Oscar and Lucinda

Rating:
Summary: A bittersweet romance in the inimitable Carey style.
Review: The simple legends of a family's past are brought into microscopic focus to become a moving saga. Two unique people, each misfits in their society, gradually come together to create an amazing white elephant - a glass church. This beautiful but impractical artifact, like its creators, is a misfit, and ultimately flawed.

But the object of the book is not the final results, but the journey. The stories of the protagonists lives are filled with moving human detail. Each episode strikes a poignant chord. Through their trials and small triumphs, Oscar and Lucinda come of age to plan their great achievement.

The story illustrates the ability of human beings to imagine and aspire to divine goals, even if reality intrudes in the effort to achieve them The book is filled with wonder, high ideals... and shortsightedness and miscommunications. Ironic opposites abound. Strengths and weaknesses, the abstract and the actual, churches and gaming hells. And it is nearly impossible to put down until the last page leaves you gasping!

Rating:
Summary: Almost as good as 'Bliss'
Review: Having read Carey's first novel, 'Bliss', I really didn't think he could write something as good. Luckily for him, and me, and anyone else who reads 'Oscar and Lucinda', he's come very close.

Nothing really happens in the book, but it doesn't matter; there's a beauty in the language used that is extremely rare. This book is pure characterization. Carey's characters are dense and human and live before the book begins and after it ends. It's a love story, but not a conventional one. The love between Oscar and Lucinda builds and builds with every written word, up to an ending which even the most astute and well-read reader will never expect. The ending is what makes the book. It is powerful. I haven't cried since I was a boy, but I came damn close reading the last few pages. It's really incredible stuff.

I found I was thinking about the last scene for weeks after I finished the book; I've even gone back and read sections. How often does a book do that to you? Not very often, I bet. 'Oscar and Lucinda' is a bit slow, but always interesting, surprising, and touching, like 'Bliss', but in completely different ways. The imagery is brilliant -- you will not see the scenes, you will stand there, with the characters, feeling the sun on your face, breathing the same air they breath. That's how good this is. Go and read it.

Rating:
Summary: beautiful
Review: Framed by recent reminiscences of an unhappy family, Oscar & Lucinda tells the story of two very unusual characters. Unlike many historical novels, it is not dull, it is not an excuse to describe pretty dresses, and it does not dwell upon the unkind living conditions with which people were faced in Days Of Yore.

Oscar and Lucinda are misfits of the highest order.

An early epiphany causes Oscar to run away from his puritanical father at an early age, seeking anglican enlightenment with the local preacher.

Lucinda is kept from society by her mother, a fiercely political woman with strong ideas about feminism and socialism, an oddity in the victorian era. She outfits her daughter according to the principles of rational dress, and believes in the moral value of factories.

Lucinda is led to gambling by loneliness born of her outsider status: it is only amongst outsiders that she can relax.

Oscar was told to gamble in a vision from god.

Each a rebel in his own right, they are drawn together even when circumstances pull them apart. Two addicts with a shared obsession, their interactioins crackle with the energy of a ricocheted bullet.

Their union is embodied in the Prince Rupert Drop: "a solid teardrop of glass no more than two inches from head to tail... Although it is strong enough to withstand the sledgehammer, the tail can be nipped with a pair of blunt-nosed pliers. It takes a little effort. And once it is done it is as if you have taken out the keystone, removed the linchpin, kicked out the foundations. The whole thing explodes." This object, impossible to create except by chance, is the key to the novel. Glass and water appear throughout the novel, their contradictory natures of force and fragility, purity and sin, the core and downfall of both protagonists.

This dual nature is also mirrored in the context of Australia's colonial wilderness with Sydney's pretensions to class and modernisation, the new world with the old. A brilliant and passionate novel whose personae breathe with desire and shame.

Rating:
Summary: Beautifully powerful...
Review: I am hard-pressed to remember two more strange protagonists in all of literature than Oscar and Lucinda. That they meet, fall in love and make a bet on whether a glass church can be transported and constructed "by Easter Sunday" for the benefit of an out-of-the-way congregation and its minister is even more absurd. Yet, page after page, I read, absorbing the wonderful and vibrant detail of mid-nineteenth century England and Australia. Only in the world of this novel could these two characters be "perfect" for each other. And in being written, this book issues a challenge to this world to accept that which is odd and unconventional, that which is outside societal and religious standards.

Somehow I am reminded of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice; the interplay between Oscar and Lucinda amongst "strict society" strikes the same chord as that struck in the love story of Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy, a man and a woman outside the "norm." This book is wonderful reading to get lost in.

Rating:
Summary: Gambling with glass
Review: To say "Oscar and Lucinda" is a novel about a wayward Anglican clergyman and a rich young lady in Australia in the 1860s may give the impression of its being merely a historical set piece, but it transcends this description through the originality of its plot, the depth of its characters, the sublime subtlety of its humor, and an almost Joycean narrative. Peter Carey's novel achieves its distinction through the intrigue of its premise, which is that the respective backgrounds of the two protagonists are so dissimilar that only a random act of fate could eventually unite them, and only one thing they have in common could keep them together -- they are both compulsive gamblers. Gambling indeed sends Oscar Hopkins and Lucinda Leplastrier spiraling towards destruction, but in a way that is unexpectedly foolhardy even by the conventions of the addiction.

The story begins by showing Oscar growing up in a provincial English village where he is sheltered by his widowed father, a naturalist and Christian fundamentalist who adheres to an ascetic lifestyle and distrusts the Anglican church. Oscar, after receiving a divination that he should devote his life to the Anglican faith, leaves his home and goes to live with a local Anglican minister, the Reverend Hugh Stratton, and eventually attends Oxford, where his friend Ian Wardley-Fish introduces him to racetrack betting, of which Stratton would sternly disapprove. After becoming an Anglican minister, Oscar offers to go to Australia as a missionary, even though gambling has become his most lucrative source of income.

Meanwhile, Lucinda, a girl who moved from England to New South Wales with her parents, was orphaned as a teenager and was bequeathed a considerable fortune with which she decides to buy a glassworks in Sydney, not because she has an interest in the manufacture of glass, but because she pities the working class and thinks her ownership of the factory will allow her to associate with Dennis Hasset, a vicar and glass expert to whom she is attracted. After visiting family friends in England (one of whom is Marian Evans, a.k.a. George Eliot, who is unimpressed with her), she embarks on the return journey to Australia, and it is on the ship that she meets Oscar and discovers they have a common weakness for cards.

The novel demonstrates that it is very difficult for a gambling addict to maintain a career in the clergy, and in Oscar's case financial ruin compels him to lodge with Lucinda, which is an obviously controversial situation under the consideration that they are not married. She dreams romantically of constructing a crystal palace of steel and glass, and Oscar, seeing a model at the glassworks, proposes a real glass church to be donated to Hasset, who now has a vicarage in a distant part of the country. This leads Oscar to wager a colossal final bet with Lucinda -- that he can transport this church, in sections to be assembled near the site, across land and sea, as a surprise gift to Hasset.

The story is narrated by Oscar's great-grandson, who remains anonymous and pleasantly unobtrusive throughout, and therefore even though the setting is the nineteenth century the mode of narration is thoroughly modern, with the relatively short chapters giving the novel a strong narrative dynamic and a fast pace; this is not a pastiche of the Victorian style. The image of the glass cathedral at the end is quite striking, not because it is a thing of beauty but because it strives to be a thing of beauty despite its fractured appearance resulting from its tumultuous passage and the death and violence which it has caused and which taint its pretensions to innocence and beatitude. This unique combination of the sacred and the profane makes "Oscar and Lucinda" a work of excellence, clearly one of the best novels of the 1980s.

Rating:
Summary: Absurd and delightful
Review: I can understand why people may give up on this book but alas! Do continue, for the time you devote will pay off spectacularly. It took me a few attempts to finish reading this novel; Carey's intensly descriptive attention to detail takes some getting used to. However, by the time I had really 'got into it' my personal dedication to the characters had become great and I became engrossed by the two protagonists: Oscar and Lucinda. The short and neatly contained chapters act almost as stories in themselves and within these small bursts of narrative subtly emerges an outline of the harsh reality of a nation in its infancy. Like the English in an unsympathetic Australian climate we see two peculiars, a square peg and an odd bod, raging and scurrying through the expectations of society. Nothing prepered me for the impact this book had on me and its dramatic ending shook me to the core. The story and its protagonists are absurd and obscure, intense and strangely romantic but moreover; utterly delightful.

Rating:
Summary: beautiful
Review: Framed by recent reminiscences of an unhappy family, Oscar & Lucinda tells the story of two very unusual characters. Unlike many historical novels, it is not dull, it is not an excuse to describe pretty dresses, and it does not dwell upon the unkind living conditions with which people were faced in Days Of Yore.

Oscar and Lucinda are misfits of the highest order.

An early epiphany causes Oscar to run away from his puritanical father at an early age, seeking anglican enlightenment with the local preacher.

Lucinda is kept from society by her mother, a fiercely political woman with strong ideas about feminism and socialism, an oddity in the victorian era. She outfits her daughter according to the principles of rational dress, and believes in the moral value of factories.

Lucinda is led to gambling by loneliness born of her outsider status: it is only amongst outsiders that she can relax.

Oscar was told to gamble in a vision from god.

Each a rebel in his own right, they are drawn together even when circumstances pull them apart. Two addicts with a shared obsession, their interactioins crackle with the energy of a ricocheted bullet.

Their union is embodied in the Prince Rupert Drop: "a solid teardrop of glass no more than two inches from head to tail... Although it is strong enough to withstand the sledgehammer, the tail can be nipped with a pair of blunt-nosed pliers. It takes a little effort. And once it is done it is as if you have taken out the keystone, removed the linchpin, kicked out the foundations. The whole thing explodes." This object, impossible to create except by chance, is the key to the novel. Glass and water appear throughout the novel, their contradictory natures of force and fragility, purity and sin, the core and downfall of both protagonists.

This dual nature is also mirrored in the context of Australia's colonial wilderness with Sydney's pretensions to class and modernisation, the new world with the old. A brilliant and passionate novel whose personae breathe with desire and shame.

Rating:
Summary: Miraculous story telling underpinned by humour and sympathy
Review: I think the first thing to say about O & L, which I must admit is one of my favourite novels, is that it is story telling of the highest order. Read it, and then ask yourself: how on earth did the author think up all the characters and events? Examples. The bishop doing the table-cloth trick. The events and characters of Lucinda's gambling evenings. The phosphorescence on the boat. The hopscotch. The novel is an extraordinary kalaedoscope of shifting colours, all held together with a ruthless, if merciless, logic. Carey moves effortlessly from rural Devon through Oxford to the nineteenth century Australian outback, throwing in references to glass manufacture, the Oxford Movement, marine biology and an infinity of other topics. Resonances connect all the disparity together: the tragic misunderstandings of love, the brittleness and beauty of glass; the ambiguous and moving relationship between Oscar and his father; the inscrutability of Lucinda (what does she really think?). And of course, the rich and inventive humour that enlivens every page. This is a book about love: its perversion into obsession, its destructiveness, its strength, and its ultimate futility; and the place of love in religion, seen in negative and positive. And despite Carey's distance from his subject (he writes in an ironic detached tone), does any reader really doubt where his sympathies really lie? (for an example of a book where the author *really* doesn't care, try The Magus by John Fowles). For example, is Oscar's father the villain of the piece, or Hugh Stratton? Or is it the mass of characters - from Mr Fig to Jeffries through to the dogooders of Sydney - who display the sluggish and lazy attitudes of the damned.

The christmas pudding incident is based on the life of Edmund Gosse (Father and Son, E. Gosse), and readers may be interested in chasing up the real Philip Gosse - the model for Oscar's father - in Glimpses of the Wonderful: The Life of Philip Henry Gosse by Ann Thwaite.

Rating:
Summary: A magnificent obsession, a beautiful relationship
Review: A wonderful, evocative novel about an eccentric parson and a prickly heiress, who manage to dance around their true emotions for much of the book; as a reader you want to take them both and shake some sense into them, Carey's writing making them seem like real people who you could touch and feel. Set in Devon and Sydney of the mid-19th century, this is a book full of so many wonderful words, not one out of place - beautiful descriptive prose, fantastically drawn characters (even the minor ones) and a tragic story that sucks you in so you feel outrage that it has ended. Carey writes a Dickenisan story that appeals to modern readers, this is a wonderful, wonderful book - i handed it on to someone else straight away so that they could experience it too. The kind of book you wish everyone could experience

Rating:
Summary: Sounds Familiar?
Review: I read this book for a class, and at first it seemed to be a pretty good read. Very quickly, however, it spirals downward into a hole from which it never really escapes. Toward the middle the pace slows down so much you almost lose track of the story. To be totally honest, it bears striking similarity to William Gaddis' book "The Recognitions". The only difference is "Recognitions" is a spectacular book, while Carey's "Oscar and Lucinda" is mediocre at best. I found so many similarities, in fact, I can't help but wonder in Carey used it as a framework for this novel.
I'm sure that the post-colonial twinge within the story will engage many readers, but I couldn't find any redeeming factors to make me change my mind (I often found myself saying, "I get it! They like to gamble alot! Enough!"). If you're into romance and you want a good saturday morning read, this book shouldn't disappoint. If you want good fiction, though, I would skip this one. I wanted to like it, but I don't. Just my opinion.