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Overview
The Booker Prize-winning author of Oscar and Lucinda returns to the nineteenth century in an utterly captivating mystery. The year is 1837 and a stranger is prowling London. He is Jack Maggs, an illegal returnee from the prison island of Australia. He has the demeanor of a savage and the skills of a hardened criminal, and he is risking his life on seeking vengeance and reconciliation.
Installing himself within the household of the genteel grocer Percy Buckle, Maggs soon attracts the attention of a cross section of London society. Saucy Mercy Larkin wants him for a mate. The writer Tobias Oates wants to possess his soul through hypnosis. But Maggs is obsessed with a plan of his own. And as all the various schemes converge, Maggs rises into the center, a dark looming figure, at once frightening, mysterious, and compelling. Not since Caleb Carr's The Alienist have the shadowy city streets of the nineteenth century lit up with such mystery and romance.
Synopsis
A foundling trained in the art of thievery, Jack Maggs was betrayed and deported to Australia for life. But now, having reversed his fortunes, he seeks to fulfill his innermost desire. Returning to London under threat of execution, he's quickly embroiled in various entanglements among a handful of characters — each with their own secrets. And as their various schemes converge, the captivating figure at the epicentre is Maggs himself, at once frightening, mystifying, and utterly compelling.
Christopher Lehmann-Haupt
...The reader is willingly drawn along, charmed by the story's details, susceptible to the plot's contrivances, always surprised by the reversals, misunderstandings, coincidences, exaggerations, interlocking narratives and other entertaining devices of vintage Victorian storytelling. As always, Mr. Carey writes with energy and fantastic inventiveness. But he seems more in control here than he has in any of his previous novels. -- The New York Times
Editorials
Christopher Lehmann-Haupt
...The reader is willingly drawn along, charmed by the story's details, susceptible to the plot's contrivances, always surprised by the reversals, misunderstandings, coincidences, exaggerations, interlocking narratives and other entertaining devices of vintage Victorian storytelling. As always, Mr. Carey writes with energy and fantastic inventiveness. But he seems more in control here than he has in any of his previous novels. -- The New York TimesPublishers Weekly -
If any contemporary author has the goods to pull off a variation on Dickens, Carey (The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith) is certainly the man. With great panache, he executes an abundantly atmospheric and rollickingly entertaining reprise of Great Expectations. In 1837, a mysterious manhulking, silent, missing two fingers steps off the coach in London. His name, we eventually learn, is Jack Maggs (read Abel Magwitch), and he has illegally returned to England from Australia, where he was brutally used in the penal colony. He's a dead man if discovered, but he's obsessed with finding his (adoptive) son, whom he's been supporting for years -- facts we glean in small, suspenseful increments.Circumstances propel Maggs into the home of Sir Percival Buckle, where he is quickly employed as a footman, and where he catches the eye of a saucy chambermaid with a tragic past. An attack of tic doloureux brings Maggs to the attention of ambitious young writer Tobias Oates, who employs the newly fashionable "science" of animal magnetism to draw out the "phantom" in Maggs' subconscious that is causing the pain. Under hypnosis, Maggs reveals some of his secrets, and Oates determines -- without informing Maggs -- to make his reputation with a novel about the criminal mind. Oates has other tawdry secrets -- an affair with his sister-in-law, monstrous debts, the legacy of a terrible childhood -- but he is protected by the veneer of respectability. Indeed, the thin line between respectability and ruin, the corrupting power of money and the cruelty of class distinctions are themes that Carey rings with adroit authority.
As the plot rockets along with surprises at every turn, Carey creates a vivid, multifaceted picture of 1800s London, especially the squalid and tormented lives of the poor and the criminal underclass. The racy, pungent dialogue is faithful to period idioms and to the muscular vulgarity of Cockney slang. Best of all, Carey's memorable characters can stand proudly in the pantheon beside those of Dickens.
Library Journal
From the moment he appears in Carey's beautifully detailed evocation of 19th-century England, Jack Maggs holds center stage. He's clearly a man with a mission, quickly insinuating himself into the household of Mr. Buckle, an arriviste with intellectual pretensions, in order to make contact with the man next door. Just what he wants with Mr. Phipps generates considerable suspense--and considerable surprise at the end. In the meantime, readers are treated to a complex study of character, motivation, and the back alleys of imperial Britain. A mesmerizing read.Library Journal
...[I]t is easy to visualize on screen this new, rollicking, scary novel of London's underbelly circa 1838. A vivid, sensory study of circumstance and need, the story commences with its protagonist newly, illegally arrived in London, singlemindedly seeking one person who can calm his roiling heart. With a hidden but doubtless criminal history and an intriguingly mysterious present, the young but imposing Jack Maggs affects everyone he encounters, even as he insinuates himself into a wealthy household. Among those he inadvertently fascinates is Tobias Oates, a writer, adulterer, and amateur practitioner of the mesmeric arts, whose soul plummets as his fame rises, his fortunes suddenly, inextricably linked to Maggs. A broad, suspenseful story that releases its secrets gradually and masterfully; highly recommended. -- Janet Ingraham Dwyer, formerly with Worthington Public Library, OhioSchool Library Journal
A bizarre tale set in Dickensian London. Jack Maggs, a foundling who has been trained as a small child to rob wealthy houses, is caught, sentenced for deportation, and forbidden to return to England on pain of execution. At age 15, the helpless young man is on his way to Australia when a 4-year-old orphan shows him a kindness by feeding him from his own meager food supply. The boy's generosity is never forgotten; from Australia, Jack manages to locate him in an English orphanage, arranges for his education and support, and comes to think of the lad as his son. In middle age, Jack defiantly returns to London in search of the boy, now a young man living the life of a gentleman. He encounters Tobias Oates, a famous writer fascinated with the criminal mind who wants to probe his subconscious. In return, Tobias promises to help him find his "son." This story has as many twists and turns as the streets of London, but in the end justice is done and Jack finds peace and contentment back in Australia. Readers familiar with Great Expectations will enjoy making parallels with the classic from which this story is taken and young adults who enjoyed Caleb Carr's The Alienist will find in this novel the same authenticity of speech and setting, madcap chases, and surprising plot elements. The major characters, while not always endearing, are always entertaining and colorful. -- Molly Connally, Kings Park Library, Fairfax County, VirginiaCaryn James
Carey creates a rousing old-fashioned narrative, and brings to it a distinctly modern, unromantic sensibility.— The New York Times Book Review
The Philadelphia Inquirer
...[A]n ingenious trickbox of a novel...Ambitious, masterfully paced.Robert Nye
Anyone who cares at all for fiction should not miss it.— The Literary Review
Erica Wagner
In Jack Maggs, Peter Carey has attempted something new again: taking another's invented world - that of Charles Dickens -and turning it in his hand like a prism to cast a new light.— The Times (London)