Rating: 
Summary: "Fake is fake no matter where you find it."
Review: Using a real literary fraud from Australia as the basis for his main plot, Carey introduces the reader to Lady Sarah Wode-Douglass, the editor of a small English poetry magazine, always on the verge of financial collapse. Persuaded by John Slater, a poet and friend of her deceased parents, to accompany him from England to Kuala Lumpur in 1972, she is recollecting her encounter there with Christopher Chubb, a refugee from Australia where he had, in the 1940s, perpetrated a major literary hoax, designed to protest the trends in modern poetry. Chubb had written and succeeded in getting published a series of "poems," supposedly by a man named McCorkle. The fraud, which took place in the 1940s, is told in flashbacks from the 1972 trip, mainly by Lady Sarah and Chubb. Its wry humor and social commentary are fun to read, with Chubb mocking the state of literary awareness in Australia at that time and providing information about the obscenity trial which resulted from his hoax. When Chubb cleverly shows her one page from another work by "McCorkle," Sarah sees it as a masterpiece akin to "The Wasteland," and tries to obtain the whole manuscript, the publication of which would save her magazine. Sarah's life in 1983, and shocking revelations by John Slater about Sarah's parents, their marriage, and her mother's death in the late 1930's widen the focus and time frame. The reader quickly recognizes, as all the characters play their parts and the story develops, that all are guilty of some sort of fakery. The second half of the book, however, becomes a wild, often wacky adventure story as separate new plots develop, the time frame changes to World War II, and several new characters, unrelated to the main plot, tell their own stories. Sarah and Slater play no real role in the action as Chubb tries to rescue his daughter from a suddenly real, seven-foot-tall McCorkle, who has kidnapped her and run from island to island in Indonesia and Malaysia, where the Japanese have invaded and have begun vividly described atrocities. Separate, virtually unconnected plots in four time frames--1983, 1939, 1972, and World War II--revealed by four or five different narrators, in settings that include England, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Australia all contribute to a confusion of focus. The characters, events, and plot line from the beginning of the book have little if any overlap with the characters, events, and plots in the middle. Though the several sections are exciting and imaginative separately, they did not cohere for me, and I found myself thinking of the first half as a stand-alone novella, with the remaining episodes connected to it as a series of memorable, separately developed short stories. (3.5 stars) Mary Whipple
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