![]() ![]() ![]() One compared the effect to that of Ian McEwan's Atonement. The readers' willing surrender to the illusion that the protagonists were real people was shared by bloggers on the book club website. The canny exercise in post-modern narrative – with its framing narrative, its shifts of viewpoint, its allusiveness – seemed to many a rather traditional thing: a love story (albeit one in which the lovers do not meet for more than 200 pages). People loved the novel because they loved Oscar and Lucinda. "Emotional attachment" (as one reader put it) was exactly what many felt towards his leading characters. ![]() "You've got these people alive in your mind, I hope, but I haven't any more." He paused. ![]() "Years could go by without me thinking of Wardley-Fish," Carey answered drily. He spoke of the characters whose stories are incomplete, giving the example of the wonderful Wardley-Fish, who travels to Australia merely to find Oscar and manages to keep missing him. "Do you ever revisit the characters you create, in your mind?" asked one reader. How happy would Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax be together? It was evident from his discussion of Oscar and Lucinda at the Guardian book club that Peter Carey has no such attachment to the people he had invented. J ane Austen used to chat with family and friends about the afterlives of characters from her novels. ![]()
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