Faber £16.99 pp256

Peter Carey’s marvellously enjoyable new novel is — like his last — preoccupied with themes of artifice and deceit, so it’s good to record that he has once more written the real thing. “Butcher” Bones, an Australian painter, has been abandoned by fame and by his wife, and now lives in remote New South Wales, caring for a patron’s house and for his vast, damaged brother Hugh. The arrival of Marlene one stormy night involves him in a plot far too elaborate to summarise. It involves art theft, intricate questions of authenticity and travel to Tokyo and New York.

Butcher tells half the story. His voice is forceful and convincing — comic, observant, contemptuous, exasperating and raucously honest, often all at once. Above all, he conveys the furious energy of his commitment to painting, revelling in the mixing of colours, working with hand, eye, body and breath in tormented but successful harmony. His creativity is as uncompromised as that of Van Gogh who was “as mad as a toilet brush”. Even when faking another artist’s work, “a crossword puzzle built on chemistry and chronology”, he is his own man.

Hugh is the other narrator, a farting idiot savant with a terrible haircut and a tendency to break people’s fingers. His language is extraordinary: chunky, apocalyptic, breathless, full of explosive capital letters like a vorticist manifesto, stuffed with solecisms, inadvertent puns, eschatological riffs, prayers for dead animals, biblical cadences and memories of his mother. His constant allusions to the classic Australian children’s story The Magic Pudding are a wonderful invention. Hugh’s intuitive antithesis between Pudding Owners and Pudding Thieves seems as plausible as the ethics of many professional moralists. Paintings are stolen, recaptured, restored and transformed just like the Pudding itself.

The “love story” of the subtitle arises from Butcher’s unexpected passion for Marlene. At first, he sees her merely as an enemy, representing the despised world of art dealers. But even as her complex career as a faker unfolds — she’s also an Aussie, not the American she appears — he can’t ultimately resist the fact that she “made the same shape in the sonar of my feelings” as his estranged son. Her very dishonesty is erotic, and he kisses her “not because I was blind . . . but because I knew her”. This impassioned ambivalence is beautifully and subtly realised.

It relates directly to the book’s eloquent exploration of Australia itself. The Bones brothers are from Bacchus Marsh, an old town near Melbourne. The Marsh is a reference point, a habitation for hicks, a contrast to Megalopolis and a source of some of Butcher’s most poignant feelings as he lies beside Marlene evoking the air that “was smoky, waxy, like after Evensong, once upon a summer time”.

Butcher and Marlene “have been born walled out from art” and their “untidy hurtful lives” are an attempt to come to terms with that. What they share is an eye, the capacity not to read an exhibition catalogue but to “look as if your life depended on it”. This is not callow aestheticism but generous anger at an international business where dealers are larcenous, “the lowest of the low, beyond leniency”. Genuine art is made from “the limitation of the materials” but in Manhattan it’s made out of money. Butcher loves the way Marlene has managed to discover, through paintings, “the true wonder of bloody everything”.

The writing is full of sumptuous painterly effects, such as the “fat spill of tears” in Marlene’s eyelashes or the “rumpled shadows like Ingres” in her bedroom. Carey sets many challenges, expecting us to pick up scatological Australian idioms, hidden quotations from Bob Dylan, references to Clement Greenberg and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. He has earned the right to do so. There is a flow of comic incident as the story withholds what it shows and winds around itself under the author’s blissful control. Readers can gratefully share both his high seriousness and his exhilaration.

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