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AMNESIA
BOOKS
432 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2014
131 people are currently reading
2,440 people want to read
About the author
Peter Carey
102books1,016followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the ŷ database with this name. .
Peter Carey was born in Australia in 1943.
He was educated at the local state school until the age of eleven and then became a boarder at Geelong Grammar School. He was a student there between 1954 and 1960 � after Rupert Murdoch had graduated and before Prince Charles arrived.
In 1961 he studied science for a single unsuccessful year at Monash University. He was then employed by an advertising agency where he began to receive his literary education, meeting Faulkner, Joyce, Kerouac and other writers he had previously been unaware of. He was nineteen.
For the next thirteen years he wrote fiction at night and weekends, working in many advertising agencies in Melbourne, London and Sydney.
After four novels had been written and rejected The Fat Man in History � a short story collection � was published in 1974. This slim book made him an overnight success.
From 1976 Carey worked one week a month for Grey Advertising, then, in 1981 he established a small business where his generous partner required him to work only two afternoons a week. Thus between 1976 and 1990, he was able to pursue literature obsessively. It was during this period that he wrote War Crimes, Bliss, Illywhacker, Oscar and Lucinda. Illywhacker was short listed for the Booker Prize. Oscar and Lucinda won it. Uncomfortable with this success he began work on The Tax Inspector.
In 1990 he moved to New York where he completed The Tax Inspector. He taught at NYU one night a week. Later he would have similar jobs at Princeton, The New School and Barnard College. During these years he wrote The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith, Jack Maggs, and True History of the Kelly Gang for which he won his second Booker Prize.
He collaborated on the screenplay of the film Until the End of the World with Wim Wenders.
In 2003 he joined Hunter College as the Director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing. In the years since he has written My Life as a Fake, Theft, His Illegal Self and Parrot and Oliver in America (shortlisted for 2010 Man Booker Prize).
Peter Carey was born in Australia in 1943.
He was educated at the local state school until the age of eleven and then became a boarder at Geelong Grammar School. He was a student there between 1954 and 1960 � after Rupert Murdoch had graduated and before Prince Charles arrived.
In 1961 he studied science for a single unsuccessful year at Monash University. He was then employed by an advertising agency where he began to receive his literary education, meeting Faulkner, Joyce, Kerouac and other writers he had previously been unaware of. He was nineteen.
For the next thirteen years he wrote fiction at night and weekends, working in many advertising agencies in Melbourne, London and Sydney.
After four novels had been written and rejected The Fat Man in History � a short story collection � was published in 1974. This slim book made him an overnight success.
From 1976 Carey worked one week a month for Grey Advertising, then, in 1981 he established a small business where his generous partner required him to work only two afternoons a week. Thus between 1976 and 1990, he was able to pursue literature obsessively. It was during this period that he wrote War Crimes, Bliss, Illywhacker, Oscar and Lucinda. Illywhacker was short listed for the Booker Prize. Oscar and Lucinda won it. Uncomfortable with this success he began work on The Tax Inspector.
In 1990 he moved to New York where he completed The Tax Inspector. He taught at NYU one night a week. Later he would have similar jobs at Princeton, The New School and Barnard College. During these years he wrote The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith, Jack Maggs, and True History of the Kelly Gang for which he won his second Booker Prize.
He collaborated on the screenplay of the film Until the End of the World with Wim Wenders.
In 2003 he joined Hunter College as the Director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing. In the years since he has written My Life as a Fake, Theft, His Illegal Self and Parrot and Oliver in America (shortlisted for 2010 Man Booker Prize).
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 460 reviews
April 15, 2023
I was over 200 pages into this read after skimming a fair bit, and thinking about DNF-ing, when I decided to check if it was just me; initially I felt vindicated on reading all the poor reviews on ŷ, when I suddenly decided to read the good ones! Inspired by these more positive reviews I went back to page one and started reading this one again! Young Gaby Baillieux releases the Angel Worm (computer virus) that allows hundreds of asylum seekers to walk free from Australian prisons... unfortunately it also infects 5,000 US Prisons!
Cool concept right? No! Because the book is about an aged reporter who's been paid to get Gaby's story; partially (or mainly?) because he knows her mother. Pretty well written this is a unassuming tale about said reporter's journey as he first seeks out in hiding (bailed) Gaby and then has to write her story based on the evidence he gets. Carey was 71 when this one was published, and this at times, clever look at Australia's 1975 constitutional crisis, the rise and fall of the Left and the interference of the Aussie moguls like Packer and Murdoch was the highlight with the chunk telling Gaby's life story, a close second. If anything, maybe Carey tries to cover too much in this book, and thus doesn't cover anything enough? A 5 out of 12, Two Stars from me. Lesson learnt, go with first reading instincts?
2023 read
Cool concept right? No! Because the book is about an aged reporter who's been paid to get Gaby's story; partially (or mainly?) because he knows her mother. Pretty well written this is a unassuming tale about said reporter's journey as he first seeks out in hiding (bailed) Gaby and then has to write her story based on the evidence he gets. Carey was 71 when this one was published, and this at times, clever look at Australia's 1975 constitutional crisis, the rise and fall of the Left and the interference of the Aussie moguls like Packer and Murdoch was the highlight with the chunk telling Gaby's life story, a close second. If anything, maybe Carey tries to cover too much in this book, and thus doesn't cover anything enough? A 5 out of 12, Two Stars from me. Lesson learnt, go with first reading instincts?
2023 read
February 8, 2019
Amnesia has had a rather sorry time of it in the world. Almost all the reviews are damning and its average rating is a woeful 2.82. Half way through I thought I might be able to launch a laudable defence. After all, Peter Carey is now 75 and we all know his best days as a novelist are behind him and have been so for a while now. In his prime he wrote a fabulous series of novels and, without doing the math, I'd include him as one of the thirty best living novelists.
The main problem of Amnesia is perhaps how Carey chooses to tell what is potentially a great story. His ever more experimental narrative technique has been a problem I've had with him for a while. In his prime his narrative voice was always pretty straightforward. The conventional tracks along which he unfurled his tales suited his fabulous talent at storytelling. He's blessed with fizzing vitality and his characters are always imagined and brought to life to the hilt. In recent years he's gone all post-modernist and experimented with dual, sometimes conflicting, narrative voices. As is the case here where the first half of the novel is narrated in the first person by a disgraced journalist who has been bamboozled into telling the story of the daughter of a woman he had a crush on as a young man. This is Gaby, an eco-terrorist who the US government wants to extradite. The second half of the novel switches to two first person narratives recorded on tape inside a kind of third person overview. Yep, it's confusing! Oddly though it's the second half which is more engaging. I had problems with Felix, the narrator of the first part. I didn't find him very interesting and often found his life drearily confusing. The beating heart of the novel is Gaby and the mother/daughter conflict was brilliantly done. Whenever Gaby's on the page the novel is compelling. Unfortunately this isn't true when Felix hogs the pages. Another problem, at times Carey assumes a knowledge of Australian politics which I simply did not have. So the best bits are a punk take on movies like Silkwood or The East and the worst bits another take on the mid-life crisis of a liberal warm hearted, cold-footed male.
If you've never read Carey I'd recommend all his early novels, from Illywhacker through to Theft.
The main problem of Amnesia is perhaps how Carey chooses to tell what is potentially a great story. His ever more experimental narrative technique has been a problem I've had with him for a while. In his prime his narrative voice was always pretty straightforward. The conventional tracks along which he unfurled his tales suited his fabulous talent at storytelling. He's blessed with fizzing vitality and his characters are always imagined and brought to life to the hilt. In recent years he's gone all post-modernist and experimented with dual, sometimes conflicting, narrative voices. As is the case here where the first half of the novel is narrated in the first person by a disgraced journalist who has been bamboozled into telling the story of the daughter of a woman he had a crush on as a young man. This is Gaby, an eco-terrorist who the US government wants to extradite. The second half of the novel switches to two first person narratives recorded on tape inside a kind of third person overview. Yep, it's confusing! Oddly though it's the second half which is more engaging. I had problems with Felix, the narrator of the first part. I didn't find him very interesting and often found his life drearily confusing. The beating heart of the novel is Gaby and the mother/daughter conflict was brilliantly done. Whenever Gaby's on the page the novel is compelling. Unfortunately this isn't true when Felix hogs the pages. Another problem, at times Carey assumes a knowledge of Australian politics which I simply did not have. So the best bits are a punk take on movies like Silkwood or The East and the worst bits another take on the mid-life crisis of a liberal warm hearted, cold-footed male.
If you've never read Carey I'd recommend all his early novels, from Illywhacker through to Theft.
January 14, 2015
Halfway through Peter Carey’s new novel, “Amnesia,� I began to worry I was suffering from it.
Who wrote this tedious mess?
Where was that two-time Booker winner who gave us such spectacular novels as “Oscar and Lucinda� and “Jack Maggs�?
Readers may have trouble remembering the jacket copy, too, which describes “Amnesia� as a cerebral thriller involving cybercrime and international intrigue. That’s true for about 20 pages. Carey, a former advertising executive, knows the importance of a great hook, and the opening of “Amnesia� couldn’t be more relevant and exciting:
“It was a spring evening in Washington DC; a chilly autumn morning in Melbourne; it was exactly 22:00 Greenwich Mean Time when a wormCar entered the computerised control systems of countless Australian prisons and released the locks in many other places of incarceration, some of which the hacker could not have known existed.�
Because those computer systems had been designed by American firms, the worm instantly spreads through the United States, too, breaking open thousands of prisons, including secret black sites in [REDACTED] where the CIA keeps [REDACTED]. On computer screens across the world, the group behind this apocalyptic amnesty announces: “The corporation is under our control. The Angel declares you free.�
Who you gonna call � James Bond? Ethan Hunt? Jason Bourne?
No, this is a job for a glib, left-wing writer named Felix Moore, “the most controversial journalist of his generation.� He’s just been financially ruined by a defamation case (his 99th), which makes him especially grateful for the support of a rich old friend, Woody Townes. Bereft of money, home and family, Felix could use a big project to rehabilitate himself, and for his own mysterious reasons, Woody wants Felix to write a flattering biography of the Angel computer hacker. “The defendant won’t talk to anyone but you,� Woody tells him. “I bailed the bloody Angel before the US could touch her.�
Her. Yes, the Angel is a young woman.
“Australianize her,� Woody demands. “Make it up, and most of all make the bitch lovable,� so lovable that the CIA won’t be able to spirit her away without causing national outrage. Because this isn’t just any young woman. She’s Gabrielle Baillieux, the daughter of a famous actress that Woody and Felix knew (and loved) in their radical student days. Writing an exculpatory biography about the young computer criminal will be an audacious and dangerous literary stunt, but it also promises to bring Felix back in touch with the girl’s mother.
This exhilarating setup is infected with all kinds of destructive malware, but for a while, the story races along Carey’s fiber-optic lines. Woody is a lot more threatening than he first appears. Young Gaby is aligned with some awfully unsavory figures, and she seems unwilling to participate in the sugarcoating of her life story. Most troubling of all, Gaby’s mother, the famous actress, is surely manipulating everyone involved. Even before Felix can figure out whom he’s really working for, he’s given miles of meandering audiotape and whisked away to an undisclosed location, where he’s ordered to start writing � fast � on a manual typewriter (the last defense against the NSA). It doesn’t take a computer genius to realize that whatever he composes is likely to get people � starting with himself � killed. But he knows, “This was the story I had spent my life preparing for.�
Truth and deception have long been adulterous lovers in Carey’s fiction. He lashed together a similarly treacherous triangle a few years ago in a svelte novel about art crooks called “Theft.� And in “My Life as a Fake,� he nested deceptions within hoaxes surrounded by monkey business to write about literary fraud. Those novels, though, no matter how much they feinted, were always fantastically engaging.
“Amnesia� may leap off today’s front-page headlines, but it quickly gets lost in Felix’s dull recreation of Gaby as a young hacker in the early days of personal computers. This teen drama � think “DOSon’s Creek� � can’t possibly compete with the chaos we’re asked to imagine is now ravaging the world’s computer systems.
It doesn’t help that “Amnesia� is predicated on a largely forgotten political conflict between Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam and President Richard Nixon. Old spooks and students of Asia-Pacific politics will remember what Felix calls “the traumatic injury done to my country by our American allies in 1975�: The CIA conspired with MI6 to bring down Whitlam in a bloodless coup designed to protect Pine Gap, America’s secret listening post in Alice Springs, Northern Territory. That evil footnote in our nation’s diplomatic history received a bit of new attention in 2013, when Edward Snowden revealed that Pine Gap is now part of the PRISM program that allows the NSA to spy on almost everyone all the time. But U.S. and British fiddling with Australian politics in the mid-1970s might as well remain classified information for all its currency among American readers � and Carey’s elliptical and erratic narrative does little to draw back that veil of secrecy.
What a missed opportunity for one of the best writers in the world. With his story of the muckraker and the cyberterrorist, Carey might have given us a provocative update on Janet Malcolm’s “The Journalist and the Murderer.� Or he could have breathed life into that forgotten coup of 1975 the way he reimagined the folk hero in “True History of the Kelly Gang.� But instead, all the potentially fantastic elements of “Amnesia� are minced and scrambled and finally overwhelmed.
Forget it.
This review was first published in The Washington Post:
Who wrote this tedious mess?
Where was that two-time Booker winner who gave us such spectacular novels as “Oscar and Lucinda� and “Jack Maggs�?
Readers may have trouble remembering the jacket copy, too, which describes “Amnesia� as a cerebral thriller involving cybercrime and international intrigue. That’s true for about 20 pages. Carey, a former advertising executive, knows the importance of a great hook, and the opening of “Amnesia� couldn’t be more relevant and exciting:
“It was a spring evening in Washington DC; a chilly autumn morning in Melbourne; it was exactly 22:00 Greenwich Mean Time when a wormCar entered the computerised control systems of countless Australian prisons and released the locks in many other places of incarceration, some of which the hacker could not have known existed.�
Because those computer systems had been designed by American firms, the worm instantly spreads through the United States, too, breaking open thousands of prisons, including secret black sites in [REDACTED] where the CIA keeps [REDACTED]. On computer screens across the world, the group behind this apocalyptic amnesty announces: “The corporation is under our control. The Angel declares you free.�
Who you gonna call � James Bond? Ethan Hunt? Jason Bourne?
No, this is a job for a glib, left-wing writer named Felix Moore, “the most controversial journalist of his generation.� He’s just been financially ruined by a defamation case (his 99th), which makes him especially grateful for the support of a rich old friend, Woody Townes. Bereft of money, home and family, Felix could use a big project to rehabilitate himself, and for his own mysterious reasons, Woody wants Felix to write a flattering biography of the Angel computer hacker. “The defendant won’t talk to anyone but you,� Woody tells him. “I bailed the bloody Angel before the US could touch her.�
Her. Yes, the Angel is a young woman.
“Australianize her,� Woody demands. “Make it up, and most of all make the bitch lovable,� so lovable that the CIA won’t be able to spirit her away without causing national outrage. Because this isn’t just any young woman. She’s Gabrielle Baillieux, the daughter of a famous actress that Woody and Felix knew (and loved) in their radical student days. Writing an exculpatory biography about the young computer criminal will be an audacious and dangerous literary stunt, but it also promises to bring Felix back in touch with the girl’s mother.
This exhilarating setup is infected with all kinds of destructive malware, but for a while, the story races along Carey’s fiber-optic lines. Woody is a lot more threatening than he first appears. Young Gaby is aligned with some awfully unsavory figures, and she seems unwilling to participate in the sugarcoating of her life story. Most troubling of all, Gaby’s mother, the famous actress, is surely manipulating everyone involved. Even before Felix can figure out whom he’s really working for, he’s given miles of meandering audiotape and whisked away to an undisclosed location, where he’s ordered to start writing � fast � on a manual typewriter (the last defense against the NSA). It doesn’t take a computer genius to realize that whatever he composes is likely to get people � starting with himself � killed. But he knows, “This was the story I had spent my life preparing for.�
Truth and deception have long been adulterous lovers in Carey’s fiction. He lashed together a similarly treacherous triangle a few years ago in a svelte novel about art crooks called “Theft.� And in “My Life as a Fake,� he nested deceptions within hoaxes surrounded by monkey business to write about literary fraud. Those novels, though, no matter how much they feinted, were always fantastically engaging.
“Amnesia� may leap off today’s front-page headlines, but it quickly gets lost in Felix’s dull recreation of Gaby as a young hacker in the early days of personal computers. This teen drama � think “DOSon’s Creek� � can’t possibly compete with the chaos we’re asked to imagine is now ravaging the world’s computer systems.
It doesn’t help that “Amnesia� is predicated on a largely forgotten political conflict between Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam and President Richard Nixon. Old spooks and students of Asia-Pacific politics will remember what Felix calls “the traumatic injury done to my country by our American allies in 1975�: The CIA conspired with MI6 to bring down Whitlam in a bloodless coup designed to protect Pine Gap, America’s secret listening post in Alice Springs, Northern Territory. That evil footnote in our nation’s diplomatic history received a bit of new attention in 2013, when Edward Snowden revealed that Pine Gap is now part of the PRISM program that allows the NSA to spy on almost everyone all the time. But U.S. and British fiddling with Australian politics in the mid-1970s might as well remain classified information for all its currency among American readers � and Carey’s elliptical and erratic narrative does little to draw back that veil of secrecy.
What a missed opportunity for one of the best writers in the world. With his story of the muckraker and the cyberterrorist, Carey might have given us a provocative update on Janet Malcolm’s “The Journalist and the Murderer.� Or he could have breathed life into that forgotten coup of 1975 the way he reimagined the folk hero in “True History of the Kelly Gang.� But instead, all the potentially fantastic elements of “Amnesia� are minced and scrambled and finally overwhelmed.
Forget it.
This review was first published in The Washington Post:
August 29, 2016
Just to let you know my previous reviews for this author's books range from one star for to five stars for . So anything could happen here!
I have decided on four stars for this one because I really did enjoy it. I love Carey's humour and his snarky comments. I enjoy his take on politics, especially Australian politics and love the fact that he talks about people I am familiar with from the past. I think his characterisations are brilliant, never stereotypical and yet each one is someone you recognise from real life. And of course I always like a book with scenes set in places I know well. When the main character ended up in a hut on the Hawkesbury River I became a captive audience.
I actually enjoyed this book much more than I expected to based on the blurb. If you enjoy Carey's writing style then I would recommend this one.
I have decided on four stars for this one because I really did enjoy it. I love Carey's humour and his snarky comments. I enjoy his take on politics, especially Australian politics and love the fact that he talks about people I am familiar with from the past. I think his characterisations are brilliant, never stereotypical and yet each one is someone you recognise from real life. And of course I always like a book with scenes set in places I know well. When the main character ended up in a hut on the Hawkesbury River I became a captive audience.
I actually enjoyed this book much more than I expected to based on the blurb. If you enjoy Carey's writing style then I would recommend this one.
December 22, 2014
The blurb on this book is way cool. Unfortunately it has absolutely *nothing* to do with the book. Nothing. You won't learn an iota more about the blurb's plot by reading this book.
Instead, Carey has chosen to write about - wait for it - a middle aged has-been writer and his many ordeals as he tries to write a book, (predominately for some reason about Gaby's family tree). Wow, what an original and fascinating twist!
It's subtly Australian too - there are more landmarks, tree species, place names and bird references than you'd find in a Lonely Planet guide. And in case that's too subtle, there are Cobbers yelling Cooee (really) and much more delightful Australian slang on every page - far more than Australians actually use in their daily conversations. Or in their lifetimes.
Carey has written some amazing tales in his time. This one is not worthy of being in the same portfolio.
Instead, Carey has chosen to write about - wait for it - a middle aged has-been writer and his many ordeals as he tries to write a book, (predominately for some reason about Gaby's family tree). Wow, what an original and fascinating twist!
It's subtly Australian too - there are more landmarks, tree species, place names and bird references than you'd find in a Lonely Planet guide. And in case that's too subtle, there are Cobbers yelling Cooee (really) and much more delightful Australian slang on every page - far more than Australians actually use in their daily conversations. Or in their lifetimes.
Carey has written some amazing tales in his time. This one is not worthy of being in the same portfolio.
December 15, 2014
I'm in the minority liking this book, and I completely understand why. I don't know a lot of people I would recommend it too, but I thought it was very good.
This passage got me to pick up the book:
The two-time Booker Prize winner now gives us an exceedingly timely, exhilarating novel-at once dark, suspenseful, and seriously funny-that journeys to the place where the cyber underworld collides with international power politics.
I like dark, and I like suspenseful and it is definitely timely. It's neither comically nor seriously funny, however. It's just plain serious. This is a book about a couple of hackers who attempt to use their powers for "good." It's a very political story, and shocker (/sarcasm) - even the good guys aren't good guys. I think that's part of the reason people won't like it. People need to believe there is a good guy. But with corporations and politicians .... It's about the steps people feel they need to take to right the corrupt. I liked all that about it. Viva la revolution.
The story is a bit disjointed - sometimes we were in the present, sometimes in the narrators past, the grandmother's past, the mother's past, the daughter's past, then the narrator changed, and that was confusing. In spite of that, it was a really solid cyberpunk story with a bit of hope for humanity thrown in.
4.5 stars from me.
October 31, 2017
I don't understand why people are down on this, I thought it was a cracker. First Carey I've wholeheartedly enjoyed for many years. I am only uneasy because it reads like a movie. When you can see the movie reeling along as you turn the page - it makes me wonder whenever I read a novel which seems like it's waiting to become a movie. If the author wrote the novel aiming for the screen is this okay? Are we reading a movie pitch or a novel?
If you want a book to read on a plane which is well-written, a nicely evoked picture of Australia starting at WWII and ending when children are computer hackers, stereotypical characters whom we all know - really well done, I thought - this is it. I won't read it again, but I'm glad I've read it once.
If you want a book to read on a plane which is well-written, a nicely evoked picture of Australia starting at WWII and ending when children are computer hackers, stereotypical characters whom we all know - really well done, I thought - this is it. I won't read it again, but I'm glad I've read it once.
May 2, 2015
This novel is a hot mess. I was first introduced to via in an Australian Literature class when I studied abroad at the University of Queensland. That is a 5-star book for me. Carey writes wonderfully, with clear fresh prose and characters that effortlessly come to life. The genius of "True History" is in the fact that Carey fabricates all of these source documents as if it is a truly historical piece, rather than a piece of fiction. The end result asks the reader to question what is "history", really, besides a fictional narrative written by people far removed from both the time and the culture, even if we desperately want to view it as "fact"? Can we ever know the "true history" of a person who has become a legend in Australia and over time? Who writes the true history of a dead person? Who gets to control the story for future generations?
This novel starts in a similar vein and we get very interesting introductions to parts of Australian history and its relationship with the US during WWII that I have never heard about in my life, neither as an American or my time spent studying abroad in Australia. With Carey you never know what is historical, based on the truth, or pure fiction, so I was excited to find out that the Battle of Brisbane, the Brownout Strangler, and the coup of 1975 were actual historical events that I have never heard about. Part One of this novel is fantastic.
Part Two I do not understand. It morphs into a long tedious tale of a narrator listening and writing a narration of events recorded from first person accounts into a tape recorder by a mother and daughter. The detail is staggeringly tedious and the characters are not interesting. I lost interest in the mystery and the story completely and ended up feeling dissatisfied by the end.
This novel starts in a similar vein and we get very interesting introductions to parts of Australian history and its relationship with the US during WWII that I have never heard about in my life, neither as an American or my time spent studying abroad in Australia. With Carey you never know what is historical, based on the truth, or pure fiction, so I was excited to find out that the Battle of Brisbane, the Brownout Strangler, and the coup of 1975 were actual historical events that I have never heard about. Part One of this novel is fantastic.
Part Two I do not understand. It morphs into a long tedious tale of a narrator listening and writing a narration of events recorded from first person accounts into a tape recorder by a mother and daughter. The detail is staggeringly tedious and the characters are not interesting. I lost interest in the mystery and the story completely and ended up feeling dissatisfied by the end.
January 18, 2024
Quite a frustrating experience and somewhat distasteful.
Peter Carey has been a mixed experience for me, I got bogged down in , but really enjoyed , and now this one was a disappointment.
A veteran journalist, Felix Moore, at the wrong end of another defamation action, is rescued by a menacing, alleged benefactor, Woodie Townes (rich, crass and fat) and is put in thrall, in the traditional sense of that word, to write an account of a young woman’s life and in particular the circumstances leading to her releasing a powerful online virus which has a devastating effect on law enforcement institutions in Australia and the United States (all the prison doors open�).
This is where the book goes wrong in my eyes. The premise is great: a young person has unleashed a destructive virus, annoying powerful governments. She needs defending. Why did she do what she did? What happens next?
In summary, we follow Moore’s efforts to piece together the story, hear his bluster, mainly to himself, about how he will not compromise his fearless left wing journalist’s principles. We follow him into successively more isolated locations, high rise or bush, where he writes up the story. But he does not interview the protagonists � he has been supplied with tapes they have recorded which he listens to. That is his source material. He learns about the young virus girl, Gaby Baillieux and her mother Celine, whom he once knew, and who cut a swathe through early Monash Uni undergraduate life and later, Labor politics, by association. The details of this plot are eloquently captured in Belinda’s Amnesia review /book/show/2... Much of the book is taken up with the Gaby’s account (from tape) and Celine’s history (from tape).
The journalist Moore is a creature of the seventies and the explosive politics of the time, which centred on an unstable left-wing, reformist government in Australia, led by EG Whitlam and which got into deep financial trouble. The journalist (and Carey) are interested in the notion of a CIA conspiracy to destabilise (not that much was needed) the government and remove it from office. But this conspiracy is never very convincing. There were moments when the notion became intriguing but they were fleeting. The New Zealander CK Stead did better in this regard with , where New Zealand falls into military rule because the country was heading down a socialist path unacceptable to the Americans.
So what we have, ostensibly, is an explanation of how Gaby came to release the virus, but what I was after was what happened then. The virus is really the end point and the story is a nostalgic reminiscence about heady student days in undergraduate Melbourne at a time of political turbulence. So the device of Moore writing a book suits this explanation, but I would have thought that good lawyers and a series of articles in the press (for which Moore would have been better suited anyway) would be a better and more effective way of defending the interests of the Bailleiux fille.
But then you would not have such a long book�
I have been trying to figure out what bugged me about the book, and I think it amounts to this: I was expecting an adventure about cybercrime and an unravelling of the motivation for the hacking. This does not really happen and what we get is personal historical background to lead us to the young woman’s nefarious deed. The other thing that occurs to me is that Peter Carey is writing like an expatriate who has been away for a long time. There is an exasperating fixation on street names, place names and the period details more in keeping with the author recalling the past than telling the story.
Disclosure: I listened to Amnesia in an audiobook version. I happened to be making frequent long–distance car journeys. The narrator was Colin Friels, a fine actor on stage and screen, but not good at audio booking. He has a sneering delivery, good for some characters, but not all, and the effect was heavy-handed. The language, which of course is not written by Friels, but he tackled it with relish, is laden with swear words and there is lots of verbal abuse. I found it distasteful. It would have been easier to deal with on the written page, but hearing so much of it was unpleasant�
Peter Carey has been a mixed experience for me, I got bogged down in , but really enjoyed , and now this one was a disappointment.
A veteran journalist, Felix Moore, at the wrong end of another defamation action, is rescued by a menacing, alleged benefactor, Woodie Townes (rich, crass and fat) and is put in thrall, in the traditional sense of that word, to write an account of a young woman’s life and in particular the circumstances leading to her releasing a powerful online virus which has a devastating effect on law enforcement institutions in Australia and the United States (all the prison doors open�).
This is where the book goes wrong in my eyes. The premise is great: a young person has unleashed a destructive virus, annoying powerful governments. She needs defending. Why did she do what she did? What happens next?
In summary, we follow Moore’s efforts to piece together the story, hear his bluster, mainly to himself, about how he will not compromise his fearless left wing journalist’s principles. We follow him into successively more isolated locations, high rise or bush, where he writes up the story. But he does not interview the protagonists � he has been supplied with tapes they have recorded which he listens to. That is his source material. He learns about the young virus girl, Gaby Baillieux and her mother Celine, whom he once knew, and who cut a swathe through early Monash Uni undergraduate life and later, Labor politics, by association. The details of this plot are eloquently captured in Belinda’s Amnesia review /book/show/2... Much of the book is taken up with the Gaby’s account (from tape) and Celine’s history (from tape).
The journalist Moore is a creature of the seventies and the explosive politics of the time, which centred on an unstable left-wing, reformist government in Australia, led by EG Whitlam and which got into deep financial trouble. The journalist (and Carey) are interested in the notion of a CIA conspiracy to destabilise (not that much was needed) the government and remove it from office. But this conspiracy is never very convincing. There were moments when the notion became intriguing but they were fleeting. The New Zealander CK Stead did better in this regard with , where New Zealand falls into military rule because the country was heading down a socialist path unacceptable to the Americans.
So what we have, ostensibly, is an explanation of how Gaby came to release the virus, but what I was after was what happened then. The virus is really the end point and the story is a nostalgic reminiscence about heady student days in undergraduate Melbourne at a time of political turbulence. So the device of Moore writing a book suits this explanation, but I would have thought that good lawyers and a series of articles in the press (for which Moore would have been better suited anyway) would be a better and more effective way of defending the interests of the Bailleiux fille.
But then you would not have such a long book�
I have been trying to figure out what bugged me about the book, and I think it amounts to this: I was expecting an adventure about cybercrime and an unravelling of the motivation for the hacking. This does not really happen and what we get is personal historical background to lead us to the young woman’s nefarious deed. The other thing that occurs to me is that Peter Carey is writing like an expatriate who has been away for a long time. There is an exasperating fixation on street names, place names and the period details more in keeping with the author recalling the past than telling the story.
Disclosure: I listened to Amnesia in an audiobook version. I happened to be making frequent long–distance car journeys. The narrator was Colin Friels, a fine actor on stage and screen, but not good at audio booking. He has a sneering delivery, good for some characters, but not all, and the effect was heavy-handed. The language, which of course is not written by Friels, but he tackled it with relish, is laden with swear words and there is lots of verbal abuse. I found it distasteful. It would have been easier to deal with on the written page, but hearing so much of it was unpleasant�
May 15, 2016
Neither Deep nor Accessible
After living in America for many years, Carey has returned to his native Australia for his latest novel, which takes Australian resentment of American dominance as one of its themes. I wish I could say it was successful, for I have admired the author greatly in the past. But the sea-change makes the language and slang less accessible, the social structures harder to parse, and many of the references meaningless to non-Australian eyes. Added to that, it is written in a genre where Carey seems less comfortable: the hard-bitten thriller, in this case featuring an investigative reporter in his sixties whose life had fallen apart. I find too few hooks for my empathy, and much that puts me off.
Felix Moore's life is in ruins after he loses a big libel case, is slapped with huge damages, and his wife throws him out. He takes refuge in drink, but is rescued by an old friend, a rich property developer named Woody, who sets him up with a new assignment. A short time before, a worm had infected the computers of prisons all over the world, freeing inmates and leading to several deaths in the ensuing mayhem. The hacker, known as the Angel, is discovered to be a young Australian woman, Gaby, the daughter of the celebrated actress Céline Bailleux. Woody offers Felix a lot of money to write Gaby's biography, portraying her as an all-Australian girl fighting for traditional values, and thus prevent her extradition to the US and the death penalty. But first Felix has to find her and persuade her to speak, in the process becoming involved in a lot of skulduggery and danger on the shady side of the law. His money will not come easily.
It so happens that Felix pined after Céline forty years ago in college, which is one of the many different time-frames that Carey juggles in his book. Another is the period during WW2 when Céline was born; Felix had undertaken to find out who her real father must have been, most probably a marauding GI. This is but one case of anti-American resentment in the book, dating back to the time when US soldiers were billeted in Brisbane, better paid and better dressed than their Australian counterparts. Another area of resentment dates from 1975, when the first waves of Vietnamese boat people arrived in Australia, although none of my online research makes it clear why Felix feels so strongly that his country had been screwed by the US over the matter. Apparently few others now recall it either; this is the amnesia of the title. There is also much reference to various political figures, whose names, importance, and beliefs would presumably be known to Australian readers, but it all washed right over me.
As a thriller of sorts, this is only moderately successful, being written in a short-breathed style that is tiresome to read. It may well be that the subtext of left-wing national politics, anti-imperialist and anti-global, would give this greater depth. But only for Australian readers.
After living in America for many years, Carey has returned to his native Australia for his latest novel, which takes Australian resentment of American dominance as one of its themes. I wish I could say it was successful, for I have admired the author greatly in the past. But the sea-change makes the language and slang less accessible, the social structures harder to parse, and many of the references meaningless to non-Australian eyes. Added to that, it is written in a genre where Carey seems less comfortable: the hard-bitten thriller, in this case featuring an investigative reporter in his sixties whose life had fallen apart. I find too few hooks for my empathy, and much that puts me off.
Felix Moore's life is in ruins after he loses a big libel case, is slapped with huge damages, and his wife throws him out. He takes refuge in drink, but is rescued by an old friend, a rich property developer named Woody, who sets him up with a new assignment. A short time before, a worm had infected the computers of prisons all over the world, freeing inmates and leading to several deaths in the ensuing mayhem. The hacker, known as the Angel, is discovered to be a young Australian woman, Gaby, the daughter of the celebrated actress Céline Bailleux. Woody offers Felix a lot of money to write Gaby's biography, portraying her as an all-Australian girl fighting for traditional values, and thus prevent her extradition to the US and the death penalty. But first Felix has to find her and persuade her to speak, in the process becoming involved in a lot of skulduggery and danger on the shady side of the law. His money will not come easily.
It so happens that Felix pined after Céline forty years ago in college, which is one of the many different time-frames that Carey juggles in his book. Another is the period during WW2 when Céline was born; Felix had undertaken to find out who her real father must have been, most probably a marauding GI. This is but one case of anti-American resentment in the book, dating back to the time when US soldiers were billeted in Brisbane, better paid and better dressed than their Australian counterparts. Another area of resentment dates from 1975, when the first waves of Vietnamese boat people arrived in Australia, although none of my online research makes it clear why Felix feels so strongly that his country had been screwed by the US over the matter. Apparently few others now recall it either; this is the amnesia of the title. There is also much reference to various political figures, whose names, importance, and beliefs would presumably be known to Australian readers, but it all washed right over me.
As a thriller of sorts, this is only moderately successful, being written in a short-breathed style that is tiresome to read. It may well be that the subtext of left-wing national politics, anti-imperialist and anti-global, would give this greater depth. But only for Australian readers.
February 5, 2015
Not a perfect book - Peter Carey doesn't seem to worry about traditional forms of structure or narrative anymore - but it's my favourite Carey book since Illywhacker... I really liked this book.
November 17, 2014
Never has the long shadow of America across the world been so ominous and so ephemeral as it is in the wake of Edward Snowden’s NSA revelations and Wikileaks. Data surveillance and the huge US presence in the tech and internet worlds have contributed to a sense of America as the omnipresent, unseen superpower in a way that no world leading country has ever been before.
This ownership of the web is what lets the US suggest, with no apparent sense of irony, that people like Julian Assange, an Australian citizen, are “traitors�, though what patriotism or loyalty they owe a country they have nothing to do with is unclear.
It is this long shadow that Peter Carey takes to task in his hacker conspiracy thriller Amnesia.
The title refers to Australia’s amnesia when it comes to the 1975 Constitutional Crisis, which saw the elected government sacked from office by the Governor-General after British and American interference and alleged CIA involvement. The novel’s protagonist, dissolute journalist Felix Moore, believes Australia loved America so much after US troops helped to save them from the Japanese navy during World War II, it refuses to really examine the dissolution of the government.
"We were naïve, of course. We continued to think of the Americans as our friends and allies. We criticised them, of course. Why not? We loved them, didn’t we? We sang their songs. They had saved us from the Japanese. We sacrificed the lives of our beloved sons in Korea, then Vietnam. It never occurred to us that they would murder our democracy. So when it happened, in plain sight, we forgot it right away."
Allegations after the crisis suggested that members of the government and the Australian Labour Party had close links to the CIA and that the US agency was instrumental in dismissing Prime Minister Gough Whitlam because he opposed Nixon’s bombing of North Vietnam, welcomed Chileans escaping the coup there and threatened to close US military bases in Australia, including Pine Gap.
That base, run partly by the CIA, along with the NSA and the National Reconnaissance Office, was later made famous as a key component of the ECHELON network, which has allegedly been monitoring phone calls, fax, email and other data traffic since the early 70s for the US, UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand � the so-called Five Eyes intelligence alliance.
Whether or not Carey comes down on the side of the CIA theorists, Felix clearly does and his left-leaning politics, combined with his tendency to make up quotes, are what have landed him where we find him at the opening of the novel: in the High Court facing defamation charges.
Supporting him in court is corporate fat cat, probable criminal and, as we later find out, possible spy, Woody Towndes. Woody is an old friend of Felix’s and when he gets kicked out of the family home after losing the case � which required him to burn his books, a directive he follows in his backyard while drunk, inadvertently burning down half his house � it is Woody who comes to his rescue.
Meanwhile, we learn that a hacker genius behind a worm that sprang the doors open on prisons in the US and Australia is one Gabrielle “Gaby� Baillieux, the daughter of another of Felix's old friends, Celine. Woody, who was helping Gaby as well as Felix, has put up bail for Gaby and now wants Felix to write her story, exonerating her of the crime. Felix, however, has other ideas, much coloured by his memories of college crush Celine and a rather dogged hope of getting to the truth � or his idea of it, anyway.
Felix is the very definition of an unreliable narrator, who admits to making up quotes � a massive journalistic no-no � and putting words in the mouths of historical characters when he has no way of knowing what they said or thought. After defying Woody and being kidnapped (on several different occasions, sometimes by Woody, sometimes by supporters of Gaby), abused and bullied into going on with the tale, he spends his whole time in a drunken state of fear � which doesn’t add much to his credibility.
Felix's book is the tale of Gaby and Celine, as told by Felix. Both women give him taped interviews leading to a second half that bounces between Gaby and Celine’s point of view, peppered with episodes of Felix’s increasing misery in captivity. Their stories encompass and echo Australia’s relationship with the US, from Celine’s conception during the Battle of Brisbane, when US and Australian troops clashed on the streets in 1942, to Gaby’s birth on the night that Whitlam is dismissed from office. Celine’s husband is a Labour MP; she is an actress and sometime activist, filling Gaby’s life with politics and eventual acrimony as their views start to diverge.
Both these things are what drive Gaby’s introduction to the early world of hacking, via the mysterious and alluring Frederic Matovic, who shows her the interactive fiction game Zork on a Mac Iix. Gaby is no Girl With A Dragon Tattoo, though: while she may be driven to the web by personal problems, her hacking is far more the product of strong politics than teen rebellion.
Although the novel clearly has something to say about data surveillance and the web, Gaby’s story is also a wonderfully nostalgic tour of the early IT world and that obsessive inquisitiveness that a lot of folks who first played games on floppy discs will remember.
Why she would risk committing such a crime as writing the Angel worm, which opens prison doors, or why there should even be a question that she might have to face an American justice system that still employs the death sentence, are issues Carey both addresses and avoids, dancing around and through them without leaving clear-cut answers.
What we get instead is a mad, frenetic dash through Australian life, history and politics (with no added explanations for international audiences, which fits) and the journey of an early hacker. Amnesia manages to be a comedic Evelyn-Waugh-style story of the media, an astute breakdown of the political relationship between the US and Australia and a conspiracy thriller about hackers all at once, without taking a single breath in between.
This ownership of the web is what lets the US suggest, with no apparent sense of irony, that people like Julian Assange, an Australian citizen, are “traitors�, though what patriotism or loyalty they owe a country they have nothing to do with is unclear.
It is this long shadow that Peter Carey takes to task in his hacker conspiracy thriller Amnesia.
The title refers to Australia’s amnesia when it comes to the 1975 Constitutional Crisis, which saw the elected government sacked from office by the Governor-General after British and American interference and alleged CIA involvement. The novel’s protagonist, dissolute journalist Felix Moore, believes Australia loved America so much after US troops helped to save them from the Japanese navy during World War II, it refuses to really examine the dissolution of the government.
"We were naïve, of course. We continued to think of the Americans as our friends and allies. We criticised them, of course. Why not? We loved them, didn’t we? We sang their songs. They had saved us from the Japanese. We sacrificed the lives of our beloved sons in Korea, then Vietnam. It never occurred to us that they would murder our democracy. So when it happened, in plain sight, we forgot it right away."
Allegations after the crisis suggested that members of the government and the Australian Labour Party had close links to the CIA and that the US agency was instrumental in dismissing Prime Minister Gough Whitlam because he opposed Nixon’s bombing of North Vietnam, welcomed Chileans escaping the coup there and threatened to close US military bases in Australia, including Pine Gap.
That base, run partly by the CIA, along with the NSA and the National Reconnaissance Office, was later made famous as a key component of the ECHELON network, which has allegedly been monitoring phone calls, fax, email and other data traffic since the early 70s for the US, UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand � the so-called Five Eyes intelligence alliance.
Whether or not Carey comes down on the side of the CIA theorists, Felix clearly does and his left-leaning politics, combined with his tendency to make up quotes, are what have landed him where we find him at the opening of the novel: in the High Court facing defamation charges.
Supporting him in court is corporate fat cat, probable criminal and, as we later find out, possible spy, Woody Towndes. Woody is an old friend of Felix’s and when he gets kicked out of the family home after losing the case � which required him to burn his books, a directive he follows in his backyard while drunk, inadvertently burning down half his house � it is Woody who comes to his rescue.
Meanwhile, we learn that a hacker genius behind a worm that sprang the doors open on prisons in the US and Australia is one Gabrielle “Gaby� Baillieux, the daughter of another of Felix's old friends, Celine. Woody, who was helping Gaby as well as Felix, has put up bail for Gaby and now wants Felix to write her story, exonerating her of the crime. Felix, however, has other ideas, much coloured by his memories of college crush Celine and a rather dogged hope of getting to the truth � or his idea of it, anyway.
Felix is the very definition of an unreliable narrator, who admits to making up quotes � a massive journalistic no-no � and putting words in the mouths of historical characters when he has no way of knowing what they said or thought. After defying Woody and being kidnapped (on several different occasions, sometimes by Woody, sometimes by supporters of Gaby), abused and bullied into going on with the tale, he spends his whole time in a drunken state of fear � which doesn’t add much to his credibility.
Felix's book is the tale of Gaby and Celine, as told by Felix. Both women give him taped interviews leading to a second half that bounces between Gaby and Celine’s point of view, peppered with episodes of Felix’s increasing misery in captivity. Their stories encompass and echo Australia’s relationship with the US, from Celine’s conception during the Battle of Brisbane, when US and Australian troops clashed on the streets in 1942, to Gaby’s birth on the night that Whitlam is dismissed from office. Celine’s husband is a Labour MP; she is an actress and sometime activist, filling Gaby’s life with politics and eventual acrimony as their views start to diverge.
Both these things are what drive Gaby’s introduction to the early world of hacking, via the mysterious and alluring Frederic Matovic, who shows her the interactive fiction game Zork on a Mac Iix. Gaby is no Girl With A Dragon Tattoo, though: while she may be driven to the web by personal problems, her hacking is far more the product of strong politics than teen rebellion.
Although the novel clearly has something to say about data surveillance and the web, Gaby’s story is also a wonderfully nostalgic tour of the early IT world and that obsessive inquisitiveness that a lot of folks who first played games on floppy discs will remember.
Why she would risk committing such a crime as writing the Angel worm, which opens prison doors, or why there should even be a question that she might have to face an American justice system that still employs the death sentence, are issues Carey both addresses and avoids, dancing around and through them without leaving clear-cut answers.
What we get instead is a mad, frenetic dash through Australian life, history and politics (with no added explanations for international audiences, which fits) and the journey of an early hacker. Amnesia manages to be a comedic Evelyn-Waugh-style story of the media, an astute breakdown of the political relationship between the US and Australia and a conspiracy thriller about hackers all at once, without taking a single breath in between.
August 25, 2023
3.5 stars. An intriguing political novel about a cyber hack, an author trying to write an honest article his way, and the author’s weakness in not making a stand during the political turmoil that occurred when the Governor General sacked the Australian Labor Government in 1975.
I am a Carey fan and found the novel to be an interesting read. I found the characters a little annoying. An appreciation of the novel is helped by having some knowledge of Australian politics during the 1970s and 1980s.
Readers new to Peter Carey should begin by reading the unique, original and delightful, ‘Oscar and Lucinda�, winner of the 1988 Booker Prize.
This book was first published in 2014.
I am a Carey fan and found the novel to be an interesting read. I found the characters a little annoying. An appreciation of the novel is helped by having some knowledge of Australian politics during the 1970s and 1980s.
Readers new to Peter Carey should begin by reading the unique, original and delightful, ‘Oscar and Lucinda�, winner of the 1988 Booker Prize.
This book was first published in 2014.
January 4, 2015
This novel tells the story of Felix Moore, a disgraced leftwing Australian journalist who is recruited to write a biography of alleged hacker, Gaby, who is accused of releasing a virus that has allowed prisoners to be released in the United States. The advance money is provided by the shady thug Woody Townes who directs him to write a sympathetic defense in order to prevent her extradition to a country still in possession of the death penalty.
The novel is difficult to follow. Gaby’s story moves forward through Felix’s memory, which is effected by his heavy drinking, and the audiotapes provided to him of Gaby and her mother, a famous actress and someone Felix know in his youth. As the suspense builds it is difficult to know who is in charge and who the good guys are. There are kidnappings, cyber terrorists, environmentalists, as well as political intrigue and humor.
Overall I did like the novel although I had some difficulty with the Australian idioms, and references to its history and political system.
The novel is difficult to follow. Gaby’s story moves forward through Felix’s memory, which is effected by his heavy drinking, and the audiotapes provided to him of Gaby and her mother, a famous actress and someone Felix know in his youth. As the suspense builds it is difficult to know who is in charge and who the good guys are. There are kidnappings, cyber terrorists, environmentalists, as well as political intrigue and humor.
Overall I did like the novel although I had some difficulty with the Australian idioms, and references to its history and political system.
January 16, 2015
Amnesia by Peter Carey. I've just finished it. If I had not had to read it for book club, I would now be throwing it into the bin. What a tedious mess! The cover says it's dark, funny and exhilarating. I think tedious, confusing, cliched and stale. Apart from my own bias which makes me believe that IT can never be made interesting, if this is Australia's answer to the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo the it has missed the target completely. This story is populated by a clapped out radical journalist, an old once beautiful radical woman who hates her mother, a fat millionaire fixer who has to do his own dirty work. The novel is littered with real names. Even Effective C++ By Scott Meyers is mentioned. Did Carey google the most popular book on in computing in the 90s?
The language is cliche ridden and exaggerated. The story about Whitlam and the dismissal is old and has been rehashed so many times, I'm truly sick of it.
Carey tries to make the story authentic by dropping in lots of real names and events but this just makes it sound like the author is trying too hard.
The language is cliche ridden and exaggerated. The story about Whitlam and the dismissal is old and has been rehashed so many times, I'm truly sick of it.
Carey tries to make the story authentic by dropping in lots of real names and events but this just makes it sound like the author is trying too hard.
January 4, 2021
Hack writes up boho childs story after she causes mayhem by hacking into Govt computer systems. Slight echoes of recent case in the UK - the US wants to extradite the girl and she faces a long time in jail if she goes there.
As often with Carey there are layers within layers. The girls mother is a past infatuation and the hack is supported by a lefty property developer who is a study in ambiguity. Is he a player or is he being played. I think he is hooked like a good un.
Not his best but interesting in parts.
As often with Carey there are layers within layers. The girls mother is a past infatuation and the hack is supported by a lefty property developer who is a study in ambiguity. Is he a player or is he being played. I think he is hooked like a good un.
Not his best but interesting in parts.
April 6, 2016
Has anybody written a really good novel about the internet/social networking/hacking? Stephen King couldn't do it with Mr Mercedes where all the computer wizardry just slowed the story down. And Dave Eggers got carried away with a good idea in The Circle but then lost all narrative momentum.
And now here's Peter Carey, another very good writer, who starts and ends with a story about teenagers hacking government and big business websites but fails to make it interesting (in fact, doesn't seem to be that interested in it himself). It's not helped by having a group of stock, uninteresting characters - boozy investigative journalist, sexy minor actress, ineffectual left-wing politician, rebellious teenage daughter.
For me, the most interesting parts of the novel were the sections on the way Gough Whitlam's mid-1970s Australian government was brought down by the CIA and the British government and the flashbacks to the hostility by Australians to American G.I.s (especially black ones) based there during the Second World War. Either of those would have made a much better basis for the plot of a novel.
And now here's Peter Carey, another very good writer, who starts and ends with a story about teenagers hacking government and big business websites but fails to make it interesting (in fact, doesn't seem to be that interested in it himself). It's not helped by having a group of stock, uninteresting characters - boozy investigative journalist, sexy minor actress, ineffectual left-wing politician, rebellious teenage daughter.
For me, the most interesting parts of the novel were the sections on the way Gough Whitlam's mid-1970s Australian government was brought down by the CIA and the British government and the flashbacks to the hostility by Australians to American G.I.s (especially black ones) based there during the Second World War. Either of those would have made a much better basis for the plot of a novel.
October 10, 2014
Peter Carey is an amazing writer. Even if you aren't a fan of his work, I think you'd struggle to condemn his prose in any way. Carey's writing is both beautiful and effortless. At the same time.
Amnesia could possibly divide readers. Indeed, my own feelings toward the book, its plot and its characters varied greatly over the three sittings it took me to finish the novel. There is no doubt however that it's written with magical eloquence.
Despite this, I finished the novel feeling somewhat dissatisfied. Duped in a way. There are a lot of words, but few answers. The plot I expected wasn’t the plot I got.
I also struggled with many of the political and literary references so spent much of the novel feeling somewhat obtuse!
Lovers of good literature and political devotees however will undoubtedly enjoy this book immensely.
Read the full review in my blog:
Amnesia could possibly divide readers. Indeed, my own feelings toward the book, its plot and its characters varied greatly over the three sittings it took me to finish the novel. There is no doubt however that it's written with magical eloquence.
Despite this, I finished the novel feeling somewhat dissatisfied. Duped in a way. There are a lot of words, but few answers. The plot I expected wasn’t the plot I got.
I also struggled with many of the political and literary references so spent much of the novel feeling somewhat obtuse!
Lovers of good literature and political devotees however will undoubtedly enjoy this book immensely.
Read the full review in my blog:
February 15, 2015
I was given this novel for Christmas so felt obliged to give it a go, even though I haven't really enjoyed Carey's writing since his early books (I especially loved Oscar and Lucinda).
This one didn't work for me. Its tone is jaded, its characters unappealing and its storyline disjointed. I may be naïve but I don't buy the wicked US influence on Australia either.
Possibly this could be edited into an intriguing cyber thriller for a TV series - something like "The Code" which featured on ABC not long ago. That was far fetched too but the tightness of the plotting and the interesting characters made it good viewing. But as a novel, this wasn't worth the time I spent on it.
This one didn't work for me. Its tone is jaded, its characters unappealing and its storyline disjointed. I may be naïve but I don't buy the wicked US influence on Australia either.
Possibly this could be edited into an intriguing cyber thriller for a TV series - something like "The Code" which featured on ABC not long ago. That was far fetched too but the tightness of the plotting and the interesting characters made it good viewing. But as a novel, this wasn't worth the time I spent on it.
July 19, 2021
Εξαιρετικό. Χωρίς άλλα λόγια!
October 13, 2019
Aww, I really wanted to like this book as the blurb was extremely intriguing, however the novel seems to be nothing like what the blurb indicated, the entire story was disjointed and plainly weird. I only persisted listening to the audiobook because Colin Friels is an amazing reader, he was just superb.
I totally enjoyed Peter Carey’s latest publication, A Long Way From Home but Amnesia was disappointing.
I totally enjoyed Peter Carey’s latest publication, A Long Way From Home but Amnesia was disappointing.
December 26, 2022
so far from what i thought i was gonna be reading. entire paragraphs that made absolutely no sense to me, and mostly felt like the equivalent of an indie film that goes right over my head. im a bit sad honestly that this will be my last finished book of 2023 😅
April 27, 2016
Der politisch links stehende australische Journalist Felix Moore erhält den Auftrag über Gabrielle Baillieux zu schreiben. Die junge Hackerin hat einen PC-Wurm in das Sicherheitssystem australischer Gefängnisse eingeschleust und damit weltweit die Türen für alle Gefangenen geöffnet, in deren Gefängnissen dieses System verwendet wird. Nun fordern die USA Gabys Auslieferung � und dort würde ihr die Todesstrafe drohen. Zur Vorgeschichte von Gabys Aktion muss man wissen, dass in Careys Szenario 1975 die amerikanische CIA die australische Regierung gestürzt hat. Das Trauma dieser Kolonialisierung der Neuzeit wurde fortan zur Obsession in Moores Leben. 1975 ist auch Gabrielles Geburtsjahr. Moore hat bereits Erfahrung als Polizeireporter, Drehbuchautor und Buchautor. Nachdem er die Machenschaften Rupert Murdochs enthüllte, ist Moore jedoch bei den Mainstream-Medien in Ungnade gefallen und inzwischen als Angeklagter Dauergast vor Gericht. Um die Schulgebühren seiner Töchter zahlen zu können, ist Moore gezwungen, im Auftrag seines alten Kumpels Woody Townes über die Hackerin zu schreiben. Die beiden Revoluzzer alter Schule vereint die Überzeugung, dass man Unrecht unter allen Umständen die Stirn zu bieten hat. Reichlich unbedarft für einen Mann seiner Berufserfahrung, denkt Moore nicht weiter über Woodys Motiv nach, die Kaution für Gabrielle zu zahlen und ihre Hacker-Biografie schreiben zu lassen. Eine Image-Kampagne für eine „gute� Australierin etwa? Mit den politischen und informationstechnischen Hintergründen der Angelegenheit ist Moore in seiner Rolle als Woodys Werkzeug deutlich überfordert. In Woodys Auftrag wird Moore per Boot in eine unwirtliche Gegend am Hawksbury River gebracht und dort zwischen Mangroven und Eukalyptusbäumen quasi ausgesetzt. Statt einer Toilette gibt es einen Spaten. Moores Arbeitsmittel sind eine alte Olivetti-Schreibmaschine und ein Beutel voll schriftlicher Notizen und alter Kassetten, besprochen von Gabrielle und ihrer Mutter Celine, Moores Jugendfreundin.
Gabys Geschichte wird aus der Gegenwart heraus in Rückblenden und Zeugenaussagen aufgerollt. Bindeglied zu Gabrielles Geschichte ist die damalige Clique von Felix, Celine und Woody. Sie verkörpern die typischen Aufsteiger der Nachkriegsgeneration, für die australische Geschichte nur soweit glaubhaft sein konnte, wie sie den eigenen Vätern passiert war. Besonders Celine hat eine schillernde Biografie aufzuweisen, die manch hässliche Wahrheit aus Australiens Nachkriegsgeschichte enthält. Ihre Tochter Gaby war als Schülerin schon Umweltaktivistin. „Ich musste unbedingt die radikalste und coolste Schülerin sein, die sie je gehabt hatten.� (S. 419) Gabys außergewöhnliches Interesse an Computern wurde schon in ihrer Kindheit immer wieder von Erwachsenen gefördert. Doch Zweifel sind angebracht, ob im Künstler- und Revoluzzer-Milieu ihrer Jugend außer Gabys Lehrerin jemandem bewusst war, welch ausgebufftes Talent da heranwuchs. Für militante Umweltaktivisten bedeutete es einen Quantensprung, wenn ihre Aktionen statt schweren Geräts nur noch ein Modem voraussetzten! Vom Umschreiben des PC-Spiels Zork zum Hacken eines Großrechners war es für Gabi und ihren Freund Frederic schon in ihrer Schulzeit nur ein kleiner Schritt � während die Erwachsenen sich sorgten, ob die beiden etwa Sex miteinander hätten.
Careys Roman wird gefeiert als Roman der Epoche nach Wikileaks. Für Leser, die in den 90ern die ersten Computerkids aufwachsen sahen, ist Gabys Biografie sicherlich eine faszinierende Lektüre, um die Erotik des Hackens nachvollziehen zu können. Mich hat in erster Linie interessiert, wer Gaby ist und wie ihre Bezugspersonen auf sie reagieren. Dass man als Leser die Ereignisse bis kurz vor dem fulminanten Schluss nur gefiltert durch Moores Unbedarftheit wahrnehmen kann, fand ich hier sehr anstrengend. Sollte Careys Botschaft etwa sein, dass man sich besser nicht von ehemaligen Lehrern und Journalisten regieren lassen sollte, weil sie zu unbedarft für die Welt nach Assange sind? Meine Begeisterung, dass Buch zu empfehlen, hält sich jedoch in Grenzen, weil ich zu oft höre, dass Leser sich in Romanen erkennbare Grenzen zwischen Erzählerstimme, Dialogen und Ichaussagen der Beteiligten wünschen. Mit seinem unzuverlässigen Berichterstatter Felix Moore und verschwimmenden Übergängen zwischen den Erzählperspektiven stellt Carey hohe Ansprüche an seine Leser. Ein von der Idee her exzellenter Plot, dessen Verwicklungen größtmögliche Aufmerksamkeit erfordern.
Gabys Geschichte wird aus der Gegenwart heraus in Rückblenden und Zeugenaussagen aufgerollt. Bindeglied zu Gabrielles Geschichte ist die damalige Clique von Felix, Celine und Woody. Sie verkörpern die typischen Aufsteiger der Nachkriegsgeneration, für die australische Geschichte nur soweit glaubhaft sein konnte, wie sie den eigenen Vätern passiert war. Besonders Celine hat eine schillernde Biografie aufzuweisen, die manch hässliche Wahrheit aus Australiens Nachkriegsgeschichte enthält. Ihre Tochter Gaby war als Schülerin schon Umweltaktivistin. „Ich musste unbedingt die radikalste und coolste Schülerin sein, die sie je gehabt hatten.� (S. 419) Gabys außergewöhnliches Interesse an Computern wurde schon in ihrer Kindheit immer wieder von Erwachsenen gefördert. Doch Zweifel sind angebracht, ob im Künstler- und Revoluzzer-Milieu ihrer Jugend außer Gabys Lehrerin jemandem bewusst war, welch ausgebufftes Talent da heranwuchs. Für militante Umweltaktivisten bedeutete es einen Quantensprung, wenn ihre Aktionen statt schweren Geräts nur noch ein Modem voraussetzten! Vom Umschreiben des PC-Spiels Zork zum Hacken eines Großrechners war es für Gabi und ihren Freund Frederic schon in ihrer Schulzeit nur ein kleiner Schritt � während die Erwachsenen sich sorgten, ob die beiden etwa Sex miteinander hätten.
Careys Roman wird gefeiert als Roman der Epoche nach Wikileaks. Für Leser, die in den 90ern die ersten Computerkids aufwachsen sahen, ist Gabys Biografie sicherlich eine faszinierende Lektüre, um die Erotik des Hackens nachvollziehen zu können. Mich hat in erster Linie interessiert, wer Gaby ist und wie ihre Bezugspersonen auf sie reagieren. Dass man als Leser die Ereignisse bis kurz vor dem fulminanten Schluss nur gefiltert durch Moores Unbedarftheit wahrnehmen kann, fand ich hier sehr anstrengend. Sollte Careys Botschaft etwa sein, dass man sich besser nicht von ehemaligen Lehrern und Journalisten regieren lassen sollte, weil sie zu unbedarft für die Welt nach Assange sind? Meine Begeisterung, dass Buch zu empfehlen, hält sich jedoch in Grenzen, weil ich zu oft höre, dass Leser sich in Romanen erkennbare Grenzen zwischen Erzählerstimme, Dialogen und Ichaussagen der Beteiligten wünschen. Mit seinem unzuverlässigen Berichterstatter Felix Moore und verschwimmenden Übergängen zwischen den Erzählperspektiven stellt Carey hohe Ansprüche an seine Leser. Ein von der Idee her exzellenter Plot, dessen Verwicklungen größtmögliche Aufmerksamkeit erfordern.
January 1, 2021
I received my copy from the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.
Amnesia by Peter Carey was not quite what I expected from the blurb, it was so much better. Rather than simply telling us the story of how an Australian hacker ‘Fallen Angel�/Gaby Baillieux hacked Australian prison systems to release detainees, Carey delves deep into Gaby’s and Australia’s political history to explain why a girl from Melbourne would decide to become a ‘hacktivist� in the first place. The premise of the novel and inspiration for the name comes from the idea that America has at times been a bit of a bully towards Australia and Australians seem to just forget about it.
Gaby is accused of infiltrating the Australian prison system to release immigrants who have been detained in Australia which also inadvertently affects many American systems. The American government sees this as an act of terror and immediately demands that Gaby is extradited to face terrorism charges there. Peter Carey says that he drew inspiration for Amnesia from the Julian Assange case when he discovered that Assange’s mother was a Labor supporter (lefty) in Australia during the 70’s and began pondering the implications that this might have had on his political motivations. Read the interview in The Australian here.
Amnesia is told through the eyes of Felix Moore, a journalist and long time Labor supporter, who has recently been disgraced for falsifying stories. His career is effectively over and his marriage is on the rocks when he is offered the opportunity to write Gaby’s biography in an attempt to proclaim her innocence.
Gaby is the child of an actress and a Labor minister. During her teen years she is exposed to some very radical Labor followers and falls in love with a hacker who teaches her all of his tricks. This combination means that she is almost destined to become a political activist.
Carey discusses real historical events to describe the ongoing relationship between Australia and America, particularly the dismissal of the Whitlam Government in 1975 by the Governor General. The history books provide a number of factors that contributed to Whitlam’s dismissal, but in Amnesia, Carey claims that the CIA was behind it due to Whitlam attempting to take control of ASIO (Australia’s version of the CIA) and threatening to cease the agreement for the American army base at Pine Gap.
I’m not too sure on my thoughts about Carey’s claims but I do agree that Whitlam was an extremely radical prime minister and I can easily imagine that his policies would have threatened a lot of politicians, so I can believe that many politicians at the time would have wanted him gone. Some of Whitlam’s notable achievements while he was in office include the termination of military conscription (another factor that would have gotten him offside with the American government I would imagine,) institution of universal healthcare and free university education. As a side note, I find it extremely hypocritical that the politicians who are currently campaigning so vigorously to increase Australian university fees didn’t pay a cent for their educations thanks to Whitlam. I wonder if they would be so determined if they were asked to pay for their fees retrospectively?
I feel that Amnesia was published at a perfect time for me as I am currently studying a news and politics subject and it certainly gave me cause to ponder many issues from a different perspective. I also loved the many references to Melbourne suburbs and landmarks, although people from outside of Australia may find them a bit confusing or irrelevant. Amnesia was a thought provoking and extremely well written novel and I would recommend it to anyone interested in Australian history. Even if you are well versed on Australian history you will find yourself thinking about events in different ways and if you aren’t you will most likely be inspired to find out more as I was.
Amnesia by Peter Carey was not quite what I expected from the blurb, it was so much better. Rather than simply telling us the story of how an Australian hacker ‘Fallen Angel�/Gaby Baillieux hacked Australian prison systems to release detainees, Carey delves deep into Gaby’s and Australia’s political history to explain why a girl from Melbourne would decide to become a ‘hacktivist� in the first place. The premise of the novel and inspiration for the name comes from the idea that America has at times been a bit of a bully towards Australia and Australians seem to just forget about it.
Gaby is accused of infiltrating the Australian prison system to release immigrants who have been detained in Australia which also inadvertently affects many American systems. The American government sees this as an act of terror and immediately demands that Gaby is extradited to face terrorism charges there. Peter Carey says that he drew inspiration for Amnesia from the Julian Assange case when he discovered that Assange’s mother was a Labor supporter (lefty) in Australia during the 70’s and began pondering the implications that this might have had on his political motivations. Read the interview in The Australian here.
Amnesia is told through the eyes of Felix Moore, a journalist and long time Labor supporter, who has recently been disgraced for falsifying stories. His career is effectively over and his marriage is on the rocks when he is offered the opportunity to write Gaby’s biography in an attempt to proclaim her innocence.
Gaby is the child of an actress and a Labor minister. During her teen years she is exposed to some very radical Labor followers and falls in love with a hacker who teaches her all of his tricks. This combination means that she is almost destined to become a political activist.
Carey discusses real historical events to describe the ongoing relationship between Australia and America, particularly the dismissal of the Whitlam Government in 1975 by the Governor General. The history books provide a number of factors that contributed to Whitlam’s dismissal, but in Amnesia, Carey claims that the CIA was behind it due to Whitlam attempting to take control of ASIO (Australia’s version of the CIA) and threatening to cease the agreement for the American army base at Pine Gap.
I’m not too sure on my thoughts about Carey’s claims but I do agree that Whitlam was an extremely radical prime minister and I can easily imagine that his policies would have threatened a lot of politicians, so I can believe that many politicians at the time would have wanted him gone. Some of Whitlam’s notable achievements while he was in office include the termination of military conscription (another factor that would have gotten him offside with the American government I would imagine,) institution of universal healthcare and free university education. As a side note, I find it extremely hypocritical that the politicians who are currently campaigning so vigorously to increase Australian university fees didn’t pay a cent for their educations thanks to Whitlam. I wonder if they would be so determined if they were asked to pay for their fees retrospectively?
I feel that Amnesia was published at a perfect time for me as I am currently studying a news and politics subject and it certainly gave me cause to ponder many issues from a different perspective. I also loved the many references to Melbourne suburbs and landmarks, although people from outside of Australia may find them a bit confusing or irrelevant. Amnesia was a thought provoking and extremely well written novel and I would recommend it to anyone interested in Australian history. Even if you are well versed on Australian history you will find yourself thinking about events in different ways and if you aren’t you will most likely be inspired to find out more as I was.
February 8, 2017
With its connection to politics, the law, ethics and forgotten 20th century history, Amnesia reminded me a bit of the ABC television show,
. The main character, Felix Moore, is a similarly rabble-rousing trouble-maker, fallen out of favour, though not a womaniser or scoundrel of that ilk. Moore is one of the last investigative journalists in the country (again, my cynical mind argues that Australian journalism has disappeared almost completely, though certain current affairs programs, particularly on the ABC, continue to soldier on as best they can).
However, Amnesia is really the story of Gabrielle (Gaby) Baillieux, a hacker from Melbourne whose own mother, Celine, was a baby born from the rape of a woman by a U.S. soldier stationed in Australia during World War II. This incident is a good example of the chilly, tense tone between the two countries, as Felix explains an American (CIA) involvement in getting rid of Gough Whitlam in the 70s and installing the conservative prime minister, Robert Menzies - all because Whitlam cancelled a deal between the two countries that enabled the US to continue using Australian territory for some of its Cold War operations. How much of this is true I don't personally know, but it's highly plausible. If it is true, it fits in exactly with the premise of the novel, as put forward by the title: that we forget these things, that as a country we have deliberately chosen to forget, making historical 'fact' slide into myth and then disappear entirely.
This is all stirred up when Gaby uses a worm to infect the computer systems that operate the private American prisons - and, by connection, the Australian ones too (a dig at the continued out-sourcing of things like prisons to private, for-profit corporations is ever-present), thus releasing all the prisoners. On the run and in hiding, Gaby's mother Celine and an old friend, Woody Townes - a wealthy (but seemingly dodgy) businessman - hire Felix to write the book on Gaby. He barely gets to meet her, though, instead dumped on an isolated island in a river to transcribe old-fashioned cassette tapes and make sense of both Gaby and Celine's version of the past - and each other.
In many ways, Amnesia is riveting and wonderful in its old-fashioned style, connecting contemporary concerns with forgotten history. It highlights the importance in understanding the past in order to not only make sense of the present but to more intelligently question it, and deal with it. But it is also a deeply disappointing novel for how it is structured and what it chooses to delve into, at the expense of the present. The ending is also a bit of a let-down, feeling sadly anti-climactic. I greatly appreciated learning about Gaby's motives, her youthful activism when trying to bring justice against a water-polluting company, Agrikem, but as engaging as her childhood and adolescence is to read about, it's also quite lengthy and for a long time you're not at all sure where it's going. The links between Agrikem, the prisons, the overturning of Whitlam's government and, frankly, everything else seemed a bit tenuous, in that elements of the plot seemed to get dropped and forgotten (the irony!). Though it could also be the effect of several months having gone by since I read this.
There is a lot to enjoy here, and enjoy it I did, for all its tendency to be a bit convoluted (even bloated) at times.
Read in May 2016.
However, Amnesia is really the story of Gabrielle (Gaby) Baillieux, a hacker from Melbourne whose own mother, Celine, was a baby born from the rape of a woman by a U.S. soldier stationed in Australia during World War II. This incident is a good example of the chilly, tense tone between the two countries, as Felix explains an American (CIA) involvement in getting rid of Gough Whitlam in the 70s and installing the conservative prime minister, Robert Menzies - all because Whitlam cancelled a deal between the two countries that enabled the US to continue using Australian territory for some of its Cold War operations. How much of this is true I don't personally know, but it's highly plausible. If it is true, it fits in exactly with the premise of the novel, as put forward by the title: that we forget these things, that as a country we have deliberately chosen to forget, making historical 'fact' slide into myth and then disappear entirely.
This is all stirred up when Gaby uses a worm to infect the computer systems that operate the private American prisons - and, by connection, the Australian ones too (a dig at the continued out-sourcing of things like prisons to private, for-profit corporations is ever-present), thus releasing all the prisoners. On the run and in hiding, Gaby's mother Celine and an old friend, Woody Townes - a wealthy (but seemingly dodgy) businessman - hire Felix to write the book on Gaby. He barely gets to meet her, though, instead dumped on an isolated island in a river to transcribe old-fashioned cassette tapes and make sense of both Gaby and Celine's version of the past - and each other.
In many ways, Amnesia is riveting and wonderful in its old-fashioned style, connecting contemporary concerns with forgotten history. It highlights the importance in understanding the past in order to not only make sense of the present but to more intelligently question it, and deal with it. But it is also a deeply disappointing novel for how it is structured and what it chooses to delve into, at the expense of the present. The ending is also a bit of a let-down, feeling sadly anti-climactic. I greatly appreciated learning about Gaby's motives, her youthful activism when trying to bring justice against a water-polluting company, Agrikem, but as engaging as her childhood and adolescence is to read about, it's also quite lengthy and for a long time you're not at all sure where it's going. The links between Agrikem, the prisons, the overturning of Whitlam's government and, frankly, everything else seemed a bit tenuous, in that elements of the plot seemed to get dropped and forgotten (the irony!). Though it could also be the effect of several months having gone by since I read this.
There is a lot to enjoy here, and enjoy it I did, for all its tendency to be a bit convoluted (even bloated) at times.
Read in May 2016.
October 1, 2015
One of the most spectacularly mis-marketed novels of recent memory. Amnesia is supposedly about "the cyber underworld" and "international power politics." Yes. In much the same way that Pride and Prejudice is about the cyber underworld and international power politics.
Carey actually wrote a book that's metafictional in a tedious way (journalist is ordered to write a portrait of a cyber-terrorist type... said portrait is the second half of the novel... can we trust him oh no author is unreliable who would have thought it). He combines ultra-realistic characters with funny caricatures (always fatal for a certain kind of reader; the kind who once read E. M. Forster's bit about round and flat characters, and just assumes that all characters must be "round"). And then (here tolls the death-knell for my interest in the book), instead of taking those perfectly bearable ingredients and whipping up a good spy thriller, he (or perhaps that ever unreliable author) serves us... a teenage love story. I don't give any shits.
As I say, it's just possible that this is all meant to be metafictional, which makes it artistically and intellectually reputable: the journalist is separated from his wife, so of course he'll focus on the love story instead of the actually interesting parts of the story he's meant to be telling. And since Carey is just telling the story of the journalist, he has to tell that story, rather than the story that his readers want.
None of which makes actually reading the second half of the book anything other than tedious. Quite a shame. On the upside, it's very readable, and at least he's trying to do something interesting.
Oh, one small thing: Carey throws in a lot of Oz slang and geography and so on, and a lot of it felt pretty thin. Particularly thin was his reference to an Italian restaurant thirty kilometres East of Monash University. Carey went to Monash, briefly, but I went there for rather too long, and I assure you, if you are thirty kays east of Monash, you are in Port Phillip Bay, and nowhere near land, let alone any restaurants.
Carey actually wrote a book that's metafictional in a tedious way (journalist is ordered to write a portrait of a cyber-terrorist type... said portrait is the second half of the novel... can we trust him oh no author is unreliable who would have thought it). He combines ultra-realistic characters with funny caricatures (always fatal for a certain kind of reader; the kind who once read E. M. Forster's bit about round and flat characters, and just assumes that all characters must be "round"). And then (here tolls the death-knell for my interest in the book), instead of taking those perfectly bearable ingredients and whipping up a good spy thriller, he (or perhaps that ever unreliable author) serves us... a teenage love story. I don't give any shits.
As I say, it's just possible that this is all meant to be metafictional, which makes it artistically and intellectually reputable: the journalist is separated from his wife, so of course he'll focus on the love story instead of the actually interesting parts of the story he's meant to be telling. And since Carey is just telling the story of the journalist, he has to tell that story, rather than the story that his readers want.
None of which makes actually reading the second half of the book anything other than tedious. Quite a shame. On the upside, it's very readable, and at least he's trying to do something interesting.
Oh, one small thing: Carey throws in a lot of Oz slang and geography and so on, and a lot of it felt pretty thin. Particularly thin was his reference to an Italian restaurant thirty kilometres East of Monash University. Carey went to Monash, briefly, but I went there for rather too long, and I assure you, if you are thirty kays east of Monash, you are in Port Phillip Bay, and nowhere near land, let alone any restaurants.
April 20, 2015
Amnesia was a bit...confusing. The book jacket description makes it seem like it's about a terrorist attack where a hacker unleashed a worm that released the locks on prisons in the U.S. and Australia. Like most people, I picked up the book because the plot description on the book sounded intriguing. Unfortunately, the book wasn't about this terrorist attack at all. It's actually about a disgraced journalist named Felix Moore, who has recently been found libel for slander and is talked into writing a novel about the suspected terrorist, painting her in a flattering light. For reasons that aren't entirely clear to me (because the book was very, very confusing) he is isolated for his safety and only given tapes from the terrorist and her mom dictating their stories to Felix.
Most of the book was about this suspected terrorist's upbringing, and we learn about it through the unreliable dictation of the terrorist herself and her mother. Besides the fact that Felix is writing this book to show that the hacker either did or didn't do this crime, the book isn't actually about this terrorist attack at all. It was just about Felix listening to tapes and writing this book, and if that sounds boring, then it's because it kind of is.
I wasn't impressed with this book and was bored throughout much of it. I would have loved to have learned more about the terrorist attack, as that plot actually sounded intriguing. Instead I slogged through the book, just waiting to get to the plot detailed on the book jacket, but that never came. Overall I was annoyed about the "bait-and-switch" with the plot, bored with the actual plot, and confused by what I was given.
Most of the book was about this suspected terrorist's upbringing, and we learn about it through the unreliable dictation of the terrorist herself and her mother. Besides the fact that Felix is writing this book to show that the hacker either did or didn't do this crime, the book isn't actually about this terrorist attack at all. It was just about Felix listening to tapes and writing this book, and if that sounds boring, then it's because it kind of is.
I wasn't impressed with this book and was bored throughout much of it. I would have loved to have learned more about the terrorist attack, as that plot actually sounded intriguing. Instead I slogged through the book, just waiting to get to the plot detailed on the book jacket, but that never came. Overall I was annoyed about the "bait-and-switch" with the plot, bored with the actual plot, and confused by what I was given.
February 18, 2017
I much preferred reading about Gaby's past than anything set in present-day.
November 1, 2014
This book is a great big crazy anarchic mess. But I enjoyed it. One of the things I enjoyed was the sense of place in the book. I grew up in Sydney, in Balmain/Rozelle and I now live in Victoria just outside of Melbourne, so I could connect with the story in terms of many of its locations.
I loved the contradictions of the characters and the machinations they employ to make things happen or to stop them from happening. He also neatly captures the alienation that many teenagers feel, their frustration with being only part adult/part child and their rebellion in the face of this. It also hints at what one is forced to sacrifice in the name of activism. It's this that gives the book its big crazy anarchic messy feel; it's in the plot and his style of writing.
And life is messy. Is Carey telling us that's why/how we become so 'amnesic' about things that are happening that we should care about, because it's happening all the time and we have to work so bloody hard to exercise even a modicum of control? I think the difficulty a reader may experience trying to follow the plot also echoes this. But it's worth it to stay with it. It got me thinking and I will always enjoy a book that can do that.
I loved the contradictions of the characters and the machinations they employ to make things happen or to stop them from happening. He also neatly captures the alienation that many teenagers feel, their frustration with being only part adult/part child and their rebellion in the face of this. It also hints at what one is forced to sacrifice in the name of activism. It's this that gives the book its big crazy anarchic messy feel; it's in the plot and his style of writing.
And life is messy. Is Carey telling us that's why/how we become so 'amnesic' about things that are happening that we should care about, because it's happening all the time and we have to work so bloody hard to exercise even a modicum of control? I think the difficulty a reader may experience trying to follow the plot also echoes this. But it's worth it to stay with it. It got me thinking and I will always enjoy a book that can do that.
April 20, 2015
I usually like Peter Carey's writing and there are passages and phrases in Amnesia that are very special - his descriptions of the Australian cities, suburbs and the bush are so well done. Nevertheless the story itself I felt was a bit of a "bandwagon". We don't need to be reminded that we (in Australia) are at the mercy of the media moguls and the ignorant electors who have forgotten the ills of our past (and present) politicians.
The use of the narrator/ has-been journalist writing up the lives of the other characters from their recorded tapes was an interesting device but it didn't work for me, as so much of the book then involved the reader being "told" the stories rather than being entertained and/or enthralled by being "shown" their stories. It was an OK holiday read but only deserved 3 stars
The use of the narrator/ has-been journalist writing up the lives of the other characters from their recorded tapes was an interesting device but it didn't work for me, as so much of the book then involved the reader being "told" the stories rather than being entertained and/or enthralled by being "shown" their stories. It was an OK holiday read but only deserved 3 stars
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