Peter Carey
THEFT
A love story
270pp. Faber. £16.99.
0 571 23147 0
US: Knopf. $24.
0 307 26371 1
Fifteen years ago, Peter Carey published his disturbing novel The Tax Inspector. Towards the end, a heavily pregnant Maria Takis finds herself beside Sydney Harbour, sipping from a champagne flute at a rich man’s dinner party:
“She had been in homes like this before, often, professionally, but she had never allowed herself to think of wealth as attractive, was so accustomed to seeing it as a form of theft that it was shocking for her to feel herself responding to it all, as if she were allowing herself to be sexually excited by a criminal.”
Maria is a tax inspector, sent to audit Catchprice Motors, a failing family business in Franklin, near Sydney, in the state of New South Wales. For several generations, the Catchprices have passed the business from father to son, along with the practice of paedophilia: fiddling the books is the least of the crimes Maria exposes. An awkward twist of plot eventually brings her to dinner with Sydney’s elite, who are all agitating about Droit de Suite, the legislation that would guarantee Australian artists a percentage of future sales of their work. The problem is that the art world (commercial galleries, collectors and artists) trades in “funny money”. The last thing anyone wants is legislation that will deliver everyone into the hands of the Tax Department.
For all its finesse, The Tax Inspector leaves questions hanging, among them “If no one can change, what point is there in anything?”, and “You’re going to be transformed through love?”. Maria exchanges these questions with one of the Catchprice sons, on the brink of an affair that never develops. Instead, she is sucked back into the hellish basement of Catchprice Motors to give birth in dangerous and disgusting circumstances. It is an exhaustingly unsatisfying end.
Inheritance – personal, cultural, historical – has been central in Carey’s fiction from the beginning. It is almost always ambiguous: something overwhelmingly defining from which, nevertheless, one would prefer to escape. The Bones brothers, whose interlaced perspectives structure Theft, come from Bacchus Marsh, thirty-three miles west of Melbourne. Like the Catchprices, their childhood was violent. Their father, Blue Bones, was a butcher, “a hard man living in an age of miracles”, and when he went out drinking their mother hid the knives.
Above their mother’s “dreadful bed” hung a framed embroidery:
IF YOU HAVE EVER SEEN A MAN DIE, REMEMBER THAT YOU, TOO, MUST GO THE SAME WAY. IN THE MORNING CONSIDER THAT YOU MAY NOT LIVE TILL EVENING, AND WHEN EVENING COMES DO NOT DARE TO PROMISE YOURSELF THE DAWN.
The eldest brother, Michael “Butcher” Bones, grows up to become a famous artist – one of his masterpieces is “If You Have Ever Seen a Man Die”. The younger brother, Hugh “Slow” Bones, grows up damaged, but insists he was not born that way: “All my life I lived amongst the perfumes of secrets, blood, roses, altar wine, who can say what happened to us all in Main Street, Bacchus Marsh, not me”.
One thing that did happen was Slow Bones’s try at drowning his father in the bath, and his father’s attempt to do the same to his son. The secrets that are threads twisted into bonds of sibling loyalty are less feral in Theft than in The Tax Inspector, but not much. The new novel starts with the Bones brothers living together in northern New South Wales, where Butcher has become a caretaker, after an acrimonious divorce – followed by a short spell in prison – has interrupted his artistic career. Prison aside, Butcher has taken care of Hugh all his life. Even during his marriage to a glamorous woman now known only as the Plaintiff, Hugh was an intrusive presence. When their son was born, Butcher’s wife urged him to be wary of Hugh’s feelings towards the baby, but Hugh proved himself a devoted uncle. Then there was an accident, another secret entered in the Bones family ledger.
Marlene Leibovitz arrives unexpectedly, full of immediate sexual appeal, like the tax inspector on the forecourt of Catchprice Motors. But whereas Maria Takis was eight months pregnant, flamboyantly, unconventionally erotic, Marlene is petite, blonde, predictably pretty, and wearing, of all things in a Carey novel, Manolo Blahniks. The scene in which Butcher offers to clean them and reflects on the “indecent softness” of the leather is mercifully short, but still it comes as a great relief when he later confesses “I hated the shoes”. Maria Takis equated wealth with theft. Carey’s new heroine shops for designer shoes. Can people change?
Marlene is preoccupied with the Droit Moral that her husband has inherited from his father, the (fictional) painter Jacques Leibovitz. This is something that makes Droit de Suite, and its fiscal implications, seem straightforward. Droit Moral is a component of intellectual property law that originated in Europe and was adopted in Australia through the Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act of December 2000. The Act bestows a right of attribution (authority to authenticate a work of art) and a right of integrity (protection against derogatory treatment of a work of art). The recipient of these rights is, in the first instance, the artist, but as with copyright, the rights do not all simply disappear when the artist dies. For this reason, the descendants can inherit an artist’s Droit Moral. In France it is perpetual, “existing for so long as the work survives in human memory and is an object of exploitation”.
Carey exposes the law’s comic potential: Marlene’s husband, Olivier Leibovitz, exercises the right of authentication over his father’s canvases, but he cannot even touch them, he hates them so much: “These great works of art make him ill, really, physically ill”.
Theft chases the Leibovitz Droit Moral from Paris to Australia to Tokyo and on to New York. When she first appears, Marlene is in quest of a Leibovitz incongruously owned by Butcher’s neighbour Dozy. Initially, Butcher is reluctant to become involved, preferring to paint his own canvases than to embroil himself in art politics:
“Hugh was up and away, all over the place like a mad woman’s shit, gallumphing along the bitumen, swearing at the flies in made-up languages but he, Dozy, Marlene, my little boy – everyone was dead to me. R.I.P, so very bloody sorry. I painted.”
