Reviewed by Pedro Ponce
7.21.07

The nature and purpose of art has been a major motif in Peter Carey’s eclectic oeuvre. The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith is an allegory of postcolonial relations distilled through the eponymous narrator’s life in the theater. My Life as a Fake uses a literary hoax to explore the fine line between art and artifice. The theme is explored more obliquely in True History of the Kelly Gang, winner of the 2001 Booker Prize. True History gives voice to nineteenth-century outlaw Ned Kelly, who constructs his own narrative as a corrective to sensationalized accounts of his adventures that would later make him an Australian folk hero.

Theft: A Love Story, Carey’s latest novel, is really two books in one. The first is a noirish send-up of the art world that follows the vicissitudes of Michael “Butcher” Boone’s painting career. Butcher struggles to get his life back after a stint in prison for trying to retrieve work taken during a nasty divorce. He resumes something of a normal life living in a patron’s house with his disabled brother, Hugh. When Marlene Cook, a mysterious art appraiser, arrives to verify the authenticity of a neighbor’s painting, Butcher becomes embroiled in a complicated affair involving Marlene and the seamy underworld of art forgery.

The love story alluded to in the subtitle is the richest of the novel’s narrative layers. Carey skillfully evokes Butcher’s agonized vulnerability as he ruminates over whether he is just another victim of Marlene’s con. To Butcher, Marlene is “extraordinarily attractive” but she works “for the other team, the market, the rich guys, the ones who decided what was art and what was not. They were in charge of history, and so fuck them all, always, forever.”

Hugh, who splits the narration with his brother, is no mere foil to his more renowned sibling. His idiosyncratic and occasionally embittered voice poignantly captures the cost of a life in art. In one of his chapters, Hugh tells his own version of his brother’s education and escape from home in Bacchus Marsh: “[O]ur mother had sold her twenty acres at Parwan so the Butcher could further his studies at Footscray Tech but in all his thousands of MEDIA PROFILES my brother never mentioned his family’s kindness. He portrayed his departure from the Marsh as an ASCENSION from a cess pit, holy fire blasting from his hairy arse.”

The split narration creates an often moving dialogue between artist and kin. But the structure makes it hard for Carey to sustain the suspense plot of Marlene’s latest confidence game, which takes the reader through Japan and New York, as well as through the convoluted process of fabricating art. Rather than a cumulative effect, the alternating episodes flatten out suspense, meandering toward an abrupt conclusion.

Love ultimately wins out in this cerebral narrative, if not necessarily between the characters, then between the novel’s wide-ranging concerns. The love explored here is not limited to that between man and woman or brother and brother; there is also a passionate engagement with art itself. As one character notes, “Looking at pictures, he said, is like a prize fight. You should eat well and sleep well before you begin.” Readers will leave Theft with a new appreciation for the monetary and emotional costs of art—as well as the difficult but inimitable joys of making it.