A Long Way from Home: A novel

"We loved the life, the energy, the chutzpah, the wonderful cast of characters and particularly the “rich, ripe voices” of the two narrators, Irene Bobs and Willie Bachhuber. A Long Way from Home is a blast of a novel so atmospheric you can smell the burning tyres and sniff the dry eucalyptus leaves. Peter Carey has taken the Redex Trial, a car-race round the continent of Australia, and hung on it the tale of a marriage and a country, of maps and map-less-ness, of glories and shames. So far, so you might say, so conventional. You’d be wrong though, because even for a writer as experienced as Peter Carey it’s hard to write a rollicking picaresque which has, at its heart, the infamy of colonial oppression. We read this book with huge admiration, amused, amazed and moved in equal measure. The idea of a book having any kind of ‘function’ bothers me. To me, historical fiction is simply a genre of literature onto which writers and readers project their own preoccupations and concerns. These concerns may reflect current events or fears for the future, but may also simply be the immediate preoccupations of any reader at any time. I think, though, that Walter Scott would agree with Peter Carey. Scott tells us himself that his own aim—we might call it a function—was to portray the Scots “in a more favourable light than they had been placed hitherto” and “to procure sympathy for their virtues and indulgence for their foibles”. As judges of the prize that bears Scott’s name, though the prize has of course broadened out far beyond Scotland, we hear him! Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Just thinking more deeply, though—the function of historical fiction is a lively question—it’s impossible to read, for example, Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall (winner of our prize in 2010) without drawing parallels with the so-called ‘strongmen’ of our own age, or read any of Tim Pears’ West Country trilogy without being resolved to save what’s left of the untrodden country he describes. But we need to take care. There’s a difference between readers of historical fiction drawing parallels or being moved to action, and writers of historical fiction feeling that influencing the reader, which of course can be malign as well as benign, is one of their functions. Prize-winning historical novels aren’t morality tales or even cautionary tales. They are first and foremost readable tales. If we don’t want to read them, they fulfil no function at all."