A RICH, DICKENSIAN TALE OF LOVE AND SELF-DISCOVERY

Author: By Jay Parini

Date: SUNDAY, February 1, 1998

Page: C2

Section: Books

Carey has often worked allusively, taking ideas and inspiration from earlier books. ``Oscar and Lucinda'' (which won the Booker Prize in England and was made into a major film, just opened) unfolds from the autobiography of Edmund Gosse: an unlikely, minor source for a novel that rapidly outstrips its source. Most recently, in ``The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith,'' Carey siphons energy from Laurence Sterne's endlessly generative ``Tristram Shandy.'' But going head to head with Charles Dickens is another matter.

Let me say right off that Peter Carey has outdone himself here. ``Jack Maggs'' is wonderful, an alluring novel of technical brilliance and great heart. It is also the most accessible of Carey's novels -- a book that sets out to entertain, and does. If it feels at times less magical or less fully realized than its precursor, ``Great Expectations,'' one can easily forgive Carey.

In ``Great Expectations,'' the convict Abel Magwitch comes back to London after a lengthy exile in Australia to make himself known to Pip, whom he has supported from a distance for some years. In ``Jack Maggs,'' Carey re-creates the events behind the return of Magwitch (who is here called Jack Maggs). The narrative takes up not only the return of the convict (in itself tense, since Maggs will be hung if he is discovered) but the search for Henry Phipps, the Pip figure. An important layer of the story also concerns one Tobias Oates, a young author and hypnotist who recalls Dickens himself: ``He wore a waistcoat like a common busker or a book-maker,'' writes Carey, ``bright green and shot through with lines of blue and yellow. He was edgy, almost pugnacious, with eyes and hands everywhere about him as if he were constantly confirming his position in the world, a navigator measuring his distance from the chair, the wall, the table.''

Carey uses Oates's interest in hypnotism and mesmerism (obsessions shared with Dickens) to meditate on the nature of creativity itself, and the reliance of artists on unwitting, unfortunate subjects. Also like Dickens, Oates is drawn to the psychological makeup of criminals and outsiders, and thus Maggs holds considerable interest for him.

The eponymous hero himself is a vivid creation: a foundling born at the end of the 18th century and schooled in criminal behavior. ``He was a tall man in his forties,'' we are told. ``His brows pushed down hard upon the eyes, and his cheeks shone as if life had scrubbed at him and rubbed until the very bones beneath his flesh had been burnished in the process.'' He became a master thief at an early age, and was ultimately banished to a penal colony in Australia, where he made his fortune in a brickworks. Now, in the 1830s, he steals back into London -- a city that Carey gloriously imagines, with its teeming shops, gin palaces, great houses, and reeking corners. By chance, he becomes a gentleman's footman in Great Queen Street, where he falls into a plot already long in motion.

Among the many memorable characters we meet are Edward Constable, another footman, and Mercy Larkin, a kitchenmaid whose love for Maggs provides another central strand of this deeply tangled plot. Much in the vein of Dickens, Carey brings both major and minor characters stunningly to life with a flick of the pen, as when we hear in passing of ``Dr. Snipes of Wapping who had killed three of his spinster patients and fed their remains to his fox terrier.'' The novel is studded with such asides, adding to the general sense of profusion that makes the text feel rich and complex.

Profusion is not usually Peter Carey's mode. His manner in his previous six novels has been to work by reticence and compression. This was not, of course, the way of Charles Dickens. The glory of ``Great Expectations,'' in particular, lies in the endless invention of details, a subtle expansiveness that gives life and breadth to the narrative. Carey's naturally laconic impulse would seem to work against him here, and -- wisely -- he has not wholly adopted the Dickensian mode. Rather, he creates a repressed, at times claustrophobic, atmosphere. The writing is terse, often epigrammatic -- as when Jack Maggs suddenly abandons the house in Great Queen Street:

``Jack Maggs had bolted, she [Mercy Larkin] knew not where. He had departed as he had first come in, in mufti. He had not spoken, not even waved. She had looked up from the kitchen window and seen him walk up Great Queen Street with his kit-bag across his shoulder. That night, after midnight, she went across the roof again, but the house was cold and frightening. She knew then: he had gone for good.''

Dickens would have played out the scene more fully, heaping detail upon detail like icing until the cake itself threatened to collapse. Carey cannot bring himself to do this, and withdraws into summary instead of full dramatization. But this is not to fault the novel: ``Jack Maggs'' has its distinct pace and texture, and the whole is radiant.

The narrative rushes like a great stream toward a glittery falls, gathering momentum as it rolls. Indeed, the last chapters of the novel are written with unusual poise and lyrical force as the story's point becomes clear. This is, finally, a book about love, and how love drives one forward into self-discovery: a theme realized on several levels here, but most vividly in Mercy's love for Maggs. Carey's novel is also an extended meditation on the sources of inspiration -- a theme embodied in the character and fate of Tobias Oates. And like all great works of homage, ``Jack Maggs'' sends readers back hungrily to the source. I, for one, finished the novel before the bed; the next morning, over breakfast, I began to reread ``Great Expectations,'' full of strange reverence and anticipation.