The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith Peter Carey Knopf 422 pp $24.00 Review by Sean Buffington Featured in BBR May 1995 In my dream, I see Peter Carey perched on the edge of the lipless void of Tristan Smith's mouth, buffeted by the meaningful garble that tumbles from it, teetering between the safe security of certain knowledges and the unplumbed depths or brutal mundaneness of the post-colonial experience. I think that my dream means this: in his new novel, The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith, Peter Carey leads his readers on a wild goose chase; he sends them hunting for the golden eggs of post-colonial thematics knowing that he has hidden only dodo droppings. Behind the textual tricks and the sexy symbolization is nothing but the burble and drool of post-colonial Everyman Tristan Smith. Which is not to say that this novel is a failure or a sham. On the contrary, The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith may be the most fascinating, perplexing, and difficult post-colonial lit to come down the pike since V.S. Naipaul's The Middle Passage. Like Naipaul-though with (somewhat) greater compassion and less gloom-Carey points us past what have become the commonplaces of post-colonial literature to conclusions that are at once frighteningly ambiguous and strikingly simple and clear. The novel, Carey's fifth, purports to be an edited version (with notes by an unnamed editor) of the autobiography of Tristan Smith, son of a prominent actor and political activist, agitator in his own right and physical abomination. Born of uncertain parentage in the archipelagian nation of Efica-a state built out of former French and British colonies and a political, cultural and economic dependent of the distant superpower of Voorstand-Tristan Smith is a footless, lipless, pupil-less creature who drools and sputters in a language that sounds like so much gibberish to untrained listeners. From his mother, the famous Voorstandish expatriate actress Felicity Smith, he learns the ropes of cultural nationalism and neo-colonial critique. With her resolutely anti-colonial theatre troupe, the Feu Follet Theatre Collective, he tours Efica-"inventing the culture of its people" with every performance. At the same time, however, Tristan discovers a subterranean pleasure of performance; he burrows into characters to hide and hide from his deformity. Performance for him is no declaration of resistance, no public statement of identity in defiance of an imperial culture. Instead, he performs to escape the misshapen shadow of his identity, to sidestep the horror of what he is: the creole-spouting colonial, uncertain of his cultural parents, the perennial victim of history, provincialism and the machinations of greater nations. Of course, it is precisely this sort of allegorical reading that Carey deviously urges on his readers. Unusual Life reads like an "Empire Writes Back" casebook: the deconstructive homage to the imperial text (Tristram Shandy); the fictional critical apparatus (footnotes, glossary, references to fictional scholarly works) that parodies the conventions of imperial scholarship; the bastardy and physical deformity of the protagonist who stands in for the post-colonial community and culture; the thematic obsession with acting and role-playing. Each of these devices is like a signpost on the road leading to a "post-colonial reading" of the text. And surely the reader could follow this road to its obvious end-a stinging rebuke of colonial mimic-men, an indictment of cultural neo-colonization, etc. Or maybe each carefully posted sign, each clearly marked curve is a warning to the reader: Here be dragons! Like mapmakers of old, Peter Carey may be telling readers that the territory of the post-colonial is stranger than they imagined. The dragons that inhabit The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith lurk behind the novel's thematic facade snickering loudly. They reveal it as parody, and the bewildered reader must wander elsewhere and look for the critical substance, the philosophical heft of the work. Careys great post-modernist joke is that the novel's heft is its lack of heft. After more than four hundred pages of suicides, espionage, covert operations and murders, Tristan reveals at his fictional autobiography's close that "although I did not know it, my unusual life was really just beginning!" Get it? We missed it. We hopped on and off too soon: The novel is about to begin, but the possibility of our further participation has been foreclosed. We've been laboring under the mistaken notion that we were reading "The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith." In fact, we only made it through the prologue! Perhaps even more astounding is the fact that the putative author-Smith-has been likewise deceived. Through all these chapters, we've been flying without a parachute, tumbling without a net. There was, we learn, no grand plan, no ultimate scheme; the author is as much victim as the reader. Which brings me back to the question of heft: What's the point? Carey's novel is a faux post-colonial fable masquerading as a fictitious autobiography. It incorporates cyberpunk conventions and elements of the imperial travel narrative. It is high pastiche-a Frankenstein of stitched-together tones, figurations, themes and styles. And at the end of it all, some unseen mischief-maker pulls the loose thread that sends it falling to the floor-a crumpled mess of skin and parts. Still, I believe that Carey is up to something more original and exciting than simple postmodern game-playing. His novel, like its protagonist, is a monster. Just as Tristan's pupil-less eyes seem to reflect the stare of the seer, so does the novel resist attempts to see into its "soul." Just as Tristan's heart and twisted frame are visible through his too-thin skin, the awkward structure of the novel stands out from the tight mesh of its words. Like the Tristan who dresses up in costume to avoid the pitying, horrified, horrible eyes of passersby, the novel puts on and discards styles and genres. The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith is the unusual life of Tristan Smith; it is his autobiography, his costume, his defense, and his vulnerability. The novel follows Smith in being petulant, unpleasant, pitiable and startling; it is, like him, ugly, frustrating, and frightening. More than fable or metaphor, Carey's novel is an essay on and against and an exemplar of the accretion of words that makes us both monstrous and human, that hardens around us like a shell, mediating our exchanges with the outside world, making them simultaneously possible and impossible, true and false, loving and painful. Words are our selves: they make us, mimic us, and reveal us. Carey's Tristan is an Everyman-wrapped in a costume of words, writing an autobiography he has little control over, talking and squirming his way through an unusual life. Sean Buffington lives and works in Cambridge, MA. I did not know what floor I was on at any moment. My arms felt like ripped lead. My hands were numb, bleeding, but I was transformed. I was no longer one of the pitiable wretches I had left behind upstairs [in the plastic surgery ward]. As I descended, I was an actor-Marc Antony, Richard the Third, the Phantom of the Rue Morgue. ...Finally I permitted myself to look down to my audience. The ground was not more than twenty feet below me. Faces were tilted up towards me. I turned to them. The faces were all wrong. They were not faces looking at an actor. Nor were they looking at something as simple as a boy on a pipe. The faces looked at something like snot, like slime, like something dripping down towards them from which they wished to take their eyes and which, the clearer and closer it became, produced in their own eyes and lips such grotesque contortions that I knew-properly, fully, for the first time in my life-I was a monster. From The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith &copy1995. Boston Book Review. All rights reserved.

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