A Hypnotic Tale -- Novel Goes Beyond The Retelling Of Dickens' `Great Expectations'

------------------------------- "Jack Maggs" by Peter Carey Knopf, $24 -------------------------------

"Jack Maggs," the seventh novel by Peter Carey, has already received a storm of attention in Britain and Australia, where it was published last fall - about the same time Carey's Booker Prize-winning novel "Oscar and Lucinda" was being produced as a big-budget movie.

American critics are now responding to the U.S. release of "Jack Maggs," and their litany of observations focuses on similar themes: that it is a contemporary retelling of Dickens' "Great Expectations," that it is a novel of exile and displacement, that it is an affirmation of Australian nihilism and that nation's ribald yet cynical joy.

Well, "Jack Maggs" is all of these - and more. Readers should know from the start that the novel goes far beyond the slick repackaging of 19th-century fiction that results in watery film adaptations of Austen, the Brontes, Hawthorne and, well, Dickens. While indebted to Dickens, "Jack Maggs" stakes its own claim in a dark prose that combines the winsome with the onerous. As in Thomas Pynchon's "Mason & Dixon" and Don DeLillo's "Underworld," the novel compels us to situate present experience in history, only to emerge with a desperate and risky sense of hope.

At the outset, Jack Maggs (Dickens' character was Abel Magwitch), a rough man of high bearing missing two fingers, wearing a red waistcoat and sporting a silver-tipped cane, arrives in the coal-smoked London of 1837 after spending 24 years in Australia as a transported convict. Like most of Carey's protagonists, he's an orphan.

Under threat of death for returning to his native country, Maggs is searching for Henry Phipps (read Dickens' Pip), who as a boy offered food to a starving Maggs then waiting to be shipped to New South Wales. To repay the generosity from long distance, Maggs over the years has propelled Phipps to gentry status by sharing the fortune he made in Australia following his release.

In an inversion of Dickens - this "Pip" turns out to be a debauched, enervated coward, and Maggs a younger, psychologically uprooted and more dangerous man than Magwitch - Carey moves a disguised Maggs into the position of footman at the home of one Percy Buckle, who, like Phipps, has been blessed by a surprise infusion of cash. Through Buckle, Maggs meets Titus Oates, a character who approximates Dickens himself.

It's hardly a flattering fictional imagining of the famous novelist. Based on both rumors and truth about Dickens, Oates' secret life proves tawdry but significant: an affair with a housemate/sister-in-law that results in a botched abortion and crushing debts.

Also, Oates' attempts to plumb Maggs' past by means of mesmerism and magnets (which Dickens purportedly used on friends) are irresponsibly manipulative - Oates is secretly plucking material to use in a mediocre novel. This is Carey's portrait of the artist not only as conniving ransacker, but also as criminal accomplice.

By these means, Carey uses Dickens' novel to grapple with 20th-century preoccupations such as dislocation, alienation and the inherently duplicitous job of fiction writers. Yet "Jack Maggs" is also a breathtaking, painful and engaging book, a 306-page novel that can seduce you into trying to finish it in one siting.

It includes a gaggle of comic characters worthy of "Tristram Shandy" and a roller coaster of a suspense plot that leads to murder, as Maggs struggles to find his terrified heir. In addition, "Jack Maggs" has a high literary-historical sensibility, which re-creates a 19th-century London that, if not altogether accurate, nevertheless has a racy and heart-wrenching verve.

Unlike most of Carey's previous novels, "Jack Maggs" has a happy ending - not a sophomoric one, but a genuine expression of hope in which Maggs comes to peace with the fact that the England he still fancies no longer exists. This is when Maggs comes home for good; the social reject finds a decidedly unsentimental redemption.

Carey's novel is a treasure for a number of reasons: Its prose has a driving power; its literary pleasures are lively and impeccable, including an underground London street slang that is often wholly invented. But best of all, "Jack Maggs" offers a vital reimagining of 19th-century realistic fiction by adding a dose of contemporary reality to it.

High art and low life are joined with an ebullient exactness of language and plot, allowing readers a way back into the grand Victorian novel, as well as a sympathetic but hard, honest look into the conditions of colonialism and alienation. "Jack Maggs" is a generous gift to anyone who cares about the future of the novel, as well as its past.

Greg Burkman is a Seattle writer and book critic.