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MAYBE ONE DAY..........
The Australian writer, Peter Carey, said that most of his stories were prompted by the questions: "Do people want to live the way they do? Do they have to live the way they do? And, what happens when they want to change? When they try to change, he says, they struggle ineffectually to escape meaningless jobs, predatory relationships, corrosive addictions and exploitative social environments. His stories celebrate a resilient human spirit in travail: in fear-haunted, corrupt and crumbling cultures, precariously balanced on the edge of a disaster-ridden, nightmarish, science-fiction futures.
Carey has a fierce emotional energy, a turbulent imagination and his stories are extraordinarily visual. They make good films. He writes in the idiom of the moment, a testimony to his advertising background. There is a jewelled concision, an emotional poignancy, to his richly poetic work. He writes in scrupulously realistic detail, with a strong sense of the existential anguish and of the personal and social diseases that ravish our fin de siecle lives in Australia.-Ron Price with appreciation to Anthony J. Hassall, Peter Carey’s Fiction: Dancing on Hot Macadam, University of Queensland Press, St. Lucia, 1994, pp.1-5.
Maybe one day I’ll write
some novel or sci-fi piece
that conveys some of my
sense of how things are.
I’ll write in rich detail and
tell of the anguish of people’s
lives, spin them a good yarn.
Then a film will be made;
I might even be rich and, yes,
famous, at least for a time, yes.
More realistically, though, I'd
really prefer to just exist side-
by-side a coterie of the population,
those working within a framework,
a new form, a nucleus and pattern
of a new organizational form, a new
administration and community life,
write of the experience of this new,
emerging world religion over the half
century: 1951-2001 with the aim of
helping those who’d be doing the job
in the next half century: 2001-2051,
with understanding, humour and adventure.
We shall see! Eh? We shall see....
Ron Price
12 January 1999
The Australian writer, Peter Carey, said that most of his stories were prompted by the questions: "Do people want to live the way they do? Do they have to live the way they do? And, what happens when they want to change? When they try to change, he says, they struggle ineffectually to escape meaningless jobs, predatory relationships, corrosive addictions and exploitative social environments. His stories celebrate a resilient human spirit in travail: in fear-haunted, corrupt and crumbling cultures, precariously balanced on the edge of a disaster-ridden, nightmarish, science-fiction futures.
Carey has a fierce emotional energy, a turbulent imagination and his stories are extraordinarily visual. They make good films. He writes in the idiom of the moment, a testimony to his advertising background. There is a jewelled concision, an emotional poignancy, to his richly poetic work. He writes in scrupulously realistic detail, with a strong sense of the existential anguish and of the personal and social diseases that ravish our fin de siecle lives in Australia.-Ron Price with appreciation to Anthony J. Hassall, Peter Carey’s Fiction: Dancing on Hot Macadam, University of Queensland Press, St. Lucia, 1994, pp.1-5.
Maybe one day I’ll write
some novel or sci-fi piece
that conveys some of my
sense of how things are.
I’ll write in rich detail and
tell of the anguish of people’s
lives, spin them a good yarn.
Then a film will be made;
I might even be rich and, yes,
famous, at least for a time, yes.
More realistically, though, I'd
really prefer to just exist side-
by-side a coterie of the population,
those working within a framework,
a new form, a nucleus and pattern
of a new organizational form, a new
administration and community life,
write of the experience of this new,
emerging world religion over the half
century: 1951-2001 with the aim of
helping those who’d be doing the job
in the next half century: 2001-2051,
with understanding, humour and adventure.
We shall see! Eh? We shall see....
Ron Price
12 January 1999
