Books: The truth is out there, somewhere

Peter Carey's characters spring from the page in Amnesia.

When a computer virus hacks into the Australian prison system in 2010, it also infects the American corporations that licensed the software. The virus spreads like bushfire, releasing not only asylum seekers across Australia, but also unlocking thousands of American correctional facilities and prisons.

The hacker responsible - "Angel", aka Gabrielle Baillieux - is the 30-year-old golden daughter of an actress and a left-wing MP. Born into bohemian comfort in a Melbourne suburb, she'd grown up becoming "precocious in the way you might expect". Had she meant to cause this much damage? Her backers say yes, arguing that Angel's crime was political, a deliberate attack on the United States. Her mother says no, hoping Gaby won't be extradited to face the death penalty.

The man hired to write Gaby's story is Felix Moore, a shambolic journalist who describes himself as "a socialist and a servant of the truth" but whose daughters attend private schools and whose colleagues know him as "Moore-or-less correct".

Felix is in no doubt that Gaby's actions were political, what he calls "retaliation" for "the events of 1975" when Australia's Labor government was dismissed in what he thinks was a US-backed coup.

In this, as in so many other endeavours, Felix is bankrolled by his old mate Woody Townes, a corpulent property developer who has something going with Gaby's beautiful mother Celine - the first love of Felix's life. Woody installs Felix in an apartment with a laptop and amphetamines, and Celine promises that crucial face-to-face interview with Gaby.

But, when his copy becomes the victim of its own hack, Felix is whisked away to ever more secret locations until he ends up in a wooden shack in the boonies, gouging out Gaby's story on a typewriter.

Peter Carey's 13th novel, Amnesia, is at once rich with promise yet maddeningly elusive, like a page of computer code that only occasionally resolves into English. Its story is fascinating and confusing, specific and disparate. There's geopolitics and cybercrime, America's hegemony and Australia's cultural cringe, mothers and daughters, husbands and wives.

Some characters spring from the page, such as the magnificent Woody, like "a Gilray engraving - indulgence, opinion, power". Others, like Gaby's fellow hackers and activists, shuffle on and shuffle off like low-res avatars. Punctuation is erratic and wilful. If you got on with Carey's early novel Illywacker (1985) and the Booker Prize-winner The True Story of the Kelly Gang (2000), you'll get on with this. But if you were hoping for something more like Oscar and Lucinda (1988), you might be disappointed.

The title refers to what Felix calls Australia's amnesia about the United States, not just in the events of 1975 but also in the Battle of Brisbane, 1942, when Australian soldiers fought US servicemen in the streets: "We were naive, of course. We continued to think of the Americans as our friends and our allies ... It never occurred to us that they would murder our democracy. So when it happened, in plain sight, we forgot it right away."

The novel throngs with real-life Australians of all stripes - from the dismissed premier Gough Whitlam to the extant media baron Rupert Murdoch - but there is no mention of the most pertinent Australian of all - WikiLeaks founder and former hacker Julian Assange, son of an artist and an activist.

There are further intriguing parallels: Carey was, like Felix, the son of a car salesman, from the same suburb, Bacchus Marsh. But, unlike Felix, Carey has not been tempted to ghostwrite any memoirs; maybe this novel is a way of imagining that nightmare scenario.

There are gripping passages: Celine's back story, her conception at the time of the Battle of Brisbane, and Felix's quest to identify her father, are all compelling. And the account of Gaby's childhood is sensitive and nuanced, showing how activists grow against the push and pull of family.

In contrast, elsewhere the novel is befuddling, such as when Felix is transcribing tapes for his book: who is talking to whom, about what, is anyone's guess. This goes beyond the necessarily opaque world of techno-geekery and its attendant lingo. It is a kind of posture, that those who need to will understand, and those who can't don't matter anyway.

Amnesia
by Peter Carey
(Hamish Hamilton $40)