Bleak House

A former convict, deported to Australia and prospering there, returns illegally to England in the 1830s to present himself to the young recipient of his mysterious benefactions. It must be Magwitch, of course, Pip’s patron in Charles Dickens’ “Great Expectations.” It must be, that is, except that it is Maggs, protagonist of Peter Carey’s new novel.

Like Magwitch, Jack Maggs moves amid a swirl of sights, smells, passions and plots that limn a time of radical British expansion and grim misery. He too must conceal himself for fear of hanging. He too finds the child he idealized at a distance grown into something less admirable, and in this case villainous--as Dickens may originally have intended his Pip to be.

In fact, though the suggestion of pastiche is blatant, Carey is doing something different and more interesting in this neo-Victorian novel. He is writing Dickens darker; the Dickens--as the late Irving Howe suggested--who may have held back, out of caution or advice, from following his darkness all the way.

A dazzling chiaroscuro of violence and virtue, Maggs has a full chokehold on the story’s mysteries instead of merely haunting them, as Magwitch does. The melodrama is splashier, if anything, and there is a touch of blitheness that recalls, as much as Dickens, his friend and fellow writer Wilkie Collins. And there is one character of thoroughly modern self-reflexiveness: a writer who exploits Maggs to engineer his own rise in class and fortune at a time when all manner of people from modest backgrounds were doing it: manufacturers, merchants, speculators.

Naturally it all begins with a figure in a red waistcoat debouching from the Dover Coach. He pushes with mysterious intent through the gaudy nighttime streets of London and confronts a glittery-eyed old woman at her front door. The exchange, more detailed than this but no more revealing: “I’m back, Ma,” says Red Waistcoat, in effect. “You’ll be hanged,” Old Woman says.

They knew how to begin novels back then, and today, for his own rather different purpose, so does Carey. At times we may question the purpose but hardly ever the skill. The author, who wrote “Oscar and Lucinda” and “The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith,” is always stimulating and almost always enthralling. He holds a perplexity long enough to goad the brain but not so long as to blur it.

After Maggs’ encounter with “Ma,” who raised him years earlier as a child member of a ring of silver thieves, he goes to the elegant house he had bought and furnished, long distance, for his young protege, Phipps. (When Maggs was on his way to deportation, Phipps, a child bound for an orphan asylum, had shared his food.) Although advised of his patron’s arrival, Phipps has decamped, and the house stands empty.

Mercy, the serving girl next door, takes it into her head that Maggs is looking for a job. Buckle, her employer, has an opening, so she advises the housekeeper that the man is “a footman, most tragically positioned.” Measured and found to be the exact height of the other footman--serving symmetry being essential--he is hired.

Thus the story begins, a gnarled drama of mutually colliding purposes. Maggs’ obsession is to find his foster son while avoiding capture by the authorities; the footman post next door seems a perfect cover. Buckle, his employer, a poor man suddenly enriched by an inheritance, is obsessed with his beautiful house and his money. Mercy, who sleeps with Buckle, is concerned mainly to keep her position until, meeting Maggs, she finds a grander passion. Phipps, when he finally is found, turns out to be a figure of cold degeneracy and arrogance.

Maggs’ counterpart and antagonist is Oates, a writer who dines at Buckle’s house and gets up to help Maggs, who is hit suddenly by the devastating pain of a recurrent tic douloureux. A muckraking journalist with a genuine anger at society’s evils, Oates is immensely ambitious. Author of a potboiler novel that has made him a minor celebrity, he is casting about for material for another one.

Oates, an enthusiast for the new technique of mesmerism, sees in Maggs a perfect subject. Ostensibly to rid him of his agonizing pain--which Oates speaks of as the work of devils and which Maggs dimly recognizes as shadows of a terrible past--he offers a course of hypnosis. In fact, realizing that the man is a deportee, he looks for revelations of his sensational past. “It’s the criminal mind awaiting its first cartography,” he exults, already sketching out a book to be called “The Death of Jack Maggs.”

It is not safe to exploit Maggs, a man both humane and violent, and at once the book’s most out-sized and most finely developed character. He has surmounted terrible things in order to make his way; he will not fall back. When he realizes that Oates and Buckle both know that he is a convict and, in England, an outlaw, he takes action.

He locks up Buckle in his household, nailing shut windows and doors. He keeps close watch on Oates. As surety for his silence, he insists that Oates tell him some mortal secret of his own; the latter confesses that he has made his wife’s sister pregnant. Several times Maggs comes close to killing to protect himself, but he is a man whose life asserts a slow, painful curve upward; one that will give the book an ending that is both radiant and oddly prosaic.

Mercy will also curve upward. Carey has written a touching portrait of someone seemingly crimped but only, in fact, starved. Nourished, as the story charmingly does, she unfurls. Buckle, on the other hand, curves down. A man of modest decency as long as he was poor, he is knocked off his fragile moral balance by his inheritance. His townhouse is a miracle he does not know how to cope with. When Maggs desecrates the miracle by making nail-splinters in the window-frames, it unleashes an inquisitorial passion and mean revenge.

As for Oates, the unquiet modern man, he is as unstable as Boswell recounting his nighttime knee-tremblers. Despite his virtues, he spatters suffering around, a heedless byproduct of his ambition. He too suffers--as when his sister-in-law, carrying his baby, dies from an abortion--but he files away the pain for future literary use.

Between Oates and Maggs, the writer and the written-of, Carey stakes his claim for the latter; if only in the way that a cow, if it could speak, might argue the virtues of still-ungrazed pasture. Writers--and no doubt Carey does not spare himself, nor Dickens either--are a transparent lot, whose job of illuminating manages to catch them in one or two useful lights as well.