Oscar and Lucinda - Softcover

Carey, Peter

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0060915927 ISBN 13: 9780060915926

Publisher: Perennial, 1989

Synopsis

Winner of the Booker Prize, a critically acclaimed, large-scale, brilliantly styled, continuously engrossing love story set in mid-19th-century England and Australia.

About this title

Review

Oscar Hopkins is a high-strung preacher's kid with hydrophobia and noisy knees. Lucinda Leplastrier is a frizzy-haired heiress who impulsively buys a glass factory with the inheritance forced on her by a well-intentioned adviser. In the early parts of this lushly written book, author Peter Carey renders the seminal turning points in his protagonists' childhoods as exquisite 19th-century set pieces. Young Oscar, denied the heavenly fruit of a Christmas pudding by his cruelly stern father, forever renounces his father's religion in favor of the Anglican Church. "Dear God," Oscar prays, "if it be Thy will that Thy people eat pudding, smite him!" Lucinda's childhood trauma involves a beautiful doll bought by her struggling mother with savings from the jam jar; in a misguided attempt to tame the doll's unruly curls, young Lucinda mutilates her treasure beyond repair. Neither of these coming-of-age stories quite explains how the grownup Oscar and Lucinda each develop a guilty passion for gambling. Oscar plays the horses while at school, and Lucinda, now an orphaned heiress, finds comfort in a game of cards with an odd collection of acquaintances. When the two finally meet, on board a ship bound for New South Wales, they are bound by their affinity for risk, their loneliness, and their awkwardly blossoming (but unexpressed) mutual affection. Their final high-stakes folly--transporting a crystal palace of a church across (literally) godforsaken terrain--strains plausibility, and events turn ghastly as Oscar plays out his bid for Lucinda's heart. Yet even the unconvincing plot turns are made up for by Carey's rich prose and the tale's unpredictable outcome. Although love proves to be the ultimate gamble for Oscar and Lucinda, the story never strays too far from the terrible possibility that even the most thunderstruck lovers can remain isolated in parallel lives.

From the Publisher

Winner of the 1988 Booker Prize, this striking novel, set in Victorian England and Australia but told with a contemporary perspective, depicts the fatal and unrequited love shared by two remarkable misfits.

About this edition

• Publisher: Perennial
• Publication date: 1989
• ISBN 10: 0060915927
• ISBN 13: 9780060915926
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 448