Bliss

It’s no surprise that Peter Carey’s debut novel Bliss (one of last year’s Faber Firsts books) should offer, almost three decades later, such exhilarating source material for the new Australian opera, which closed this year’s Edinburgh International Festival. The many talents of Carey, Brett Dean (score), Amanda Holden (words) and a fine cast and orchestra combined for a production that triumphed with critics.

It’s no surprise because, over a 30-year writing career, Peter Carey’s writing has always been inventive, energetic, completely original and darkly funny. Carey is a brilliant literary ventriloquist – crisis ridden ad exec Harry Joy in Bliss, wild Australian outlaw Ned Kelly in True History of the Kelly Gang, the Dickensian Jack Maggs, the 139-year-old ‘Illywhacker’ Herbert Badgery, the twin voices of Butcher Bones and damaged brother Hugh in Theft: A Love Story. Now, with the Booker-shortlisted Parrot and Olivier in America, Carey inhabits the master (based on Alexis de Tocqueville) and servant as they flee Europe and head towards the New World across the Atlantic.

The Man Booker Prize 2010 Shortlist

‘Parrot and Olivier in America was such a long and risky journey, this makes me feel like I’ve reached the shore I dreamed of finding. What great news to wake up to.’ - Peter Carey

Parrot and Olivier

Peter Carey will make literary history on October 12th if Parrot and Olivier in America wins this year’s Man Booker Prize – he’d become the first author to win this most prestigious award three times. He’s already – along with J. M. Coetzee – one of only two double-winners.

But he faces stiff competition: Andrea Levy, Howard Jacobson, Damon Galgut, Emma Donoghue and Tom McCarthy have written equally brilliant books. Our fingers are crossed.

See also:

Peter Carey Video Interview with the Wheeler Centre, Melbourne

Q & A with Peter Carey

Peter Carey at the Sydney Writers’ Festival (Video)

The Faber Podcast with Peter Carey (Audio)

www.petercareybooks.com

Paul Dirac: The Strangest Man

It’s very rare for a science book to win the Costa (or Whitbread as it used to be) Biography Award, but that’s just what Graham Farmelo’s The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac has done this year. The Costa judges said, ‘The extraordinary mind and achievements of Britain’s Einstein are rendered here in the most compelling biography of the year.’ Just as significantly, the reviewers at Physics World named it their book of the year for 2009, though they stressed that you don’t need to be a professional physicist, academic or boffin to understand it and enjoy it. That’s one of the skills of a great biographer – to make a subject available beyond its core audience.

Paul Dirac was one of the pioneers of quantum physics, perhaps the greatest theoretical physicist since Isaac Newton, and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1933. Yet little was known about him – his genius went largely unrecognised – largely because of Dirac’s reticence.

Graham Farmelo’s book is a welcome reminder – or an introduction – to an icon of modern thought. Our interview with Farmelo (recorded in January last year) is well worth a listen.