Peter Carey's Jack Maggs is cleverly plotted and ingeniously peopled but also a bit pointless. The titular Maggs is an Australian convict who, having made good there, illegally returns to England to meet the young man (Henry Phipps) for whom he has been a mysterious benefactor. (If this description sounds familiar, it's because Jack Maggs is a reimagining of the story of Magwitch in Charles Dickens's Great Expectations, one of my favorite books ever.) Instead of finding Phipps--who is mysteriously absent--Maggs becomes a footman for his protege's neighbor, Percy Buckle, a former grocer who chanced upon a sizeable inheritance. The rest of the book concerns Maggs's search for the object of his affection; Buckle's relationship with his new tenant and employee; and the fascination of Tobias Oates, a writer friend of Buckle's, with Maggs's dark history and odd emotions.

I'm not sure why this book never quite grabbed my attention. It has colorful, complex, evolving characters in a vibrant setting. It's written well. It has a most definite plot (indeed, several of them). It even says plenty of interesting things, not only about Great Expectations--which it inverts in many particulars--but also about the corrupting influence of jealousy, the artist as a thief of others' lives (Oates is, I think, a Dickens analogue), the nature of human decency, and love.

But I just never got into it. I appreciate the novel only with clinical detachment, and I'm not sure why. I guess I never bought the central relationship of the novel, which is Maggs's bond (or imagined bond) with Phipps. That relationship was very affecting in Great Expectations, but Carey doesn't seem to have gone through the effort of reestablishing the basis for Maggs's obsession here. Indeed, this may be a more general objection: for all the color in Jack Maggs's characters, their relationships seem pretty pallid, so that when those relationships founder or break or succeed it doesn't seem like that big of a deal. The story, too, while full of action, seems half-hearted. People did stuff; stuff happened; I yawned. It doesn't help that the novel sometimes goes off at length on what I considered weird little tangents (e.g., Oates's obsession with mesmerism, and Maggs's "Phantom") and that Carey is not always very forthcoming about what is going on (e.g., with Maggs's nightly visits to Phipps's house). Perhaps my confusion contributed to my distance.

But this is all somewhat speculative: I don't really have strong feelings about any of these criticisms, just as I don't have strong feelings about the book as a whole. Maybe Jack Maggs just paled in comparison to A Thousand Acres, the book I read just before it. Or maybe random personal factors conspired to rob me of any real enjoyment of this book. (I read most of it during two very long bus rides in Spain.) All I know is that when I finished the book, I didn't feel as though I'd wasted my time, but I didn't think I'd gotten much out of it either.

Copyright © 2005 Steven Wu