when frankenstein is combined with an uproar true story

When Frankenstein is Combined with an Uproar True Story

A Review on Peter Carey’s My Life As A Fake

If you are a writer, or a director, or a comic strip artist, or whoever person involves in a process of making an imagery character to live up the story you’re making, have you ever thought, or imagined, that somewhere, somehow, your imagery character is happened to be a true and a real authentic person, living up his or her life on her daily ordinary life which is precisely the same as the one you’ve designed through your story?

Knowing the sudden fact that your inventions had somehow became reality would probably makes your minds fill up with enough eeriness and strange sensations. Now, let’s imagine that your supposedly-imagery character then turns out to be your stalker, one that haunt you with lots of questions and follows you wherever you go, unquestionably it will freak you out!

Those dreadful premises probably were the one trigger Peter Carey to write this book. Having the Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein note on his first page, Carey underlines the fear of creating a real monster through your imagination that will someday then pursuit and ruin your life, in which he splendidly describe and transform to this appealing novel.

Actually, Carey did more than just describing the fear inspired by Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. He combined it with an uproar true-story based incident happened in Australia in 1944, where an imagery poet was invented by some other poets to trick or to make fool one editor of a magazine called ‘Angry Penguins’. The imagery poet was named Ern Malley, whose poems was so fascinated the editor of that magazine, named Max Harris, who afterward recalled Malley as someone so brilliant that even at the time when he finally found out that Ern Malley was only a hoax made to humiliate him; he still believed that Malley was somewhere out there, alive and breathing.

In My Life as A Fake, Carey transforms the hoax in the form of fraud character made by Christopher Chubb to treat a lesson to David Weiss, an editor of a poetry magazine, who is envied by Chubb. The hoax character invented by Chubb was named Bob McCorcle, and it’s successfully tricked Weiss whom then publish the hoax and grant the poems made by McCorcle, in this case is Chubb as the inventor. Later on, because Weiss publish that poem, he then fell into an accusation of exposing obscenity and has to be trial in court. Suffer from the humiliation, Weiss was reported killed himself after the court.

Interestingly, and fruitfully unique, Peter Carey dissolve that inspired-from-a-true-story element with the fear of having created a monster inspired by Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. As the story flows, surprisingly Chubb was shocked by the fact that there’s this man, described with disturbing giant figure and big forehead, which came and claimed himself as the real Bob McCorcle. The sudden appearance of the real Bob McCorcle was said to be the real cause of Weiss’ death, and much more than that, he turned out to be a stalker to Chubb’s life and even had ruined his life for fifteen years, as well as being the perpetrator of his daughter’s kidnapping which involved him in a long yet interesting pursuit adventure in the Malay and Indonesian jungle. As a result, Carey had invented an attention-grabbing story full of unusual ideas and interesting descriptions about the Malay-Indonesian culture here and there. He even makes Chubb’s dialogue so singlish that I found it as one other thing that would make this novel is considered favorable.

Another thing unique from this novel is the existence of a character named Sarah Douglass, an editor of London poetry magazine, who acts as a narrator in this story. She tries to writes the story of Chubb and his becoming-real invention, Bob McCorcle. But Sarah is not only functioned as a narrator, she too has her own story which later on revealed as the story flows. In where later on the reader would probably see her life as what is referred by this novel’s title; My Life as A Fake. Whose life as a fake anyway? Well, it could be Chubb’s, McCorcle’s, Sarah’s or even all of them.

With those unique, intense and strong plot which drag the reader’s question even until the last page and the appealing description of Malay and Indonesian culture here and there, this novel is so worth reading. The only flaw contained in this novel is probably the method of no punctuations used by Carey. It might considered unique at first, but as the story flows and becoming more complex, especially at the time when Sarah’s acting as a narrator of a story narrate by Chubb, the punctuationless makes the story rather difficult to understand because the readers are often forced to figure out who’s saying who. However, aside from that, for those of you who seek for good book with touch of unique culture in it, you won’t find any regret reading this book.