Peter Carey's A Long Way from Home is a fine addition to his impressive canon

Peter Carey's A Long Way from Home finally found its way to the top of my list of books to read. Only three or fours years late. And a good choice it was too.

It follows the Redex Trial, a brutal round-Australia car race in the mid-1950s. But more importantly it follows a three-person driving team who were thrown together by fate, apparently: Titch Bobs (aka Bobst, aka Bobsey), a lively diminutive figure, perennially in thrall to his competitive and domineering father; Irene, his wife, a strong but secretly sensitive woman, in a rigid colonial society where women just did not wear overalls and drive souped-up vehicles in harsh and savage conditions; and Willie, a neighbour and schoolteacher with no prior car experience, who always thought he was just a regular white guy from Bacchus Marsh, near Melbourne, Victoria, but who finds, as the race progresses into more obscure, Aborigine-dominated reaches of the country, that he is actually of mixed race (or "half-caste", in the argot of the time), and had been adopted out at an early age.

Gradually, Willie's story becomes the dominant one, as he finds himself involuntarily dragged into strange and unexpected circumstances, and steadily learns more about his own surprising back-story. As it progresses, the plot becomes less about a race, and more about race.

Carey writes in a sing-song, slightly elliptical style, redolent of the time and place, and peppered with the local vernacular ("mulga", "jila", "chooks", "blackfellah", "tucker", "nong", "wowser"). A couple of random examples from early in the book:

"Mister must have been five foot two and she even smaller. Missus's hair was so tousled and curling she might have been, had not all the other evidence been so much to the contrary, a boy. Her husband's complexion was smooth and glowing, he could have been a girl."

"He was not a big boy but he had mass. He squirmed and flapped and I felt the horror of my relentless dreams which were peopled not only by snakes but creatures like possums that would end up being born as children if I did not kill them. The rivers in my dreams were filled with fish which broke apart like wet cardboard. I often skeepwalked, but in my classroom I was wide awake, dangling a pupil out my window. There was no precedent for this except the unexpected fit that had me leave my marriage."

It's a relatively easy read in general, but compelling and interesting, as it teases apart colonial attitudes and the very different vibe of Australia's indigenous people. You can see why Carey is one of the rarefied few to have won the Booker Prize twice, and why I read every new book he produces (eventually!)