UR TV CAST

There is something curious – but very Vonnegutian – about this summer’s story of how a Chicago journalist’s newspaper column came to be mistaken for a university awards speech that the writer Kurt Vonnegut did not give. Not least because the odd tale quickly acquired mythical status, thanks to the Internet, a medium that has long attracted the antipathy of a man who otherwise seems the epitome of easy going. Despite its skilled construction, there are also some creaks in the plot It’s not Carey at his haunting best. But he hovers there benignly, an author who, when all’s done, will allow Tobias to go on and write The Death of Maggs without Maggs having to die, unhappy or before his time.. His Victorian London may be brooding and claustrophobic, with none of the light or poetry that shine from the New World of Oscar and Lucinda, but the manner of the telling is never gloomy It doesn’t have the leisure to be. The 91 chapters, and the three weeks they contain, zip past, hurrying us on towards an ending part-tragedy, part-melodrama, part-happy-ever-after.The cost of the frenetic pace is that we’re swept past depths and darkness that would have been worth pausing over, that the Carey of Illywhacker or Oscar and Lucinda would have wanted to explore.

Carey delights in Dickensianism and all its affectionate condescension, cartoon humour and broad farce. Jack Maggs, in this respect, becomes a kind of post- Marxist, post-colonialist, post-feminist remake of the Victorian novel.But if this is the intellectual framework, the texture is altogether less conscience-laden. Many themes in the book – mesmerism, master-servant relations, Tobias’s treatment of his sister-in-law, Buckle’s of Mercy Larkin – come into the same orbit, of power and abuse. Reading what Tobias has written about him, he feels cheated, pickpocketed, burnt alive.

So when he hurls Tobias’s notebook into the River Severn, it’s a kind of victory for the silenced and marginalised. He is writing his own story (of which we get generous extracts), and though paranoia and secrecy force him to write back to front and in invisible ink, the words are his. Tobias thinks he can use Maggs, because he’s colourful, criminal, larger than life; many writers – not just Dickens, not just other Victorians like Mayhew – have worked in the same way But Maggs refuses to be a Character in someone else’s story. Carey isn’t writing surrogate history or biography but asking questions about authorship, ownership and theft. But Thomas Hardy once complained of the “infinite mischief” in the “mixing of fact and fiction in unknown proportions”, and even the most postmodernist reader may be distracted occasionally by a dour Hardyesque voice asking questions about what exactly has been invented – and why.The why is the more interesting question.

As the two men go to Gloucester for an abortive and bloody meeting with the thief-taker, Tobias entrusts Maggs with his secret So far he has had the upper hand. But now, as Maggs puts it, they are “bogged” together, mired in mutual dependence like Pozzo and Lucky Soon they are literally manacled. As they return to London for the denouement, it is Maggs who has assumed control.Even those with a sketchy knowledge of Dickens will hear echoes of his life in Jack Maggs. Percy Buckle, at first protective of Maggs, because his own sister was transported, begins to regard him as a rival for Mercy’s affection There’s the constant fear he’ll be discovered and banished.