Although Amnesia is set entirely in Australia, the United States casts its long shadow. Trying to make sense of the superpower, and, more specifically, dissecting Australian–United States relations at a nation-state and person-to-person level, has loomed large in Carey’s fiction. It has perhaps loomed large in his own life, too, given the years he has lived in New York (he moved there in 1990). Amnesia stands free of these previous writings, and yet it riffs off them. For example, while Efica and Voorstand are fictional places rather than facsimiles of Australia and the United States, the ideas that drive Carey’s novel The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith (1994) – including imperialism and client states – find a companion book, albeit a less fabulous one, in Amnesia. Not least, Felix seems capable of interpreting all things in life, including his understanding of Gaby, through the prism of United States culpability over Whitlam’s removal:

We criticised them, of course. Why not? We loved them, didn’t we? We sang their songs. They had saved us from the Japanese. We sacrificed the lives of our beloved sons in Korea, then Vietnam. It never occurred to us that they would murder our democracy. So when it happened, in plain sight, we forgot it right away.

Felix brings personal as well as political baggage to his biographical task, including his long friendships with Celine and Gaby’s father (an inbred Labor politician), his crumbling marriage, and his need to land any gig that might bring in cash and help him retrieve his professional standing. But his personal feelings of failure and inadequacy become wrapped up in his political take on Gaby and, for that matter, his take on the world around him – especially what he sees as America’s crimes and Australia’s passive compliance.

At its core, then, Amnesia is a raucous meditation on dissent. Felix’s brand of dissent is to write books, to regret lost moments of revolt, to rail against national amnesia, and to drink himself stupid. When Felix tells his dodgy mate and benefactor, Woody Townes, that he, Felix, is a coward, Woody replies, ‘I wish to Christ you were that simple.’ And Woody is right: Felix might be all over the place, but there is a form of courage somewhere within him. More than that, he is a poignant embodiment of how hard it is to make a stand, to convince others to join in, and to force change.

In contrast to Felix’s clapped-out efforts, Gaby’s activism pulsates. Her commitment to her cause, and her belief in its logic, is unwavering: ‘No, I’m a soldier,’ she tells Felix. But the toll – on herself, her fellow conspirators, her supporters, her parents – is profound and dangerous, even deadly. Carey’s account of Gaby’s formative years is the novel’s high point. She and her chief accomplice, Frederic, start out as activists on trainer wheels, egged on or held back by parents and various mentors, including activist teachers, all of whom have their own agendas and ideological battle scars. But Gaby and Frederic’s teenage certainty that the world is wrong and that they must, and can, change it, never fades; they just get better at their craft. Gaby’s personal activism includes not hiding from what she’s done: Felix grasps this and it turns his telling of her story into another act of resistance.

Peter Carey

Amnesia is an ambitious novel that possesses some of the energy and thrilling abandon of Carey’s early works, including his short stories. It stands firm in ways reminiscent of Carey’s Illywhacker (1985), which Victoria Glendenning called, ‘A great tottering tower of a novel which stands up astonishingly against all the odds’. For all of Amnesia’s lofty themes, though, it is Carey’s capacity to define a character in a few cutting yet somehow empathetic words that gives the story its energy and depth: ‘he was like a stick insect, 100 percent camouflage, all dry and wiry, with one brown-papered eye and smoke closing down the other.’ When Carey scratches the surface of his characters, he draws blood; he exposes raw emotions that are sometimes incoherent, sometimes self-serving, sometimes deeply compromising. He avoids none of his character’s foibles or weaknesses – ‘She had pressed her jeans to make it not her fault’ – and yet there is a palpable rejection of simple rights or wrongs. Carey is a writer who seems to want to celebrate, as much as to castigate, human flaws. He is sardonic and withering, but somehow optimistic. In Amnesia, the world is insidious and magnificent.

With its overt talk of Whitlam the victim, of the ALP machine, of cyber-terrorism, and so on, Amnesia seems a more obviously political novel than many of Carey’s previous works. But this is deceptive, for he has always been a deeply politicised writer: think, for example, of the political implications of one of his grandest visions, the image in Oscar and Lucinda (1988) of a glass church floating down a river in colonial Australia. Nonetheless, in Amnesia there are occasional moments when political context or historical summary sits under a veneer of fiction, often in the form of Felix’s insistent version of the truth. Most prominently, several passages about the Dismissal are notably information-heavy. Even when brief, such passages stick out, but they are an unavoidable by-product of this sort of political fiction.

Many contemporary novels overstay their welcome. In contrast, Amnesia has many untold or lightly told stories, and many intriguing characters whom readers only glimpse. That is not to suggest that Amnesia is unfinished, or that Carey should have written a different book, one in which he fashioned a neat bow at the end of every loose thread. But the layered, everything-is-connected-to-every-thing foundation accentuates the fact that Gaby’s story and Felix’s story are magnified parts of something much bigger.

So much of Carey’s earlier work – including themes, provocations, characters, and settings – echo, chime-like, through Amnesia. But Carey isn’t repeating himself: Amnesia is both familiar and a distinctly new moment in his career. This novel does not offer a neat moral or defining scene, but because everything is connected, one moment does resonate: as Celine gives birth to Gaby in 1975, at the exact moment that Whitlam is getting the boot in Canberra, she turns on her obstetrician: ‘There are politics every day … Only a fool would forget it.’