Illywhacker. London: Faber & Faber, 1985.

PETER CAREY (b.1943)
Illywhacker. London: Faber & Faber, 1985.
First edition, signed and annotated with 619 words on 50 pages. Set in Australia between 1919 and the 1980s, Illywhacker is the picaresque story of confidence trickster Herbert Badgery, 'a hundred and thirty-nine years old and something of a celebrity': against a backdrop of outlandish encounters and outsized characters, magic and jokes, Badgery embodies the Australian national character over the changing times of the 20th century. The novel won numerous awards and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Carey's annotations, each marked with a coloured index-tag and augmented by highlighting within the text, often link elements of the novel to his childhood memories ('The milk of my childhood, ladelled into a "billy" and left by the front gate by the milkman. Always lots of cream to skim off'; 'Swagmen were common in my childhood when no-one thought to call them "homeless"'), family history ('My father worked as a chauffeur for a Chinese herbalist named Goon. He loved the family. They liked him well enough to take him with them when they returned to China. He didn't') or other sources ('Making a T.V. commercial in the hinterland behind Surfers Paradise I met a woman who believed that humans could breed with other species...'); occasionally, sentences are cross-referenced to interviews or articles by Carey, or in two instances to his next novel, Oscar and Lucinda (1988). A number of illustrative elements are pasted in, depicting the hut by the Never-Never in which the novel was written, Carey's grandfather's business in Ballarat, a landscape, two cockatoos, a goanna, the author as a child with 'Australia's Own Car'; also eight Australian stamps (two depicting Carey himself)'; the booklet R. Graham Carey. Pioneer Airman by H.N. Eustis is loosely inserted.

Octavo. Original red cloth, spine lettered in silver, pictorial dustjacket.

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