Fulfilling Expectations

By Paul Gray

Banished for life to New South Wales, a convict eventually returns to 19th century London, risking hanging if the law discovers him, all because he wants to see Henry Phipps, the young English gentleman he has "made" by sending money from abroad. Does that premise sound familiar? It will to those who have read Charles Dickens' Great Expectations and remember Pip's turmoil when he learns that his elevation in society has been financed by the fearsome felon Abel Magwitch. The novel being described here, however, is Peter Carey's Jack Maggs (Knopf; 306 pages; $24). What the dickens is Dickens' plot doing in Carey's new fiction?

Nothing very promising, those familiar with postmodernist literary and largely sterile ironies might guess. In this instance, they would be wrong. For one thing, it is not necessary to know a single word of Great Expectations to have a fine, suspenseful time reading Jack Maggs. Carey takes a cue from Dickens but then ad-libs an original and freestanding performance, replete with the sorts of twists and shocks and coincidences that originally gave page turners a good name. And those readers who retain a clear sense of Dickens' novel will encounter a trove of subtle allusions, not just to the 19th century author's life and works but also to the predatory relationship between an inventor of tales and the real-life subjects who find themselves grist for this creative mill.

Jack Maggs' search for Henry Phipps bumps into an immediate obstacle: Phipps is not to be found at the house where Maggs' money installed him. So the convict takes an expedient job as a footman at the house next door, the better to spot Phipps when he returns. Very quickly--Carey mimes perfectly the Victorian novelist's skill at making the implausible seem inevitable--Maggs comes to the attention of one of his master's dinner guests, the rising young author Tobias Oates. When Maggs, serving the wine, collapses from the pain of a tic douloureux in his cheek, Oates volunteers to relieve the servant's anguish by mesmerizing, i.e., hypnotizing, him. Maggs, a man desperate to keep secrets, is at the mercy of Oates, a man avid to exploit them.

The struggle between Maggs and Oates, a character obviously based on Dickens and lacking only the original's extenuating genius, forms the stem of Carey's plot. But, as befits a mock-19th century novel, there are many fascinating exfoliations. All of Carey's major characters come equipped with vivid childhoods--not just Maggs, thrown on a Thames mud flat as an infant and adopted in order to be trained as a thief, or Oates, humiliated and impoverished young by a feckless father. There is also Mercy Larkin, who befriends Maggs and who was sent into prostitution when barely more than a child by her own mother.

Because of the publishing mores of his time, Dickens could not write directly about prostitutes or abortionists or homosexuals, although coded references to them could be discerned by those in the know. In Jack Maggs, Carey breaks the old code and produces something wonderfully new.

--By Paul Gray