This is an angry book. At one point, Butcher reflects that, despite the alimony he must pay the Plaintiff, since his involvement with Marlene, he has “more money in my pocket than my father had accumulated in the full total fury of his life”. But it is not enough; partly because his father’s fury has passed to his elder son, like a mocking shadow of Droit Moral. Also, there is always the problem of Hugh. “Don’t worry about Hugh. I’ll look after Hugh”, insinuating Marlene assures Butcher. He is nobody’s fool: “I snorted at this, but I must tell you, it touched me. No-one had even lied to me about this sort of thing before”.
As a love story, Theft is remarkably disabused. “What then are we to do with my emotions? Should they be burned or nailed up on the wall?”. Butcher sees nothing between these vehement options – kill the affair, or go with it regardless. His motivation for choosing the second seems whimsical at first. Marlene, of course, adores his work and flattery is hard to dismiss. There are also the usual attractions: sex, mutual admiration and material gain. Butcher’s asides on the progress of love are typically abrasive:
“I was grateful. I loved her, more than the eyelashes and cheeks, her tenderness, her generosity, and – even if this sounds weird – her guile. I was at home with her, with her light, slight body, her bottomless eyes.”
“Bottomless eyes” certainly sound weird. But should the infelicity – by no means an isolated example – be attributed to Butcher or Carey? Or both? The use of a first-person narrative recalls the demanding technique employed with such success in True History of the Kelly Gang (2000). Here there are two harsh personal voices (Butcher’s and Hugh’s) and no opportunity for decorous writing of the kind Carey excelled at, fifteen years ago:
Granny Catchprice was eighty-six years old. She liked to smoke Salem cigarettes. When she put one in her mouth, her lower lip stretched out towards it like a horse will put out its lip towards a lump of sugar. She was not especially self-critical, but she knew how she looked when she did this – an old tough thing.
With retrospect, this reads tidy and tame: the well-worn image of a horse deftly, but showily, unfolded. Since then, Carey has rebelled, grown in confidence, and rebelled again. His new novel is rough-hewn, full of abrupt one-liners, blunt images and block-capital obscenities. In a Tokyo restaurant, Butcher sees shouting cooks slice squid and hurl it “onto the metal plate where it leapt like something in my mother’s hell”. The slapped-down image is devastating.
Radical independence is profoundly present in this novel: not the glamorous intransigence of the historic outlaw Ned Kelly, but something more ordinary and for that reason surprising. Butcher, Hugh and Marlene are all outsiders. The deep and various loves between them are humble expressions of solidarity: not the kind of love that transforms, but the kind that patiently accepts and perseveres in the face of deceit or disappointment. Just as Butcher knows he cannot explain “the dark puzzle of Slow Bones’ folded brain”, he is able to take Marlene in his arms and hold “the whole cage of mystery that was her life”. On this account, love is not an end to loneliness, but a passing comfort in inevitable solitude. Sexually excited by a criminal, responsive to wealth, cynical, broken, angry – all the things Maria Takis feared at the end of The Tax Inspector, happen to Butcher Bones in Theft. Yet this time the ending is wonderfully executed: “slow-drying, ambiguous, a shifting tide between beauty and horror”. There is still a question left hanging: “How do you know how much to pay if you don’t know what it’s worth?”. We must hope that, one day, in a different novel, the brilliantly restless Peter Carey will return to answer it.
