It was 1997. Peter Carey was the ballsy Australian author who, having already won the Brits’ biggest literature prize (the Booker) and shrugged off any shred of colonial insecurity, saw fit to reimagine one of the greatest works of English literature – Great Expectations by Charles Dickens – from the perspective of an Australian convict.
A year later, Jack Maggs won the Commonwealth prize – but it wasn’t until he was at the ceremony that Carey, a vocal republican, learned that his prize included a meeting with Queen Elizabeth II.
Carey felt mixed emotions. “She was the fucking queen, on one hand,” he says now. “On the other, I thought she was a relic.”
Carey didn’t say no but he’d didn’t say yes, either: he tried to buy time, telling the organisers he wanted to consult friends in Australia “to see if this would play badly”. The organisers decided it was best to say he was busy: “They said some bullshit on their press release about me having other commitments but the journalists there knew this wasn’t the case.”
The tabloids lost their rag; the Evening Standard branded him a “chippy Antipodean” and “militant”. Carey wasn’t fussed “but there were a lot of people around me … who were rather exercised that I should make things right with the palace. So I wrote a letter to the palace in which I said I was sure that if anybody was imprisoning the Australian people, it was the Australian people – and that if we wanted to be a republic, I was sure her majesty would not send a gunboat.”
Peace restored, Carey went to the palace. He admits he was intimidated: “I was a little boy who had sat there cutting the crown jewels out of the Melbourne Argus, listening to the coronation on shortwave radio.”
And Elizabeth II said (best read in Carey’s chilly impersonation): “I believe you had some difficulty getting here.”
In Great Expectations, Abel Magwitch is a petty criminal who has a fateful encounter with our orphan narrator, Pip, before he is shipped off to a penal colony in New South Wales. Carey recognised the streak of post-colonial inferiority in Magwitch: an Englishman forcibly made Australian, who – despite finding freedom and riches in his new home – still longs to be a member of the class that has tortured him. So he becomes Pip’s anonymous benefactor, sending him money for years before travelling to London, at the risk of capture and death, to set eyes on the little English gentleman he has created.
Maggs is Carey’s version of Magwitch; in the novel he becomes a source of inspiration for an author, Tobias Oates – a thinly disguised young Dickens. Jack Maggs (or Peter Carey’s Great Extrapolations, as every review at the time joked) opens with its namesake’s return to London, his silver-topped cane tapping as he walks across Westminster Bridge. He is, in Carey’s words, “the Australian who would be proud to spill his blood for empire at Gallipoli, or vote against a constitutional republic”.
Carey regards Magwitch/Maggs’ decision to return to Britain as “such an Australian choice”. “He’s freed, he’s rich, he’s manufactured a gentleman at long distance. And at risk to his life, he wants to go back. And, whenever there’s a referendum, I think of that.”
Jack Maggs has just premiered on stage courtesy of State Theatre Company South Australia, with Mark Saturno in the titular role. Carey hasn’t had any involvement bar reading the script by the playwright Samuel Adamson, which he thinks is “really terrific”. “It wasn’t a tedious and literal interpretation of what I’d written,” he says. “It felt free and energetic and seemed like it might be fun.”
This is the level of involvement authors should have in adaptations, he says: “No matter how much they like might like to, or think they can, they are never going to be able to control what happens. The minute you give the rights to somebody else, it’s theirs.”
Carey opened Jack Maggs again recently. “It becomes like something somebody else wrote, or something that that you wrote when you were mad or drunk. But I did think, ‘My God, this is good.’ Writing a novel takes you so far beyond yourself and what you know and who you are, that you find yourself dragging things out of the dark. Where you get to at the end is so far removed from who you are that it is like someone else wrote it.”
He once thought of Jack Maggs as a book he’d written for Australians. “But if I think about it in its broadest political sense, I was writing it for the Commonwealth,” he says. “The people in London really didn’t get it. I mean, they got Dickens. But there is a thing in the heart of it that, if you are from the Commonwealth, you understand.”
Part of what he means is the familial, if not always pleasant, relationship Britain has with her former subjects. He remembers catching a taxi in London to go to the Booker prize ceremony: “The taxi driver heard my accent and says, ‘Come here for the culture, have you?’ And I said, ‘Well, actually, I’m exporting some to you.’ He said, ‘Oh yeah – Neighbours?’ So he had his little laugh. Then a block or two later, he says, ‘So, you got the marks on your ankles?’ And he meant from the shackles that convicts wore.”
Although he has lived in New York since 1990, Carey still refers to Australia as “home”. Does he miss it? “I hesitate to use the word homesick – I feel love, irritation, all the things that you feel when you’re with your family.”
He is no longer involved in Australia’s republican movement; over the last year he has become “very news-averse, and I wonder why” he says drily. But he did see Lidia Thorpe’s showdown with Charles III. “And there’s been major change since, I’m sure,” he says, sarcastically.
Does he think Australia will ever become a republic? “It’s become hard to imagine when the left in politics doesn’t have the political will to do it,” he says. “I don’t know. The Australian people seem to be much more interested in becoming another state of the United States.”
Speaking of – what did he think of the US election result? “Fuck off,” he says cheerfully.
Is he working on another book? “I’d say fuck off again but not with quite the same spirit,” he laughs. “I’m a writer. If I’m not writing, I’m no one.”
State Theatre Company South Australia’s production of Jack Maggs is at the Dunstan Playhouse, Adelaide festival centre, until 30 November, then the Playhouse, Canberra Theatre Centre 5-7 December
