Peter Carey. (2015). Amnesia: A Novel. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Peter Carey. 2015. Amnesia: A Novel. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Peter Carey, Amnesia: A Novel. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2015.

Peter Carey. Amnesia: A Novel. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2015.

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   • bioText: PETER CAREY is the author of twelve previous novels and has twice received the Booker Prize. His other honors include the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and the Miles Franklin Literary Award. Born in Australia, he has lived in New York City for more than twenty years.
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The two-time Booker Prize winner now gives us an exceedingly timely, exhilarating novel—at once dark, suspenseful, and seriously funny—that journeys to the place where the cyber underworld collides with international power politics.
 
When Gaby Baillieux releases the Angel Worm into Australia’s prison computer system, hundreds of asylum-seekers walk free. And because the Americans run the prisons (let’s be honest: as they do in so many parts of her country) the doors of some five thousand jails in the United States also open. Is this a mistake, or a declaration of cyber war? And does it have anything to do with the largely forgotten Battle of Brisbane between American and Australian forces in 1942? Or with the CIA-influenced coup in Australia in 1975? Felix Moore, known to himself as “our sole remaining left-wing journalist,” is determined to write Gaby’s biography in order to find the answers—to save her, his own career, and, perhaps, his country. But how to get Gaby—on the run, scared, confused, and angry—to cooperate?
Bringing together the world of hackers and radicals with the “special relationship” between the United States and Australia, and Australia and the CIA, Amnesia is a novel that speaks powerfully about the often hidden past—but most urgently about the more and more hidden present.

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: Luke Harding, The Guardian
   • content: "[This] lively 13th novel from the Australian magus Peter Carey will leave the mind reeling. It is tremendous fun, a satiric burlesque as fast as a speeding car, barbed as only Carey can be, seething with benign rage and as black as reality. . . . Carey is an intellectual magpie. Not much escapes the cerebral writer's notice. . . . [Carey's] inventive unpredictability is part of his appeal. The narrative energy of Amnesia is impressive, as are his brilliant handling of the many voices and his always fluent prose. . . . Carey has always been a gifted ventriloquist, and the dialogue in this fast-moving narrative gives the impression that the speakers are in the next room. We don't so much read the dialogue as overhear it. Amnesia contains some of the sharpest characterization Carey has written. . . . Carey has always been a clever, entertaining writer with an adroit grasp of how things work, as well as a subtle feel for the political in everyday life, but this time he has created characters that are unnervingly human. . . . Amnesia is blunt and funny, brave and outspoken. . . . Carey says a great deal in an entertaining, provocative novel, weighty with polemical intent, yet he never forgets to tell a story that is as large as life and as exuberantly complicated, and, as regards setting the record straight, long overdue. If fiction can summon the now, this novel has." --Eileen Battersby, The Irish Times "The brilliant Australian author explores digital activism, legacy journalism, US political interference and Australia's collective forgetfulness about its past in this probing but rollicking novel. . . . Amnesia crackles with energy, inventive in its language (not least in its profanities) but never pretentious, emphasizing the value of straight talking and laughter." --Jake Kerridge, Sunday Express "Peter Carey is such a varied and intriguing novelist there are times when it seems he can write anything. . . . [Amnesia is] exhilarating. It even has a viral twist at the end. As I said, Peter Carey can do anything." --James Runcie, The Independent "Amnesia is exhilaratingly suffused with Carey's wild prodigality of invention. . . . Amnesia glitters with nervy verbal inventiveness and pungent characterization. Carey conjures the longings and anxieties of his wayward teenaged idealists with the same pathos and precision with which he depicts the pains and disillusions of middle age." --Jane Shilling, Evening Standard "A novel about the new American empire and its repercussions around the world, about technology and, most movingly, about family. It is slippery and compelling, written with the vivid precision that marks Mr. Carey's best work. It appears at first as though he might, like Thomas Pynchon in Bleeding Edge or Dave Eggers in The Circle, be attempting to recreate the constantly shifting virtual world in the fixed text of a novel. But humanity, not machinery, lies at the book's heart. . . . Mr. Carey, who has already won the Man Booker prize twice should be in with a chance for a third prize next year." --The Economist "A twisting, thriller-ish tale . . . A sharp ripost to those who say fiction can't cope with the cyber age. . . . Intriguing." --Paul Dunn, The Times "All kinds of political trickery is afoot in this indignant, robustly and funny novel." --The Sunday Times (best recent books) "Carey has twice the energy of most writers; but comedy, it's clear, is something he takes very seriously indeed. . . . An ambitious novel that mixes the story of an Assange-like activist on the run from the US government with stories of political betrayal and bad faith stretching back...
2. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     November 24, 2014
     From two-time Booker winner Carey comes this complex new novel, focusing on the author’s native Australia, but exploring themes of journalistic freedom and Internet ethics. At the center of the book is the young Australian Gabrielle Baillieux, who releases a virus called the Angel Worm in the computer system that controls the Australian prison system, releasing thousands of prisoners throughout Australia and, inadvertently, in the U.S. The move could be construed as an act of terrorism, a bold stroke in the fight for human rights, or just a geeky plan gone awry. Journalist Felix Moore is hired to write Gabrielle’s story sympathetically, to avoid her extradition. In the process, he spends time with her mother, the actress Celine Baillieux, whom he had previously known in college. Looking back through the two women’s lives, Felix also explores Australia’s history since WWII, confusing himself but also educating readers about the Land Down Under. Throughout the book, Carey’s cartwheeling prose and dazzling intellect can be challenging to keep up with, but the book is worth the effort.

3. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     November 15, 2014
     Carey returns to his native Australia, the setting of his two Booker-winning novels (Oscar and Lucinda, 1988; True History of the Kelly Gang, 2001), for this busy, history-soaked study of politics, family and computer hacking.Felix, the hero and occasional narrator of Carey's 13th novel, is a legendary journalist who's recently been disgraced in a libel trial. To redeem himself (and pay off his fines), he falls back into the orbit of a wealthy and politically powerful friend, who has a job for him: Write the life story of Gaby, a young woman accused of releasing a computer virus that freed inmates in almost 5000 U.S. prisons and jails. Felix was college friends with Gaby's mother, Celine, and he's being steered to find Gaby innocent, quite forcefully so-over time he'll be sequestered in a remote hut and motel room with nothing but a typewriter and tapes of Gaby and Celine's conversations to keep him company. That's the novel's spine, but it's forced to bear the weight of a lot of back story, including musings on the CIA's involvement in the disruption of Australia's scandal-ridden government in 1975; the U.S. soldier and serial rapist who impregnated Celine's mother; and Gaby's awkward adolescence in the late '80s, when she fell for a young man who taught her the ways of hacking, which led to some muckraking of a local polluter. As the title suggests, Carey is interested in the ways that we forget about the darker but influential moments in our lives, often deliberately. It's a provocative theme, and Felix's seen-it-all tone gives the political scenes an appealingly hard-nosed, jagged mood. But the novel overall is baggy, shifting from coder-speak to blunt dialogue to reportage. History is a complicated web, Carey reminds us, but this one is particularly sticky. A relatively forgettable entry in a top-shelf novelist's oeuvre.

     COPYRIGHT(2014) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

4. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     February 15, 2015
     

     Delving into political activism and ecoterrorism, this literary mystery by two-time Man Booker Prize winner Carey starts off with the unleashing of a computer virus that opens prison doors in Australia and the United States. Gaby, the daughter of a politician and his actress wife, is identified as a suspect in the viral attack, and soon Felix Moore (a writer with his own political past) is commissioned by wealthy shadow figure Woody Townes to produce a book about her. Felix is promptly abducted and taken to a remote location, where he transcribes tape recordings of reminiscences by Gaby and her mother, which comprise the bulk of the novel. His efforts result in a work bearing the same title as the present novel, which when released on the Internet has far-reaching consequences. Looming large over all these events is the Australian Constitutional Crisis of 1975. VERDICT Intricate and well told, with compelling details of Australian political and social history, this book is nevertheless slow paced, with shifts in time and perspective complicating matters. In the end, the characters never really command the reader's sympathy enough to move beyond the political and environmental into human drama. [See Prepub Alert, 9/8/14.]--James Coan, SUNY at Oneonta Lib.

     Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

5. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     After recent novels set in England and Germany (The Chemistry of Tears) and the US (Parrot and Olivier in America), Peter Carey returns to Australia for the first time since 2008’s His Illegal Self in his new novel Amnesia. He returns with a vengeance to Melbourne in particular, focusing on the inner northern suburbs stretching from Carlton to Coburg. Amnesia is centred on a young female cyber criminal called Gaby Baillieux and narrated by disreputable journalist Felix Moore, who has found himself in strife after being sued for defamation. Woody Townes, a rich property developer from Melbourne, hires Felix to write Gaby’s story, and Felix quickly finds himself in even more trouble. Nevertheless, he delves into Gaby’s family history to uncover her past. For all his years in New York, Carey hasn’t lost touch with the Australian vernacular, and the voice of Felix Moore leaps off the page. In part two of the novel, Carey shifts the point of view to allow the voices of Gaby and her mother to emerge as well, and as always, he handles the dialogue masterfully. At one point Felix claims that he has ‘a lifetime of hard-won technical ability’ as a writer, and the same could be said of Carey. However, this novel doesn’t come together quite as satisfyingly as some of his best novels have.

     Blair Mahoney teaches English, literature and philosophy at Melbourne High School

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When Gaby Baillieux releases the Angel Worm into Australia’s prison computer system, hundreds of asylum-seekers walk free. And because the Americans run the prisons (let’s be honest: as they do in so many parts of her country) the doors of some five thousand jails in the United States also open. Is this a mistake, or a declaration of cyber war? And does it have anything to do with the largely forgotten Battle of Brisbane between American and Australian forces in 1942? Or with the CIA-influenced coup in Australia in 1975? Felix Moore, known to himself as “our sole remaining left-wing journalist,” is determined to write Gaby’s biography in order to find the answers—to save...

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