Theft: A Love Story

Categories: Fiction

I read Peter Carey's Jack Maggs years ago.  That great, fiendishly ebullient Dickensian riff is still my favorite of his many splendid novels, but here's another one that will grab you by the throat, slam you in your seat, and keep you there cover to cover.

Theft:  A Love Story is the tale of Michael "Butcher" Bones, a brilliant painter who has sabotaged his own career by his drinking, his scorching impatience with the Australian art scene, and a short stint in jail for ignoring the divorce court orders that keep him from his son and turned his works into his ex-wife's property. 

Now Butcher is living in a patron's backcountry house, reducing it to a shambles as he works, and looking after his big, thick brother, Hugh.  Into their lives walks gorgeous Marlene, who is attempting to reach the house on the next farm, where there's a painting by her father-in-law, the late, great Jacques Liebovitz. 

Butcher can resist neither the alluring woman nor the lure of Liebovitz's name, because an illustration of one of Liebovitz's works was one of the things that drew this outback butcher's son into art as a boy. 

Soon, Marlene has him entangled in a grand, continent-hopping scheme to display his own new work (perhaps some of his best), look after her interests as one of Liebovitz's heirs, and--well, possibly assist in art crime on an international scale. 

The novel is narrated alternately by Butcher and by Hugh.  Though Hugh is clearly not quite right somehow, his skewed but ominously prophetic rants reveal much that the obsessed Butcher doesn't see about Marlene and what she has them involved in.

A gloriously masterful exercise in unreliable narration, Theft careens through Carey's usual territory of obsession, passion, artistry, and fakery.  Readers will savor the zest, the humor, the psychological insight, and the sheer originality of this latest work of art