#A LONG WAY FROM HOME PETER CAREY TRIAL#
When the Bobs enter the Redex Trial - in a bid to become famous and boost car sales - they convince Bachhuber, who has been fired from his job after an unfortunate incident with a student, to join them as their navigator. The pair are neighbours and strike up an unlikely friendship.
Those characters are Irene Bobs, a headstrong woman who is married to the best car salesman (a short man called Titch) in the whole of south-eastern Australia, and Willie Bachhuber, a tall, lanky teacher who’s ruling the airwaves as a quiz show king on a national radio programme. (Occasionally, it has to be said, this is confusing, especially if you’ve put the book down and then come back to it and can’t remember which character is telling their side of the story their voices don’t feel sufficiently different to be able to distinguish them easily.) The story, set in the early 1950s, is told in the first person from two different characters’ points of view in alternating chapters. This novel - his 14th - is based very much on the Redex Trial and focuses on a trio of eccentric characters that enter the event before it morphs into an intriguing exploration of a different kind of race - that of white Australia’s crimes against its indigenous population.
#A LONG WAY FROM HOME PETER CAREY DRIVERS#
He largely spoke about the background behind the novel, which is based on the Redex Australia Trial, a road rally dating from 1953 that circumnavigated Australia and was open to pro and amateur drivers in unmodified cars unsuited to the tough terrain.Ĭarey’s own family ran a Holden car dealership in Bacchus Marsh, the country town where he is from, so he shared a lot of funny tales about cars and this particular rally, which he followed obsessively as a young boy - among other topics, including politics, travel, writing and why he’d waited so long to write about Australia’s indigenous history. It was an entertaining evening - albeit very, very cold (even with the heating on, the church was akin to sitting in a giant refrigerator and after an hour in the pews I could barely feel my feet because they’d turned numb with the cold). It was essentially the Irish launch of his latest novel, A Long Way from Home, which has since been longlisted for the 2018 Miles Franklin Literary Award. Fiction – paperback Faber & Faber 336 pages 2018.Įarlier this year, in the depths of winter, I went to Dublin for a long weekend, specifically to see Peter Carey in conversation with Joseph O’Connor at the “Pepper Canister Church” on Upper Mount Street.
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