A Long Way from Home
-
- $15.99
-
- $15.99
Publisher Description
Irene Bobs loves fast driving. Her husband is the best car salesman in western Victoria. Together they enter the Redex Trial, a brutal race around the ancient continent over roads no car will ever quite survive. With them is their lanky fair-haired navigator, Willie Bachhuber, a quiz show champion and failed schoolteacher whose job it is to call out the turns, the grids, the creek crossings on a map that will finally remove them, without warning, from the lily-white Australia they know so well.
Set in the 1950s amid the consequences of the age of empires, this funny, brilliantly vivid and lively novel reminds us how Europeans took possession of a timeless culture – the high purpose they invented and the crimes they committed along the way.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
For his 14th novel, Peter Carey sends a young couple and their neighbour on a thrilling car race around ‘50s Australia—and on a journey of self-discovery. Through his two narrators, Irene Bobs and Willie Bachhuber, Carey builds a vivid, sunburnt Australia: dusty roads, rural living and families crowding around the radio. There’s also innate sexism and government-mandated segregation. (It’s no accident that the most intriguing characters are the whip-smart Mrs Bobs and an indigenous stowaway.) A rambunctiously funny story peppered with sobering realities, A Long Way from Home is an instant classic.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Carey's unfortunate latest (after Amnesia) starts out being about a race and ends up being about race, but it's marred by so many "what's going on here?" moments and convenient plot-changing contrivances that readers will wonder what story Carey's trying to tell, and how. In postwar Australia, car salesman Titch Bobs decides to enter the Redex Trial, a grueling endurance car race around Australia, with the goal of winning and using the ensuing celebrity to open his own dealership. His crew: his wife (and driver) Irene, and his neighbor (and navigator), quiz show champion Willie Bachhuber. Carey takes a lot of time setting up his narrative chess pieces, and it's not long after the race starts (over a third of a way into the novel) that a family tragedy breaks up Titch's crew and eventually sends one of them on a baffling adventure that unearths a life-changing secret and lays bare the shameful history of indignities perpetrated against Aboriginal people. Carey's prose is cutting and often quite funny ("On the far shore stood a moustached white man who should have been told, years ago, don't wear shorts."), but that alone doesn't save the overly shaggy story. This won't go down as one of Carey's better efforts.
