Short Notices
In Winnipeg's "UpTown Magazine", Quentin Mills-Fenn provides a short review of His Illegal Self and concludes: "It's a suspenseful story, but at its heart is the beautiful, tortured relationship of Che and Dial. Carey not only masterfully creates a precocious eight-year-old boy, he also describes how two people, even with all the love in the world, can't always say what they know."
The "Complete Review" provides a full round-up of reviews of the novel. Their conclusion: a B+, "Not quite a consensus, but most at least impressed by his dazzle."
Meg, on the "A Snippet a Day" weblog decides that "Jack Maggs is a colonial reimagining I can dig...I prefer it to Great Expectations, the novel that inspired Carey. Not by a lot, but really, Dickens's novel sags at the end. Carey's books don't have that problem (except his first, Bliss)."
We don't see many reviews of Carey's short stories these days, but Leah Cave has a look at The Fat Man in History, the author's first collection, which "operates on the same paradox as that of Shakespeare's wise fool, the only character speaking the truth. To seek reality, you must depart from it. Opting for the absurd and the comical, the eerie coincidence and the flight of fancy, Carey carefully stages each element of the story in order to provide comment on modern society while also reflecting it's elusive nature."
Other
In attempting to answer the question "What makes a good writer?", the "Insightwards" weblog finds that, with Carey, it's the voices: "...doing the various character voices properly takes you more than half the way to being a good writer. Truth is, he does that wonderfully well. His characters are almost real people, I wouldn't be surprised to come across one of them in the flesh in the nearest café around the corner."
In "The Boston Globe" we learn that Geraldine Brooks is reading His Illegal Self, while Carey is reading Helen Garner's The Spare Room. For a second there I thought they were doing a swap.
