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Jack Maggs

by Peter Carey

Summary

In Peter Carey's literary fantasy, one of Dickens's characters (Magwitch in GREAT EXPECTATIONS) is a real person, and tries to murder the novelist for caricaturing and sentimentalizing him in the novel. Winner of the 1998 Commonwealth Writers Prize. A New York Times Notable Book for 1998.

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Media Reviews

"'Jack Maggs' is well written. Carey's sentences are an elaborate pastiche of nineteen-century decorum laced with modern wit. There is a skilful deployment throughout of underworld slang of the time....I don't want to leave the impression that 'Jack Maggs' is just a literary pleasure....Anyone who cares at all for fiction should read it."    -- Robert Nye

   -- Literary Review

"The book, alive with detail and incident, sometimes sounds quite like a 19th-century novel....The book has qualities in common with its predecessors, but it benefits by its narrower focus. It is a more complex, more profoundly excogitated, more self-critical achievement, and future reprints of 'Oscar and Lucinda' may well bear the legend 'by the author of Jack Maggs'."    -- Frank Kermode

   -- London Review of Books

"Dickens has been revised for our postcolonial, postmodernist times. In an audacious and wholly successful act of writerly reinvention, Mr. Carey turns Dickens upside down....Mr. Carey's great achievement here is to superimpose so many different levels of meaning onto this relatively straightforward story. Without ever descending into postmodernist boredom, he crafts a quintessentially postmodern tale, in which the novel we are reading is also the novel whose creation we are reading about....The various meanings are simply there to be decoded, or not. Meanwhile, on the surface 'Jack Maggs' is still a ripping good yarn-and one needn't have Mr. Carey's powerful imagination to see Dickens tipping his cap admiringly."    -- Marc Carnegie

   -- Wall Street Journal

"'Jack Maggs' is wonderfully acute in its analysis of Dickens, and wildly entertaining at the same time....Dickens's idiosyncratic drollery can't be easy to imitate. Carey can do it but doesn't overdo it. He leaves one marveling at the sheer energy he has put into what is ultimately a spoof."    -- Gabriele Annan

   -- New York Review of Books

"[T]he reader is willingly drawn along, charmed by the story's details, susceptible to the plot's contrivances, always surprised by the reversals, misunderstandings, coincidences, exaggerations, interlocking narratives and other entertaining devices of vintage Victorian storytelling. As always, Carey writes with energy and fantastic inventiveness. But he seems more in control here than he has in any of his previous novels....[He] has flattered the master with an imitation so clever that it has a life all its own."    -- Christopher Lehmann-Haupt

   -- New York Times

"[] wondrous, sly, Dickensian swirl of a novel....Carey creates a rousing, old-fashioned narrative, and brings to it a distinctly modern, unromantic sensibility."    -- Caryn James

   -- New York Times Book Review

Bibliographic Details

Publisher: Random House Inc
Published date: 1998
Edition: 1th edition
Size: 6.75 x 9.75 inches
Weight: 1.5 pounds
Pages: 306

Publisher's Notes

"Jack Maggs is a dazzling tale of obsession, and Jack Maggs stands as a remarkable character, a resurrected antipodean lag returned to England for vengeance and reconciliation."--Thomas Keneally From the Booker Prize-winning author, a vivid and robust novel of Dickensian London--a place and a story teeming with mystery, science, and passion.The time, the 1830s. Jack Maggs, a foundling trained in the fine arts of thievery, cruelly betrayed and deported to Australia, has now reversed his fortunes--and seeks to fulfill his well-concealed, innermost desire. Returning "home" under threat of execution, he inveigles his way into a household in Great Queen Street, where hes quickly embroiled in various emotional entanglements--and where he falls under the hypnotic scrutiny of Tobias Oates, a celebrated young writer fascinated by the process of mesmerism and obsessed with the criminal mind.From this volatile milieu emerges a handful of vividly drawn characters in the dangerous pursuit of love, whether romantic or familial--each of them with secrets, and secret longings, that could spell certain ruin. And as their various schemes converge, the captivating figure at the center is Jack Maggs himself, at once frightening, mystifying, and utterly compelling. "Imaginative and audacious . . . A twentieth-century, post-colonial Dickens novel . . . This strange, bold, gripping, and wonderful novel is the story of a power struggle, a double love story, a quest story, and a story of trickery and disguise. Its about taking possession--of an inheritance, of another persons soul, of your own destiny--and being taken possession of. Not least, its the story of one writer's being possessed by another."--Hermione Lee, The Observer "Uncommonly exciting and engaging. As much as anyone now writing, Peter Carey is a master of storytelling. His empathy with his characters, combined with his psychological sharp-sightedness, has them almost jumping off the page in full human complexity. An especial bonus is his style . . . Vivid, exact, unexpected images and language match the quick, witty intelligence flickering through this novel, and make it a triumph of ebullient indictment, humane insight, and creative generosity."--Peter Kemp, Sunday Times (London) "Writing and philosophical contemplations of the highest order . . . On a par with, and more interesting than, his two earlier masterpieces . . . An absorbing, beautifully written novel finished off with a most satisfactory happy ending, and with incidents, an atmosphere, and ideas that linger in the mind."--Carmen Callil, The Daily Telegraph

Other Editions

• Hardcover - Random House Inc (1998) - from $1.00
• Paperback - Random House Inc (1999) - from $1.00

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