Talk to Oscar and Lucinda like its author wrote you back.
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What it argues
Oscar Hopkins is an English Anglican minister with a gambling compulsion and a terror of almost everything. Lucinda Leplastrier is a young Australian woman who owns a glass factory and gambles obsessively herself. They meet on a ship, fall into something that is not quite love, and become entangled in a bet that will define and destroy them: Oscar will transport a prefabricated glass church through the Australian wilderness to a remote mission.
Beneath the plot — which is genuinely strange and comic — Carey is writing about faith and doubt in Victorian England and colonial Australia, about how institutions and individuals enact violence while believing themselves to be doing good, and about the particular madness of gambling as a way of communicating with God. Oscar and Lucinda both use games of chance as theology: if God runs the universe, then chance is His language, and to gamble is to ask Him questions directly. This is not presented as wisdom but as damage, and the damage has consequences.
What it gets right
- 1.
Gambling in the novel is a theological act — both Oscar and Lucinda treat games of chance as a way of communicating with and submitting to divine will.
- 2.
The glass church is one of literary fiction's great central images: beautiful, impossible, fragile, and designed to bring light to a place it will instead damage.
- 3.
Carey shows how colonial piety and good intentions can generate devastation — Oscar is not malicious, but his mission ends in death and dispossession.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Peter Carey is an Australian novelist born in Bacchus Marsh, Victoria, in 1943. He is one of only four writers to have won the Booker Prize twice, for Oscar and Lucinda (1988) and True History of the Kelly Gang (2001). His other major novels include Illywhacker (1985), Jack Maggs (1997), and Amnesia (2014). Carey lived in New York for many years after leaving Australia, and much of his later work examines Australian identity and colonial history from a position of expatriate distance. He is known for his technical ambition and his ability to inhabit historical voices.
