Peter Carey

This concise introductory study showcases Carey's storytelling talents. Carey's success, in Australia and elsewhere, owes much to his ability to lure his readers into a world at once familiar and fantastic. Carey's fictions are products of the dream factories of twentieth century corporate capitalism. He debunks the utopian myths of western consumer culture, revealing beneath New Age cant the brutal worship of wealth and power. The world of which they speak is less exotic than grotesque but it is not, for all that, irredeemable. Huggan argues that Carey's fictions present both a satire on destructive material values and a defence of the right to change, to invent new pasts and futures.