It's 1837, and Jack Maggs is in London. This is of note because he's meant to be in Australia, and indeed was transported there on the understanding that returning to England would mean an automatic death sentence. So why is he here? And why, when he appears to be a man of fairly substantial independent means, has he taken a menial job as a footman at the house in Great Queen Street owned by Mr. Percy Buckle, a man of similarly humble origin transformed into a man of wealth and status by a handy inheritance?
Mr. Buckle likes to entertain interesting people, and one of those people is Mr. Tobias Oates, amateur magician, published novelist and semi-professional mesmerist. Look into my eyes, not around the eyes, into my eyes, etc. Upon putting Jack Maggs into a trance it quickly becomes clear that he has a wealth of exciting secrets to reveal and Oates quickly books him in for a series of sessions. Maggs is a bit suspicious but agrees, realising that this gives him some leverage with Mr. Buckle who wants to ingratiate himself with his new friend. Oates isn't entirely straight with him, though, selling the sessions as some sort of hypnotherapy to help smooth out Maggs' mental state, while actually using them to get Maggs to describe his prior life, eye-watering crimes and adventures and banishment to the other side of the world, the idea being to gather some material for a future novel. As an aside, Oates isn't being entirely straight with his own wife Mary either, since he hasn't told her that he's been knocking off her sister Lizzie, who conveniently happens to live in the same house.
It turns out that Jack Maggs is particularly interested in the occupant of the house next door to Mr. Buckle's, one Henry Phipps - interested enough to break into the currently empty house and write a series of letters to him, letters whose content is sensitive enough that a series of subterfuges is deemed necessary including writing in invisible ink and in mirror writing. But why? And, come to that, why isn't Henry Phipps in his house where he could just be called upon and all this subterfuge avoided?
Part of Jack Maggs' agreement with Tobias Oates rests on Oates' acquaintance with a man called the Thief-Taker, someone who can supposedly track down anyone, upon handing over of an acceptable fee of course. Oates takes Maggs to where he can be found, which turns out to be Gloucester, a quick scoot down a couple of motorways lasting no more than a couple of hours in our glorious mechanised future, but a bumpy coach ride lasting several days in the 19th century.
While they are away a bit of intrigue plays out involving some of the other members of the Buckle household - fellow footman Edward Constable and housemaid Mercy Larkin. Constable knows Henry Phipps, it turns out, in the sense of knowing his current whereabouts (holed up at his club after getting wind of Jack Maggs' arrival), but also in the more Biblical sense of having indulged in a bit of highly irregular (for 1837 anyway) man-on-man bumsex activity with him in the past. Mercy has a similar sex-based arrangement with Mr. Buckle and is also a highly expert snoop and busybody and knows everyone's business, including Henry Phipps' and a good deal more of Jack Maggs' than he would like.
Oates and Maggs meet with the Thief-Taker and find him to be an obvious charlatan and mainly concerned with relieving them of a large sum of money, something Jack Maggs is very willing to murder rather than allow to happen. Having done a bit of slightly messy murdering in the back-room of an inn it then becomes necessary for Oates and Maggs to make good their escape, which they do by stealing a boat and escaping down the River Severn to Bristol, and thence back to London. During the course of this journey Oates reveals that not only is he having some personal issues with his wife and her sister, issues made more complicated recently by his having impregnated Lizzie, but moreover he too knows perfectly well where Henry Phipps is. Maggs, understandably a bit vexed by this, agrees not to kill Oates as long as he facilitates a meeting with Phipps, and moreover agrees to help Oates out of his current mess by acquiring some back-street abortion pills from one of his shady contacts.
And so we finally learn what Jack Maggs' connection to Henry Phipps is - Phipps, as a small orphaned child, offered some kindness to Maggs while he was being transported from place to place as a criminal, and, after he'd served his prison term in Australia and made his fortune, Maggs in return became Phipps' benefactor and allowed him to live in the house in Great Queen Street (which Maggs owns). After many years of anonymous benefactorship and providing Phipps with a regular income, Maggs, who has constructed a whole fantasy life for Phipps as a fine and upstanding gentleman, comes to England to gaze with pride upon his boy.
The trouble is that not only is the real-life Phipps a bit of a shit, he's also terrified of meeting with Maggs, whose fearsome reputation precedes him. Some of Phipps' associates persuade him that if a situation could be engineered where Phipps came upon Maggs unexpectedly in his house, he'd have a valid excuse to shoot him, thereby solving his problem and, as a bonus item, inheriting the house. And so the scene is set for a climactic showdown.
Just as with A Thousand Acres and Temples Of Delight it was only after I'd finished Jack Maggs and started looking for some background material online, in preparation for writing this blog post, that I discovered it's a very loose adaptation (a re-imagining, if you must) of another, older work, in this case Charles Dickens' Great Expectations. The character of Jack Maggs is based on the convict Abel Magwitch and Henry Phipps on the main protagonist Pip. As with the other two, I was not particularly familiar with the source material (I've never read any Dickens and only seen a few brief snippets of the 1946 David Lean/John Mills film) and to be honest that seems like a good thing in terms of my capacity to enjoy Jack Maggs as a stand-alone work in its own right, something (i.e. enjoy it) I did very much. It's definitely the best of the three Peter Carey novels I've read, Oscar And Lucinda and The Tax Inspector being the other two. It's not perfect, though: the plot device of having Jack write the secret letters to Henry (and thereby explain some background detail to the reader) is a bit clunky, and some reviewers were a bit grumpy about Carey being soft-hearted enough to allow Jack a happy ending, something I reckon most readers will have built up enough of a grudging regard for Jack to be fine with, though.
Jack Maggs won the Miles Franklin Award for Australian fiction in 1998, a prize previously won by a couple of Tim Winton books on this list, Cloudstreet and Breath. It's also the latest book on this list whose title is just the full name of its main protagonist. The most recent other example was Charlotte Gray whose review contains a list of the others (there are now, I think, five in total).
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