There are two kinds of art theft. The first is represented on the dust jacket of Peter Carey's new novel, the gun-waving, tie-up-the-guards heist kind that most recently occurred in Norway at the cost of two Edvard Munchs. Then there's the sort committed by Michael "Butcher" Boone, painter and main character of the novel, that of intellectual larceny, the unaccredited expropriation of a style, a subject, a brushstroke, even a color—in short, artistic identity theft.
Heists are exciting but, pace The Thomas Crown Affair, morally cut and dry affairs: A bunch of thugs with a bunch of weapons forever vanish a great work into some black-market collector's attic for a bunch of money. Theft has this element, but it also has the copying of ideas, a much thornier dilemma. How do you draw the line between influence and plagiary? What is acceptable subconscious "internalizing" (to use Kaavya Viswanathan's laughably unpersuasive excuse) and what is plain pickpocketing? When is stealing stealing?
If Carey seems inordinately interested in artistic fraud, he's really just keeping up with the news. His previous novel, My Life as a Fake, is a fictionalization of one of literature's all-time great hoaxes. This was the invention of a poet named Ern Malley by two Australians in the 1940s. The perps believed that the modernism movement had become abstruse, contrived, and wrongheaded; therefore, they schemed up poems under Malley's name they knew the modernist leaders—in particular an editor named Max Harris—would eat with a spoon. Harris loved the poems, Malley became renowned and then the hoax was unmasked and Harris was disgraced.
But the curious thing, which Carey dove upon in My Life as a Fake, was that Harris refused to stop touting Malley's greatness even after he learned that Malley did not, in fact, exist. Sheer pig-headedness, or are those poems, written under totally false pretenses, actually valid as works of art?
"Butcher" Boone, in Theft, is not originally a fake as a painter at all—this is part of the reason he has such a struggle making a living. Paroled from prison, removed from his wife and children by a restraining order and saddled with the care of his mentally-challenged brother, Hugh, Boone lives and paints at the mercy of a philistine patron who lends Boone a country house in New South Wales with the expectation of great art at minimal fuss. The art happens, but so does trouble. After Hugh has a violent outburst in town (the root cause of the restraining order), the Boones are evicted. What's worse, Boone falls under the suspicion of the Art Police—there's a real agency just for art crimes—for the burglary of an original Jacques Leibovitz, a Carey creation who maybe resembles Matisse or Roualt.
Having painted his masterpieces and in the process become nearly homeless, Boone meets Marlene Leibovitz. Marlene is the daughter-in-law of the great painter, and she and her husband possess the Leibovitz droit moral—that is, the authority to declare whether or not a found painting thought to be his is genuine or fake. Marlene had certified the veracity of the stolen Leibovitz just before it was burgled. But instead of heaping further accusations on Boone, she becomes for him what every artist can only dream of: a beautiful lover who also has incredible gallery connections. And she's good with Hugh.
Thus commences the love story of the subtitle, and it's a breathless one, with Boone protesting a bit too much, in raptures rather too swear-word-filled, about its blinding effect on him. This from a man, Carey slyly points out, whose job it is to see better than the rest of us. What he misses is that Marlene's involvement with the stolen painting was more than concerned curiosity. The droit moral is a formidable possession, conferring the alchemical power to turn a junky canvas into gold. A great painter like Boone is another good tool to have on hand. Half to please his love and half for the challenge, Boone decides to paint almost from scratch a lost Leibovitz called "Le Golem Electrique." The painting was praised, described, and pictured by the art critics of its time, so there's no disputing its existence. And if Boone can credibly replicate Liebowitz, and Marlene can credibly concoct a story of the "Golem's" salvaging, they'll own one of the most valuable paintings in the world.
Painting scenes bookend Theft—Boone's real masterpieces and then the counterfeit Leibovitz—and they are really the strongest parts in the novel; I can't think of many recent books that describe the process of painting half as well (although Jonathan Wilson's A Palestine Affair was also very good on this score). Carey writes a wild, rampageous prose, and from his pen painting is intense and kinetic work. This early passage is about his piece "If You Have Ever Seen a Man Die":
I did not wish to start. I scoured the blades with wire wool until they were burnished and then I screwed up my eyes and plunged the whirling shaft into the heart of Mars black, carbon black, graphite, 240 volts, 100 r.p.m., phthalo green with alizarin crimson and I had started. I was in. I shook the drips off that last mix, what a very cold light-sucking black was lying there, a lovely evil thing captive in a can. At its nasty little heart was alizarin crimson. I could already calculate how I would edge those shapes as yet unborn.
The counterfeiting of "Le Golem Electrique" elevates Boone into the same muscular reverie as his original work does: "As I worked on my sketches I discovered and then adopted the mad joy in the Golem. He had an electric-light globe burning on his shoulder and blazing blue eyes, spheres of cobalt blue." So the wonderful complication of Theft is created: Is Boone's Golem an "adoption" or a forgery, is it his or Leibovitz's, and what should he do with the thing?
Such complications, combined with the occult maneuverings of underground art skullduggery, make for a labyrinthine and frequently ingenious story. But Carey has chosen to further, and to my mind gratuitously, entangle his plot with the insertion of a second narrator, and not just any second narrator but Hugh Boone, whose perplexing disability throws an outer coat of nonsense over much of the proceedings.
With his bighearted love of children and animals but his propensity for accidental violence, Hugh is a slightly smarter version of Lenny from Of Mice and Men. Subconscious influence or overt (though of course allowable) rip-off on Carey's part? In a book about truth and phoniness, Hugh seems to me to be, artistically speaking, bogus. Rate the following sentence, wherein he describes Marlene's eyes: "You never saw such blue—hair threads of ultramarine, the blues of an opal, bless us, arranged in the pattern of an eye." Sounds more like something a painter would say, doesn't it? Which is no doubt why Carey jams in the little locution "bless us," to make it more, you know, idiot savant-ish. Hugh also sprinkles his narrative with words in ALL CAPITAL LETTERS for, it is very pointedly explained, no reason at all. He is intended to offer an illuminating perspective on Boone and Marlene—Hugh sees through their fraud at once—but all his blundering and ranting and self-pitying gets tiresome immediately. Carey has won nearly every writing award an Australian can win, including two Booker Prizes, and it is very strange that he would compromise his story with such a clunking cliché as Hugh, one of those derivative characters you only find in books.
Hugh becomes doubly distracting as the book progresses. Marlene, though likable, is hard to swallow as a character too—some of her criminal feats require not only sociopathic tendencies, but a superhero derring-do that Carey conveniently leaves to our imagination. But when her elaborate connivances collide with Hugh's subplot, we get an ending that is almost completely implausible. Fake is another word that comes to mind.
So these are some fairly large rents in Theft's canvas. Yet even those parts of the novel that are unconvincing are readable because they are vitalized by Carey's natural élan and intelligence. His writing is alive; and just as we would say for Michael Boone, we can say of Peter Carey that he creates with an energy and passion that can't be stolen from anyone.