Theft: A Love Story
by Peter Carey
Faber ₤16.99, 273 pages

The opening line to Peter Carey’s latest novel captures the uneasy mix of ostentation and coarseness that runs throughout the book. “I don’t know if my story is grand enough to be a tragedy, although a lot of shitty stuff did happen,” the protagonist, Michael Boone, begins. “It is certainly a love story but that did not begin until midway through the shitty stuff, by which time I had not only lost my eight-year-old son, but also my house and studio in Sydney where I had once been about as famous as a painter could expect in his own backyard.”

Theft, the ninth novel by Australia’s finest export - twice a Booker Prize winner - is narrated in turns by Michael, also known as Butcher Bones, and by Hugh, his “damaged 220-pound brother”. After Michael loses everything including his own paintings in a divorce settlement, he and Hugh have to move to an Australian country house owned by one of his collectors.

Into their newfound rustic routine enters Marlene Cook, an Aussie New York resident. She has come to authenticate a painting by French cubist Jacques Leibovitz which has allegedly been hanging from Michael’s neighbour’s wall - though, as it happens, it will not be hanging there for long.

Michael becomes a prime suspect for the Leibovitz theft, and struggles to regain artistic credibility. He is lured into Marlene’s ambitious scheme - a plan that will make him famous, will make both of them rich, and will allow them to be together. It is a well-known fact that even the best-laid plans have a habit of going awry, however. And so does this one.

Known for resplendent fictions anchored in a very specific sense of place, Carey’s latest novels have taken in larger views - much of the action in his previous work, My Life as a Fake, was set in Malaysia. Theft moves from New South Wales to Sydney, Tokyo and New York. It is the depictions of Australia, however, that remain most memorable - a river, for instance, described as a “tumescent beast: yellow, turbulent, territorial”, its surface a “bruised and swollen skin”.

Of the two narrative voices, Hugh’s is the most striking (though, in its all-too-knowing candour, more savant than idiot, not entirely convincing). His account of events is an effective counterpoint to Michael’s self-involved tale. Like glittering found objects, Hugh incorporates snatches of randomly overheard language (capitalised for emphasis) into his simple-minded world view. He is given to using words such as “gloaming” and “vermilious”. After a flooded river subsides he notices “grass as flat as dead men and something like sad vomit not yet hosed away”; he compares a face to “an egg or river stone, no place to crack it open”; the skin on a man’s eyelids is “soft as a penis freshly bathed”.

Michael is an equally apt vehicle for arresting imagery. Marlene’s hair after a long-haul flight is “like a paddock of hail-damaged wheat”, and a detective’s face is “all creased with smiling like a lizard in the mouth of a dog”. The artist’s chores are imbued with the power of Carey’s prose: “I invaded ultramarine blue with a force of sweet burnt umber, thus giving birth to a new black as warm as a winter blanket.”

Yet the painter who can portray the mixing of colours with such precision is also prone to describe the woman he loves as “unusual, but very attractive” and talk about her “lovely brown body” - unimaginative depictions if ever there were any. Michael, who swears like an outback trucker, can articulate such pretentious utterances as: “It was in the reign of Ronald Reagan, at three o’clock on a September afternoon, that we arrived in the heart of the imperium.” He thinks of himself as a gruff hick, yet seems clued-up about Manolo Blahniks and “the SoHo where you bought your Comme des Garcons”. For all the harsh words about his loathsome ex-wife, or all the pining after his son, ex-wife and son are only barely sketched in.

Theft is connected to Carey’s body of work through its exploration of recurrent themes - the clash between cosmopolitanism and rootedness, the tenuous border separating authenticity and fakery, the burden of carrying one’s double or shadow through life. As in Oscar and Lucinda, Carey ponders the possibility of man-made beauty emerging amid the roughness of Australia’s landscape. Particularly touching is his depiction of Marlene discovering art - and the wider world - despite her provincial upbringing: “She quietly, triumphantly, entered a completely unmapped ocean, and was gobsmacked... to see what the conditions of birth and geography had hidden from her, i.e. the true wonder of bloody everything else, no less.”

Carey’s novel is entertaining, intriguing even, but lacking the urgency its plot lays claim to, its characters are mostly unable to elicit any empathy. Does the fault lie with the reader for harbouring such high expectations? Perhaps. But it is the author’s fate (and a sign of his talent) to be judged by the towering standard he previously set himself.