![]() ![]() It’s also a folly, quite unsuited to the climate, already battered and twisted and cracked. The church itself is airily beautiful, a ‘crystal-pure bat-winged structure’, the product of years of dreaming. He’s there because of a wager with Lucinda Leplastrier whom he loves – and who will not be the narrator’s great-grandmother. ![]() ![]() It ends – as a direct consequence of that pudding – half a world away in 1866, as Oscar sits, ill and miserable, in a glass church drifting on barges down a remote Australian river. It begins in Devon, with a Christmas pudding snatched from the child’s lips by his harsh Plymouth Brethren father. And the narrator’s account of his great-grandfather, the Reverend Oscar Hopkins, is, by any standards, a weird one. ![]() For one thing, it’s a family history, and we’re all of us secretly stunned by the coincidences which have resulted, against the odds, in our existence. Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda is a tall story, as elaborate and fantastical as any of the yarns spun by the trickster hero of his last novel Illywhacker. ![]()
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