A Long Way from Home
A novel
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- USD 6.99
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- USD 6.99
Publisher Description
Irene Bobs loves fast driving. Her husband is the best car salesman in southeastern Australia. Together they enter the 1954 Redex Trial, a weeks-long endurance contest of a car race that circles the entire continent. With them is their lanky, fair-haired navigator: deposed quiz show champion and failed schoolteacher Willie Bachhuber. If they win the Redex, the Bobs name alone will get them a dealership, and Willie will have recharged a life currently ground to a halt. But before any of that might happen, their official strip maps will lead them, without warning, out of the comfortable white Australia they know so well. A breakneck, often hilarious, eye-opening adventure that at the same time reminds us how white people took possession of a timeless culture—the high purpose they invented, and the crimes they committed along the way—A Long Way from Home is Peter Carey’s late-style masterpiece.
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.
