Thin true line: fact, fiction collide in Carey's phantom poet

By Peter Carey

Knopf, 266 pp., $24

No other Australian writer in our time has succeeded as well as Peter Carey in writing novels that compel the attention of a worldwide audience. His work -- twice honored with the Booker Prize -- occupies a high plane of literary brilliance. ''My Life as a Fake" is his eighth novel, and it should sit comfortably on a shelf beside ''Oscar and Lucinda" or ''True History of the Kelly Gang," his most accomplished works, even though it seems hastily composed at times.

Carey has often pulled a loose thread from an old story or legend or historical narrative to weave his own shimmering fabric. In ''Jack Maggs," for example, he snatched a character from Dickens, the memorable convict called Magwitch, and brought him to new life in a work that moved quickly beyond pastiche. In the latest novel, he seizes upon an infamous Australian story -- a true one -- reinventing it in ways that bring out its hidden dimensions.

In the 1940s, James McAuley and Harold Stewart -- two antimodernist literary types -- decided to make fun of modernist poetry by perpetrating a hoax. They brewed a heady sequence of surrealist verse, making up some lines, robbing Shakespeare for others, even stealing passages from a report on mosquito control written by the US Army. They attached the name of Ern Malley to the verse and sent it to Max Harris, the well-known editor of an Australian literary magazine. Harris fell for the trick, proclaiming the work a masterpiece of surreal literature. Soon after, the poor man was hauled into court for publishing an obscene work. (The story is retold by Michael Heyward in a 1993 book called ''The Ern Malley Affair.")

This delicious hoax was ripe fruit for Carey's picking, and pick he did. In an epilogue, he talks about his sources, quoting a remarkable line by the gullible Harris, proclaimed long after the hoax had been revealed: ''I still believe in Ern Malley." By this (one supposes) he meant that fiction can overtake reality, supplanting it. It's a statement of faith in the necessary fictions by which we all live, and was meant to affirm the supremacy of the imagination.

With a wise economy of form, Carey folds the two perpetrators of the hoax into one Christopher Chubb. The gullible editor becomes the hapless David Weiss, and the invented poet is called Bob McCorkle. As in the original story, Weiss is charged with obscenity for publishing the fake poet, and a trial follows. It's an amusing story so far, but it turns surreal when a figure claiming to be the real McCorkle staggers into the courtroom, ''a massive man with wild dark eyes and black, shoulder-length hair." Thus, Chubb, like Frankenstein, stands before his creation, a creature of his invention, someone who may or may not exist. (The novel's provocative epigraph comes from Mary Shelley's ''Frankenstein": ''I beheld the wretch -- the miserable monster whom I had created. He held up the curtain of the bed; and his eyes, if eyes they may be called, were fixed on me.")

Writing in 1985, the narrator of ''My Life as a Fake" is Sarah Wode-Douglass, the daughter of a ''beautiful, impatient Australian mother" and a ''rather posh English father" called Lord William Wode-Douglass, ''generally known as Boofy." Editor of The Modern Review, a down-at-the-heels literary journal, she happens upon Chubb in Kuala Lumpur, where she had gone a decade before with a strange poet called Slater to figure out some things about her own life, including the circumstances of her mother's suicide. She finds Chubb reading Rilke in a bicycle repair shop, where he wonders: ''You'll listen if I tell you a story?" ''I suppose I haven't anything better to do," she replies, thus provoking the Gothic tale of the Bob McCorkle affair and much else besides.

Chubb, as Sarah learns, has been ruthlessly haunted and pursued by his monstrous creation, McCorkle. The latter, in a vengeful act against his ''creator," abducts Chubb's daughter in Melbourne, then sweeps her away to Southeast Asia. In a sly reversal, the created figure soon casts doubt on the existence of Chubb, bringing up some wonderfully thorny philosophical issues: What is real? How can we tell fact from fiction, the dancer from the dance? Isn't fiction merely the shaping of reality, and once given that shape, does it not have its own existence, separate from the creator?

As these questions move to the fore of Chubb's narrative, the narrator herself, Sarah, begins to process her own memories, retrieving images that have been repressed for decades. Each of the major figures in this labyrinthine tale within a tale are unnerved, driven by obsessions, losses, traumas. With incredible swiftness, the scene of the novel shifts from Melbourne to Kuala Lumpur to Sydney to London to the humid rain forests of Malaysia -- the story itself spreading out over half a century. With a prodigious imagination, Carey -- in the speaking voice of Chubb, in the written voice of Sarah -- takes the reader on a bizarre and tortuous journey, some of it quite digressive. In fact, the hasty final third of the novel often seems to lose its way in a crowd of digressions.

Chubb's digressions are rarely boring, however. In one, he explains how he learned to poison people from a Tamil teacher and how he was subsequently tied to a raft and launched into a tumultuous river. Indeed, the reader often feels like Chubb on this makeshift raft, bound hand and foot to the text itself. Fatigue may set in, and it is occasionally difficult to remember exactly where you are in the narrative, but ultimately the journey is worth the trouble, being a cautionary tale about the powers of imagination, which can turn the counterfeit into the most terrifying reality, transforming lives in the process, destroying everything in its path except the truth, which remains the finest of all fictions.

Jay Parini, a poet and novelist, teaches at Middlebury College. His latest novel is ''The Apprentice Lover."