A reading from the book of Carey

I'M STANDING in the improvised reading area, quite close to the Blackwell's check-out, staring at three stout plastic chairs, all black, all with names on. None of which I recognise. "All these seats are reserved for The Independent," says the helpful bookshop boy, a bit goofily. He's shifting about a lot on his feet as if something's the matter somewhere inside. Should I spread myself across all three like margarine? I opt for "Vanessa" because it looks the warmest.

The acting features editor of LAM magazine, so fresh from Australia that she's still sleeping on some kind friend's floor, explains to me how she's tried and damned well tried to get an interview with Carey this week. To no avail. He wasn't giving interviews to LAM magazine. I tell her not to feel persecuted. He could hardly bring himself to appear on Start the Week. So it will be a pic, plus a selection from the bons mots he's sure to be dropping this evening. I tell her that this reading was described in Time Out as his only UK appearance. Which had struck me as a little odd, because he'd given another unique UK appearance on the Welsh Borders just 10 days ago. The truth is so difficult to winkle out in these slippery, post-modern days. She understands all that, of course.

Then Carey himself slips in, straight through the middle of the audience like some jaunty and upbeat actor, kicking his legs out in front of him as if he's got too much nervous energy. He stands to one side of the microphone, parking himself beside a dangerous-looking ziggurat of Peter Carey titles on a black table, and listens to a few words of heartfelt, random praise from English reviewers that someone reads out from the jacket of Jack Maggs, the new novel he's come here to read from. No wonder he's smiling so much when he steps up to the microphone. Life seems good.

Outside, it's a late 20th century London night with taxi tyres ripping through the rain. Inside, deep within the pages of the book that Carey's now reading from, it's a mid-19th century London night, a dark, menacing place illuminated fitfully by the brilliant aura of gaslight, the sight of which astonishes Jack Maggs himself, the ex-convict who has just returned to London from Australia.

Carey is not an especially memorable reader. He can't do the various accents, but he stitches together his choice of extracts competently enough. Just one person in the shop is cheated of the sight of his interesting face, so lean and so sallow - the wan, late 19th century-looking girl with the hair drawn back off her face, seated so patiently at the check- out behind him. I watch her eyes flutter closed, and then, with a great effort of will, jerk open again.

Carey has his head part-turned away from the microphone as he reads, which means that the words seem to slip out from the corner of his wide mouth. The tale itself is suffused with mystery and menace, with odd coincidences and even odder meetings, and this strange, sidelong reading approach - as if he's confiding harsh truths to each one of us separately - makes it seem even more so. His lips peel back from his teeth as he reads, like some snarly dog's. A pictorial representation of Jack Maggs himself, some sepia-tinted ne'er-do-well in a bashed-in top hat, stares down from the wall, cynically interested in what his creator is making of him. Carey, legs splayed, and looking comfortable enough in his old, black, rain-spattered Doc Martens, flexes his knees obsessively, and barks on with a kind of playful savagery.A Camden Cleaning Services truck roars slowly by, skimming off the surface from the filth of ages. From inside the book, that old yellow, sulphurous smell of London town is gradually rising, together with a great stench of fresh horse shit. Plus ca change...

But what had possessed Carey to write this riff on Great Expectations in the first place? That's what his audience wants to know. Why should an Australian want to steal the horny old coat of Charles Dickens?

And: "Why isn't he writing about his home town of Bacchus Marsh for God's sake?" someone local to him pitches in from the back. Carey hooks his thumb into his trousers as if he's stuffing away a handy pistol.

It's all to do with the consequences of colonialism, of the psychological burdens of Australia's beginnings as a penal colony. Carey gestures towards the street: "To know I'm descended from a convict is not a flattering thing in London."

"And why Great Expectations? It suddenly occurred to me that Magwitch was my ancestor. After all, Dickens was lavishing a lot of tender, first- person affection on Pip. Why wasn't Magwitch getting some of that? Dickens gave my ancestor a bad rap, and I thought to myself: fuck him. Well, one moves on fairly quickly from that..."

Jack Maggs, having been transported, wants, above all things else, to get back to London and live amongst the representatives of the class that persecuted him. "That seems to be about us, about a country that's seeking out its identity; about a country that can't decide whether or not it wants to be a republic ... You see, we don't respect our founding fathers in the way the Americans do. Our equivalence of Jefferson and Washington are the likes of Ned Kelly. Our cherished stories are tales of folly and failure - Gallipoli, or Ned himself, a murderer who was hanged, stone dead, by the age of 30. These are all stories of loss and disaster, and we trust them. It's all part of the legacy of our colonial past, of our being a client state. My grandfather called England home, though he'd never been there..."

"And what about your home town of Bacchus Marsh then?" asks the features editor of LAM. "Have you warmed to it at all, Mr Carey?"

Carey gives her a kind, pitying look. He is momentarily lost for words. Is this because there's too much to say - or too little? "Well, when I was a kid it seemed totally tedious, flat, brown, full of squinty farmers with mean faces. Now, well ... the family business is a crappy video store..." he pauses.

Her pen's poised above the page of her blue notebook.

"Well ... I feel depressed ... but it's mine."

Got it. So pithy. So true.

`Jack Maggs' is published by Faber, pounds 6.99 paperback

EXCERPT: `JACK MAGGS'

"IT WAS a Saturday night when the man with the red waistcoat arrived in London. It was, to be precise, six of the clock on the fifteenth of April in the year of 1837 that those hooded eyes looked out of the window of the Dover coach and beheld, in the bright aura of gas light, a golden bull and an overgrown mouth opening to devour him - a sign of his inn, the Golden Ox.

"The Rocket (as his coach was aptly named) rattled in through the archway to the inn's yard and the passengers, who had hitherto found the stranger so taciturn, now noted the silver-capped cane - which had begun to tap the floor at Westminster Bridge - commence a veritable tattoo.

"He was a tall man in his forties, so big in the chest and broad in the shoulders that his fellows on the bench seat had felt the strain of his presence, but what his occupation was, or what he planned to do in London, they had not the least idea. One privately imagined him a bookmaker, another a gentleman farmer and a third, seeing the excellent quality of his waistcoat, imagined him an upper servant wearing his master's cast-off clothing.

"His face did not deny the possibility of any of these occupations; indeed he would have been a singular example of any one of them. His brows pushed down hard upon the eyes, and his cheeks shone as if life had scrubbed at him and rubbed until the very bones beneath his flesh had been burnished in the process. His nose was large, hawkish, and high-bridged. His eyes were dark, inquiring, and yet there was a bruised, even belligerent quality which had kept his fellow passengers at their distance all through that long journey up from Dover.

"No sooner had they heard the coachman's Whoa-up than he had the door open and was out into the night without having said a single word."