#Book called a long way home skin#

Irene loves her husband, loathes her father-in-law and longs for success on a grander stage. Titch dreams of running the local Ford dealership after (yet another) stab in the back from his father, he has to make do with being the Bacchus Marsh representative of General Motors Holden. Titch is genial, slightly useless and lives in fear of his domineering father, Dan. Initially, we meet the petite Irene Bobs, a spunkily irrepressible young woman married to the equally diminutive Titch. The novel is told in alternating first-person voices. Then something changed: “You can’t be a white Australian writer and spend your whole life ignoring the greatest, most important aspect of our history, and that is that we – I – have been the beneficiaries of a genocide.” In a recent interview in the Australian, he said that he’d always felt that it was not the place of a white writer to tell this tale. It seems strange at first that Carey – surely Australia’s greatest living novelist, even if he hasn’t dwelled there for decades – has taken so long to get around to the subject. Then there’s Francis Spufford’s Golden Hill, whose concluding revelation about one of the characters’ racial identities does what all good end-of-book twists ought to, shedding new light on the entire novel.Ī Long Way from Home, Peter Carey’s 14th novel, uses the story of a light-skinned Indigenous Australian who has been brought up white to address the country’s brutal history of racism. More recently, we’ve had Philip Roth’s The Human Stain, in which the African American Coleman Silk attempts to pass for a Jewish academic. Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel, Passing, is a near-forgotten classic, telling of two mixed-race women, Clare and Irene, who identify as white and black respectively. It shouldn’t surprise, then, that racial passing has such a rich literary history.

#Book called a long way home skin#

W riters are by nature chameleons, with each new character a new disguise to take on, a fresh skin to inhabit.