Peter Carey

Oscar Hopkins, the hydrophobic, noisy-kneed son of a preacher, renounces his father’s stern religion in favour of the Anglican Church. Lucinda Leplastrier, a frizzy-haired heiress, impulsively buys a glass factory with the inheritance forced on her by a well-intentioned adviser. When the two finally meet, on board a ship to New South Wales, they are bound by their affinity for gambling and risk, their loneliness, and their awkwardly blossoming mutual affection. Love will prove to be their ultimate gamble.

Oscar and Lucinda

Peter Carey's Booker Prize winning novel imagines Australia's youth, before its dynamic passions became dangerous habits. It is also a startling and unusual love story. Oscar is a young English clergyman who has broken with his past and developed a disturbing talent for gambling. A country girl of singular ambition, Lucinda moves to Sydney, driven by dreams of self-reliance and the building of an industrial Utopia. Together this unlikely pair create and are created by the spectacle of mid-nineteenth century Australia. Peter Carey's visionary brilliance, and his capacity to delight and surprise, propel this story to its stunning conclusion.

Amanda Wells

Oscar and Lucinda is a long book that didn't feel all that long to me. The jumps through time, and switches of perspective, as well as the fascinating perspectives and situations that each character got into all served to push this book along, and dragged me with it.

It is funny, and endearing, and overall quite enjoyable.
There were times when I wished something would get cleared up, but the problems of communication were appropriate to the time and to the characters, so I can't hold that against the story too much.

The ending is fantastic. I won't say more - but although I wished for something different - I did not see it coming. 

I'd recommend it, especially if you want a nice long read in a colonial Australian setting, and if you have a sense of humour.

Daryl Houston

Full of lovely prose, this book had me thinking "I've found one of my next read-everything-by-this-author books" until he kind of lost me with the glass church escapade and the fairly sudden twist. I suppose there must've been a pretty important reason (something about fickle fate or the pointlessness of slavish devotion to faith?) Carey went in this direction with the book, but it read to me almost like the plots of two books grafted together, and it was disappointing in the end, if still beautifully lyrical throughout.

Trevor Berrett

When I started this book I knew I was in for something different. Two gamblers fall in love and conspire to transport a glass church across the outback in colonial times? And it's good? Yes, it is good. 

Peter Carey's Oscar and Lucinda was a great trip for me. I loved being immersed in the details of the 1850s and 1860s. I especially loved being immersed in the details of the mind from this period. This is not a simple love story. The characters feel deeply about many things, and have many different feelings: guilt, pleasure, holiness, despair, longing, loneliness. The list could go on. It's a rich rich book. 

While the basic story is what's written above, it is more honest to say that the transporting a glass church thing is just something that happens in the book. It was a way for Carey to really dig into deep questions of the soul--faith, doubt, righteousness, hypocrisy, wickedness, the fragility of relationships. While I read this book I really cared for the characters as they struggled to find their identity amidst so much external and internal conflict.

The book is also pretty funny. There are several great parts that made me laugh out loud. It's the way Carey describes things and his sense of timing. But that same talent helps him also achieve a devestating effect in the reader. The comical story is real, but so is the tragedy and the despair. The relationships are so important to the characters, who have struggled so hard to connect with anyone, yet the relationships, while honest, are also desperate. It's hard to read at times for fear of what discoveries will be made.

The books started slowly, though not unpleasantly. We see Oscar and Lucinda growing up, experiencing their rather harsh childhoods. Oscar is a bit strange to others. Lucinda too, only its because she's a rather strong willed woman. Both recognize their situation, and even though they recognize that they should not worry because they feel they are being exactly who they should be, it still hurts. On a side note, almost, they each become addicted to gambling. Ultimately they gamble everything they care for on each other. This all somehow leads to a very insightful look at faith, colonialism, love, death.

Somehow in this book Carey has taken a million minute, seemingly unimportant details, and compiled them into something touching and important. I like the way one of the Best of the Booker judges described it as building the Taj Mahal out of matchsticks (or something along those lines).

Peter Carey's novel of the undeclared love between clergyman Oscar Hopkins and the heiress Lucinda Leplastrier is both a moving and beautiful love story and a historical tour de force set in Victorian times. Made for each other, the two are gamblers - one obsessive, the other compulsive - incapable of winning at the game of love. Oscar and Lucinda is now available as a Faber Modern Classics edition.

Oscar and Lucinda

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