Australian novelist Carey’s The True History of the Kelly Gang was an inventive explosion of the myth of outlaw national hero Ned Kelly. He continues pulling at the loose, frayed edges of legend in Fake, a tale that plays off a real-life scandalous Aussie literary hoax. Carey’s con artist, Chubb, forges the life’s work of a fictitious working-class poet named Bob McCorkle to humiliate a rival. But things go terribly wrong. The rival winds up dead, and then … McCorkle shows up. Conjured out of thin air, apparently, by some unknowing magic of Chubb’s. He’s a tough, leathery creature who makes growly threats out of lines like “he’d never tangled with a poet before.” And he’s quite irritated with his creator. It’s a thematic shift not unlike what Charlie Kaufman did in the last act of the film Adaptation—suddenly, Carey’s story is a weird echo of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and an exploration of self-destruction and literary invention. Like Adaptation, Fake loses punch by never resolving the story it started telling, and that lack of cohesiveness makes the book feel about fifty pages overlong. Still, it’s an engaging and recommended read.
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