learn that Oates has fallen out of love with his wife and in love with her sister...
...Who is the criminal now...
...Integrity is rare in the England of Jack Maggs...
...But most of all Carey's book is, as he intended, a telling meditation on the nature of the creative process, on how the artist finds and distills art from the chaos of raw experience...
...Jack Maggs is an imposing and mysterious figure: "He was a tall man in his 40s, so big in the chest and broad in the shoulder that his fellows on the bench seat had felt the strain of his presence...
...The author accepts Maggs as a gift from heaven, for he has long been intrigued by what he conceives to be "the Criminal Mind," and sees Maggs as a prototypical example of it...
...Maggs thinks of Australia, where he spent so many years in cruel servitude, as a sort of hell...
...Oates (based in almost every detail on the young Dickens) is brilliant, facile and unstable...
...It is also the place to which, in the end, he willingly returns...
...An enthusiastic amateur practitioner of the then fashionable science, Oates "would be the archeologist of this mystery...
...He vowed to make enough money to enable Phipps to live in comfort, enough to "spin him a cocoon of gold andjewels...
...Buckle out of pity, Oates out of artistic arrogance and curiosity...
...Oates was forged in frightening circumstances, and as an artist he developed the technique of confronting the sources of his anxiety: "He feared poverty...
...The Haymarket, for example, a street once famous for its outdoor market, is so transformed that "a man from the last century would not have recognized it...
...Keeping his vow, he lavished his wealth on the boy...
...Who has the criminal mind...
...As teenagers Jack and Sophina fell in love, but their innocent idyll ended in tragedy...
...weave him a nest so strong that no one would ever hurt his goodness...
...Oates invents what he considers to be an artistic denouement that has an apocalyptic fire consume his convicthero...
...Tobias Oates is fascinated by everything he hears from Maggs, whose mind, he reflects, "is a world as rieh as London itself...
...Instead, he secretly finds employment as a footman in the house next door of one Percy Buckle, Esquire...
...Carey's depiction of the artist as a lesser person than the creature he makes use of implies something that is surely true: Creative fire is, finally, a gift that has little or nothing to do with virtue...
...Neither man, according to Carey...
...Afraid of the authorities and unsure of his reception, for Phipps has not answered his recent letters, Maggs does not approach his beneficiary directly...
...To this teeming and unpredictable city returns an outlaw who was banished forever more than 20 years ago...
...He argues that our circumstances make us what we are, and it is the cruel exigencies of early 19th-century society that have turned Jack Maggs, an affectionate boy, into a nearly-hardened criminal...
...But he is revolted by the fact that the source of his fortune is "convict gold," and feels only distaste for his benefactor...
...Buckle's prize catch is Tobias Oates, a young author who is as much of an upstart, and as socially insecure, as Buckle himself...
...The thief trained little Jack to recognize valuable silver...
...Maggs reluctantly agrees to go along...
...He had nightmares about hanging...
...The author of Captain Crumley, a comic first novel that met, like Dickens' Pickwick Papers, with staggering and unprecedented success, he is tormented by a devouring ambition closely allied to the "unholy thirst for love" that his impoverished childhood has given him...
...In this contest Maggs wins hands down...
Vol. 81 • February 1998 • No. 3
