Sydney, and Australia even, have not been high on my hit-list of must-see places. Till now. Now Peter Carey's made me want to go. This is a thoroughly idiosyncratic take on the city. You won't read about its monuments or its foodie credentials. But you will have a take on its history and how it came from being home to the aboriginal people to a convict settlement, to a busy and often beautiful city on a stunning coastline. This via a series of escapades and conversations with groups of old friends there. It's pacey, funny, eccentric. Read it. ( )

Somewhat surprisingly, this was a nice introduction to a brief visit to Sydney. It offers a little history, a little memoir and plenty of colourful storytelling set in a wide variety of Sydney locations. Carey tells stories about people from his earlier life in Sydney, combined with a contemporary visit to some of the same people. His scenes range from the Blue Hills behind Sydney to the straits offshore, managing to cover most of the tourist highlights, such as a climb up the Sydney bridge, a tour of the opera house and the ferry ride to Manley beach. He even manages to fit in many memorable un-touristy incidents, such as an attempt to go protect his friend’s home from a fast-moving forest fire.
Among the more memorable stories are two different tales of fighting the wild seas of Sydney’s outer harbour and southeast coast down into Bass Strait. The unforeseen hazards show why earlier mariners avoided the southern oceans and failed to find Australia until 1770. Carey also illustrates the ignorance, privation and corruption suffered by the first convict Britons who were sent to establish a colonial presence in Australia.
He fills his stories with concrete details of the colours, sounds and natural features that make them quite realistic. By the time I got to Sydney, I was looking forward to visiting the places he describes, and felt I knew a lot about them.
Carey is a novelist of renown, although I haven’t read any of his books, so I was not surprised that he could write a good story. It made me wonder, though, how factual the stories are. Did he really go through those incidents with his friends, or are they reworked to make a better story? Or are they all the products of a creative imagination? Some stories seem to be clearly fantasies, such as the dreamlike midnight climb to conquer the Sydney bridge. The histories seem to be solidly based in fact. These are all good questions to have in mind reading any travelogue, and they might not have been so prominent in my mind if Carey had not been a novelist.
The concrete details and storytelling approach that Carey uses make a nice complement to David Day’s Claiming A Continent, which I read at the same time. ( )

This book has some stuff that is interesting to me, and then some of it I just couldn't wrap my head around so I skimmed over some chapters in a way like I almost gave up trying to figure out what they were about. I don't find it as gripping as I would like it to be, but some of those boating stories were a lot of fun to read. One of the reasons I read the book was for its Australian English, and I did get a dose of that. The writing isn't exactly boring, but I don't suppose this is one of Carey's better novels. And by reading this review you can tell that I feel average about this book. Even this review is nothing but indifferent. ( )

Peter Carey returns to Sydney, from New York, in 2001, specifically to write this book. He's got a plan, which mostly involves hanging out with old friends and chatting to them about Sydney, basing his book on the three Chinese elements of earth, air, fire and water, but he gets waylaid along the way.

Peter Carey's friends are all rich and powerful now, so the books started off hanging out in a swankier bit of Sydney than I usually hang out in, so at the beginning I was preferring his recollections of his slumming it in Balmain when he first arrived in Sydney as a young man to the "now" content of the book.

Actually, most of the best bits were the history: while bushfires are a yearly occurrence every Christmas, there was a particular fear to the bush fires that encircled Sydney in 1994 (I too remember the ask raining down in the middle of the CBD); comments about the original settlers and convicts (I really must read more of Sydney's history); the unknown Arthur Stace writing "Eternity" in beautiful copperplate script on the sidewalks of Sydney (before my time, but I remember being mesmerised by a copycat "Eternity" as a small child).

But he gets sent off track of his initial themes and ideas by an old friend of his who has fallen on hard times, who takes him down Parramatta Road (not a beautiful stretch of Sydney) to the Blue Mountains (a beautiful piece on the outskirts of Sydney), where he's currently living in a cave. Matter of fact, several of his friends refuse to play ball with his ideas. While I have a sneaking suspicion that this isn't all true (in Carey's Wrong About Japan, he also invented a character who was the most interesting bit of the book), it definitely improved on the earlier "isn't Sydney beautiful" phase, because, let's face it, not all of us wake up to Harbour views every morning.

And there's a rather strange bit where he keeps on arguing with De Selby, an architect in Flann O'Brien's great The Third Policeman. While intriguing, it definitely seemed a bizarre and unnecessary aspect to the book.

Overall, I rather enjoyed this, but he was making bits of it up (I have never seen a conductor on a Sydney train!). I'm in two minds about this confabulation, because, like in Wrong about Japan, the best bits of the book were fictional. It's definitely a wildly distorted account, but it's fun seeing this city through someone else's eyes. ( )

I got the feeling of being in the city with Mr. Carey as I read this book. For me it was not so much a story about the city as it was a story about his history with Sydney. Kind of like a homecoming story, a short but memorable visit with old chums where the friendship has neither fully survived nor totally succumbed to the pressures of time. ( )