Peter Carey’s novel about America (or the idea of America) is told in the inter­leaved, altern­ating voices of Olivier de Garmont, a French commis­sioner sent to study the judicial and penal system of the new world (but also to escape a revival of revolu­tionary fervour at home), and his itinerant English journeyman artist-cum-servant, nicknamed Parrot.

Carey’s invest­ig­ation into the nature of democracy in America is based heavily on the writings of Alexis de Tocqueville, and while these musings are fascin­ating, the real heart of the book is the frequently antag­on­istic but often strangely tender relationship between Parrot and Olivier.

Parrot’s voice is partic­u­larly strong, and while the narrative alternates between the two, the actual telling of the story is more complicated than it first appears. Parrot — a skilled engraver and calli­graphist — takes dictation from the short-sighted Olivier (whose handwriting, we’re told, is quite awful), so that there are incidents told from Olivier’s point of view which appear in the sections belonging to Parrot, giving him the oppor­tunity to provide his own commentary.

Carey in historical mode has a remarkable talent for making the reader feel what it’s like to be alive at a certain moment, with unusual but intensely imagined details — convicts being pressed together in a hulk like “wet poultry”, for instance, or an old woman’s “blood-filled hand”. And whenever Parrot opens his heart (which he does often, in rage, grief and joy), the words, and the effect, are magical. He is a complex, fully-realised character — and another of Carey’s orphans.

Many of Olivier’s obser­va­tions about America are appar­ently paraphrasings and direct quota­tions of Tocqueville’s — for example, his ingenious recog­nition of the rocking chair (an invention of Benjamin Franklin, appar­ently) as being a symbol of America’s “democratic restlessness”, or when, upon being made to listen to a vocal performance by the young ladies of a Philadelphia family, he notes that “(what they) affect most are its difficult passages”, (which, I have to admit, put me in mind of the vocal gymnastics of the typical American Idol performance). Olivier’s prophecy that America will one day elect an idiot as president is a little obvious for my liking, though it suggests that Carey was coming from a pretty angry place when he conceived the book; this naked trans­planting of the contem­porary to the historical reminded me of the later sections of Antoni Jach’s Napoleon’s double.

Reading the book as an Australian, and knowing that Carey is ‘one of us’, Parrot and Olivier in America somehow also becomes a book about Australia (there is indeed a period of Parrot’s life set in the penal colony of New South Wales). It’s as though by making these points about America, Carey is making obser­va­tions about Australia by comparison — though that may be less Carey’s intention and more my imagin­ation. It would be fascin­ating, though, for America to send us a Carey, an Olivier, to describe our country to us with such penet­ration and such style.

(Oh, and the Australian edition is a wonder of a thing — frankly, it shits over the design of the UK and American editions.)

Given that the central character of this book is a stage magician, it’s probably not surprising that the reviewers quoted on the jacket, in seeking to praise the book, have borrowed so many phrases from the world of illusion and presti­di­git­ation. It’s certainly an elegant read, full of charm, misdir­ection and the occasional pyrotechnic.

I was surprised that this book seemed to have been so well received when it was published in 2001. Not because it isn’t good, but because it seems in many ways unfash­ionable. Gold doesn’t come across as a showy writer, but his precise, effortless descrip­tions of action and motive are always economical and often beautiful. And he’s brilliant at constructing scenes, partic­u­larly in the second half, giving the book all the qualities of a great thriller.

Gold’s finest achievement, though, is his hero, Charles Carter: based on a real magician, but brought to life with all the character and complexity that fiction can supply.

This is an intriguing, curious, eccentric book. The story is driven by a series of near-future cataclysms, yet Amsterdam eschews any sense of doom or apoca­lypse; instead we have an unnamed narrator adapting and surviving and finding ways to live in an unpre­dictable, highly mutable world within view of our own.

Like David Mitchell’s Cloud atlas, Things we didn’t see coming is told in a series of discon­nected vignettes, each one requiring the reader to reorient themselves in a new world. Amsterdam handles the expos­ition well (though less so in the later sections, I felt), largely because his character doesn’t ruminate on the disasters and what has caused them (Y2K looms in the first section, and there has clearly been a melting of the ice caps at some point, and a future war appears to leave parts of the population irradiated and riddled with cancers), and because Amsterdam is shrewd about placing his character in revealing, telling and cleverly inter­sected situations.

In the end, it’s not about disaster, it’s about the before and after. It opens with prophecy, a plea to open our eyes to impending chaos, and it ends with a transcendant acceptance, with eyes literally closed. It’s about our worries — how we worry about the wrong things, how worrying about anything at all is a burden we needn’t carry, provided we have the courage to change who we are, and perhaps even to forget who we are.

Amsterdam’s narrator has no answers; he survives by coming to a way of living that works for him in the moment, and by being prepared to change that way of living as soon as it becomes unsus­tainable or proves malad­aptive. There’s a line toward the end about “good choices for the apoca­lypse”; I wouldn’t be surprised if that was a working title for the book.

Great concept, mixing grimy police procedural, online sleaze and the world of faerie. Much straighter than I expected, having read a bit of Ball’s short fiction this year, though that’s no doubt due to the noir trappings.

Looking forward to seeing where Ball takes the sequel, which is being published by Twelfth Planet Press in 2010.

A clever alternate history, sparingly but brilliantly evoking a weird version of England in communion with alien entities. Peter M. Ball has published some great stories this year.

A fascin­ating alternate history concerning an aborted bombing of Hiroshima.

One of the finest things I’ve read this year — a concept that’s as well thought out as the best hard science-fiction, told in a perfectly judged voice evoking the best fantasy and fable. If Ted Chiang was prolific as well as being a genius, I think I’d have to murder him out of envy. As it stands (he publishes relat­ively rarely), I may only have to wound him.