Oscar and Lucinda

I find myself in the awkward position again of having no idea how to start my blog.  I’m not sure what I want to say about Oscar and Lucinda.  I enjoyed parts of it and parts of it I knew, objectively, while reading them were good.  But reading isn’t an objective thing and I found it so difficult to connect with or care about.  At times it felt like watching an episode of Who Do You Think You Are? starring a celebrity I’d never heard of.  It’s a story about another family’s unbelievable family legends and their gambling problems.

I went into this book knowing nothing about it that I hadn’t read in the blurb.  The blurb promises a story of an heiress and a vicar who love each other but can’t be together.  Also they both gamble.  I had no idea that Peter Carey is Australian so went into the thing expecting swooning maidens and meaningful gazes across a game of bridge; all the while making sure local gossip Mrs Miggins doesn’t catch wind of the mutual longing.  I thought there would be talk of Oscar being below Lucinda’s station.  Turns out, Australia didn’t really go in for all that shit; it’s set in the 1880s and the pair end up living together while unmarried.  Lucinda gives precisely zero fucks about the gossip this causes.  And as much as I want to like her, I can’t.  I spent most of the book feeling utterly disconnected from everything that happens in Australia.

The story’s told from the point of view of one of Oscar’s descendants.  The narrator turns Oscar into a thing of legend.  It’s told like a tale that’s been passed down through the generations.  Or it sort of is.  The narrator’s simultaneously omnipotent and a character involved in the tale.  He knows things that it’s impossible to know and so when he occasionally refers to Oscar as “my great-great-grandfather,” it’s jarring.  It takes you out of the story because the book is neither one thing nor another.  We get to know Oscar too well for him to be a real thing of legend.

I get what Carey’s doing through most of the book.  It’s about chance.  The whole plot hinges on gambling multiple times.  Oscar only leaves England for Australia because of the flip of a coin and he leaves Lucinda on a fool’s bet.  She bets him, in a plot development that sounds like one of those drunken bets Dave Gorman used to take, that he can’t transport a glass church 400 km along the Australian coast.  Naturally, Oscar takes this bet because he is an addict.  This I accept.  It’s mostly the concept of a glass church that I take umbrage with.  It’s-well- stupid.  It detracts from the rest of the book because of its ridiculousness.  

Oscar and Lucinda isn’t a bad book.  I think all my problems with it come down, again, to my expectations of the novel verses the reality of the book.  I know that I’ve said time and time again that the trick to really enjoying a book is to go in without any expectations.  I’m just beginning to think that this can only be achieved by not even reading the blurb… 

My read is Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion.  I haven’t read anything by her for years, so I’m looking getting back into her.