Oscar and Lucinda
by Peter Carey
Summary
Oscar Hopkins is the son of an English Plymouth Brethren minister, breaks with his father over a Christmas pudding, becomes an Anglican clergyman, and discovers that he can win at the racetrack almost at will. He decides that gambling is theologically permissible if the winnings go to God, which is the sort of reasoning he applies to everything.
Lucinda Leplastrier is an Australian heiress who buys a glassworks in Sydney with money she did not ask for, wants to build something, and cannot as a woman get anyone to take her seriously. She also gambles, compulsively.
They meet on a ship, recognise each other, and eventually make the wager the novel has been walking toward: that Oscar can transport a church made entirely of glass and iron up the New South Wales coast and inland to a settlement in the bush. Everything Lucinda owns is on it.
Carey writes in short chapters, about a hundred of them, with a Dickensian appetite for grotesque minor characters and sudden cruelty. The nineteenth century is rendered without nostalgia, and what happens to the Aboriginal people along the river as the glass church comes upstream is neither softened nor made the point.
It is long, strange, very funny and finally terrible. The glass church itself is one of the great images in Australian fiction.
At over five hundred pages it takes a while to gather, and the two protagonists do not meet for a considerable stretch. Stay with it. Readers who enjoy Dickens, or who liked True History of the Kelly Gang, will find this the richer book.
Historical Context & Significance
Oscar and Lucinda won the Booker Prize in 1988, Peter Carey's third novel and his first win, after being shortlisted in 1985 for Illywhacker. It also took the Miles Franklin Award, Australia's most important literary prize, the following year.
Carey won the Booker again in 2001 for True History of the Kelly Gang, putting him in the very small group of double winners alongside J.M. Coetzee and, later, Hilary Mantel and Margaret Atwood.
The novel arrived in 1988, the bicentenary of European settlement in Australia, a year of official celebration and considerable protest, and its treatment of what the colonial project actually did upriver was read directly against that. Gillian Armstrong filmed it in 1997 with Ralph Fiennes and Cate Blanchett.