Book Review: OSCAR & LUCINDA by Peter Carey

Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"It was all born out of habits of mind produced by Christianity: that if you sacrificed yourself you would somehow attain the object of your desires. It was a knife of an idea, a cruel instrument of sacrifice, but also one of great beauty, silvery, curved, dancing with light."

Believe me when I tell you that OSCAR & LUCINDA is a fitting book for Holy Week.

It's a theological / sociological treatise masquerading as a love story (sharp eyes will note I didn't promise a happy ending by using the term "romance").

If that turned you off the book... it shouldn't!

Perhaps I should begin again and say that this is now one of my favorite books OF ALL TIME. I LOVE books that are more than what they seem. O&L is such a book that makes fun of the invention of genre. Philosophy abounds in its dialogues on the nature of God, religion's role in shaping a nation, and it MUST be said that it is also a very feminist book indeed! But this is feminism done right, with none of the toxicity that is to be found in so-called feminist novels nowadays (pure rage, little reason and even less art) and all of the righteousness, and from a male author, too!

"And where is the church on which account so much blood has been spilt?"

It is the middle of the 19th century. Oscar is born to a religious father in England, but finds no joy in his father's house, and is adopted by a poor Anglican minister instead. Lucinda is raised in Australia and is orphaned, left with a fortune she feels guilty for inheriting and a deep longing for companionship that her circumstances prevent her from getting.

Both of them turn to gambling, Oscar to raise funds and Lucinda to rid herself of blood money. In author Peter Carey's hands, metaphors take on epic proportions as gambling is likened to the everlasting gamble souls take when betting on a certain religious denomination, and glass is held to be a symbol of civilization, of the quest to purify souls and magnify the Lord's light, both mirror and window.

In love, and in madness, they bet their destinies and fortunes on one mad scheme: to bring a glass church to the absolute edge of the Antipodes and western civilization.

"Churches are not carried by choirboys. Neither has the Empire been built by angels."

I know now why it became a movie (Ralph Fiennes and Cate Blanchett), and why it was even turned into an opera in 2019. (I have seen neither, and probably never will, just because the book tore me up so much!)

The characters are so vivid in my mind, so real, that I truly mourn the ending of the book, and I wish I could reread it for the first time again. And I know I will, if only to exult in Peter Carey's prose, peppered with nouns and adjectives of his native Australia, casting a critical eye on the white cleric's role in its bloody colonial history.

It's so hard to choose another book after reading one that exceeds the maximum five-star rating! Hmmm maybe I should go for the second novel of Carey's that also won a Booker Prize, hehe.

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