Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Amnesia
    Amnesia
    Amnesia
    Audiobook11 hours

    Amnesia

    Written by Peter Carey

    Narrated by Colin McPhillamy

    3/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Peter Carey has won the Booker prize twice for his ventures into historical fiction, True History of the Kelly Gang and Oscar and Lucinda. Now the acclaimed Australian author is set to address a rather more contemporary situation. Amnesia is a thrilling and witty journey to the place where the cyber underworld of radicals and hackers collides with international power politics.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateJan 13, 2015
    ISBN9781490647531
    Amnesia

    More audiobooks from Peter Carey

    Related to Amnesia

    Related audiobooks

    Literary Fiction For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Kevin Barry

      Dec 18, 2020

      Rattling around the house in the County Sligo hills, swinging from bouts of paranoia to moments of strange, demented hilarity, a 900-page doorstopper was just what I needed to stay grounded. The post A Year in Reading: Kevin Barry appeared first on T

      2 min read

    • Article

      Minor Aesthetics: On Helen DeWitt’s ‘The English Understand Wool’

      Nov 17, 2022

      The story that 'The English Understand Wool' tells is a DeWittian distillate. The post Minor Aesthetics: On Helen DeWitt’s ‘The English Understand Wool’ appeared first on The Millions.

      7 min read

    • Article

      A Love Lost, Then Inexplicably Found

      Mar 28, 2022

      Our Wives Under the Sea is an arresting novel that moves quietly. Told from the alternating perspectives of Miri and her wife Leah, the story revolves around the mysterious after-effects of an undersea research mission gone awry. Julia Armfield seaml

      2 min read

    • Article

      Five Books We Missed in 2015

      Dec 15, 2015

      Five Books We Missed in 2015
      9 min read

    • Article

      Interlude

      Mar 28, 2022

      Interlude
      10 min read

    • Article

      Olga Tokarczuk Takes on the Detective Novel

      Aug 21, 2019

      In her hands, the whodunit becomes a Trojan horse to explore a whole host of concerns, including fate and how one life fits into the world around it. The post Olga Tokarczuk Takes on the Detective Novel appeared first on The Millions.

      9 min read

    • Article

      The Blue-collar Bard

      Jul 13, 2020

      The Blue-collar Bard
      13 min read

    • Article

      Bill Buford’s Stint in Hell’s Kitchen

      Mar 11, 2020

      Fourteen years after the bestselling Heat, former New Yorker fiction editor Bill Buford is back with another culinary adventure. The post Bill Buford’s Stint in Hell’s Kitchen appeared first on The Millions.

      5 min read

    • Article

      Two Poems by Charles Baudelaire

      Jun 9, 2020

      After my friend and I left the tobacco shop, he carefully sorted his loose change; slipped some small gold coins in his left jacket pocket; into the right went the silver pieces; in his left pants pocket, a handful of centimes; and in the right, a si

      2 min read

    • Article

      ‘Bitter, Gentle, Funny’: Irish Stars Unite To Celebrate Overlooked Poet Patrick Kavanagh

      Sep 18, 2022

      Patrick Kavanagh is one of Ireland’s most revered poets – a genius from a rural backwater who made the parochial universal. Yet his fame never really reached other shores. While William Butler Yeats and Seamus Heaney won Nobel prizes and were quoted

      2 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Amnesia

    3/5

    93 ratings15 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      After losing his umpteenth libel suit at the hands of the people who own Australia's mines, newspapers, politicians, and — it seems at that moment at least — judges, veteran journalist Felix also manages to estrange his wife and daughters and finds himself out on the street. He then gets shanghaied by his old college friend and party comrade Cecile into writing an apologia for her daughter Gaby, an environmentalist who has been arrested for computer hacking and seems to be at risk of extradition to the USA. This somehow takes Felix back into the history of the "Battle of Brisbane" — rioting caused by the presence of large numbers of US servicemen in Queensland in November 1942 — and the Constitutional Crisis of 1975, which Felix sees as a coup instigated by the CIA and Rupert Murdoch to frustrate Whitlam's policy of closing down US bases in Australia. He contrasts the committed direct action of Gaby and her friends with the ineffectual posturings of the left back then, divided as it was between middle-class hippies (like Felix and Cecile), socially-conservative trade unionists and pragmatic politicians.There's a lot of good stuff here about the evolution of Melbourne society in the 80s and 90s, and the running joke about the writer's ineffectiveness as an agent of political change is handled cleverly (and with a nice final twist), but Carey gets a bit too fascinated by the story of Gaby and her progress as a hacker, where he lets himself — or Felix on his behalf — be seduced by the jargon without really seeming to know what he's talking about.
    • 3/5
      Enjoyed all the interactions between Felix and Woody, but for everything else, I got lost. For me, a bit too much noise.
    • 3/5
      One of the most spectacularly mis-marketed novels of recent memory. Amnesia is supposedly about "the cyber underworld" and "international power politics." Yes. In much the same way that Pride and Prejudice is about the cyber underworld and international power politics.

      Carey actually wrote a book that's metafictional in a tedious way (journalist is ordered to write a portrait of a cyber-terrorist type... said portrait is the second half of the novel... can we trust him oh no author is unreliable who would have thought it). He combines ultra-realistic characters with funny caricatures (always fatal for a certain kind of reader; the kind who once read E. M. Forster's bit about round and flat characters, and just assumes that all characters must be "round"). And then (here tolls the death-knell for my interest in the book), instead of taking those perfectly bearable ingredients and whipping up a good spy thriller, he (or perhaps that ever unreliable author) serves us... a teenage love story. I don't give any shits.

      As I say, it's just possible that this is all meant to be metafictional, which makes it artistically and intellectually reputable: the journalist is separated from his wife, so of course he'll focus on the love story instead of the actually interesting parts of the story he's meant to be telling. And since Carey is just telling the story of the journalist, he has to tell that story, rather than the story that his readers want.

      None of which makes actually reading the second half of the book anything other than tedious. Quite a shame. On the upside, it's very readable, and at least he's trying to do something interesting.

      Oh, one small thing: Carey throws in a lot of Oz slang and geography and so on, and a lot of it felt pretty thin. Particularly thin was his reference to an Italian restaurant thirty kilometres East of Monash University. Carey went to Monash, briefly, but I went there for rather too long, and I assure you, if you are thirty kays east of Monash, you are in Port Phillip Bay, and nowhere near land, let alone any restaurants.
    • 4/5
      Peter Carey is one of my favorite writers and I enjoyed Amnesia. Unlike most of his books I had a hard time keeping track of this story line. The timeline was confusing and often, when the scene changed, it took some effort to figure out which characters were in play and how they got to where they were. It may have been a literary device used to underscore the displacement felt by the narrator of the story. If so, it worked.
    • 2/5
      Has anybody written a really good novel about the internet/social networking/hacking? Stephen King couldn't do it with Mr Mercedes where all the computer wizardry just slowed the story down. And Dave Eggers got carried away with a good idea in The Circle but then lost all narrative momentum.
      And now here's Peter Carey, another very good writer, who starts and ends with a story about teenagers hacking government and big business websites but fails to make it interesting (in fact, doesn't seem to be that interested in it himself). It's not helped by having a group of stock, uninteresting characters - boozy investigative journalist, sexy minor actress, ineffectual left-wing politician, rebellious teenage daughter.
      For me, the most interesting parts of the novel were the sections on the way Gough Whitlam's mid-1970s Australian government was brought down by the CIA and the British government and the flashbacks to the hostility by Australians to American G.I.s (especially black ones) based there during the Second World War. Either of those would have made a much better basis for the plot of a novel.
    • 4/5
      OK, I can see why some readers don't rate this, but I thought it was wonderful. Carey is at the peak of his powers here. Yes, he plays with voices, switches from 1st to 3rd person, moves back and forward in time, but he is so skilled that one hardly notices. It just all flows along with a kind of anticipating mystery. The characters (ALL of them) are finely drawn and there's plenty of action and suspense. I loved it.
    • 3/5
      Brilliant in parts, in others a little tedious.
    • 4/5
      The author need not apologise for writing a book about Australian political history, but he, and his editors, somehow repeatedly used "lead" as the past participle of the verb to lead.
    • 4/5
      An interesting look back at some forgotten episodes in Australia's recent history, framed by a modern-day computer crime story. A bit rambling in parts; and if you don't know anything about the events of 1975 it may have trouble keeping your interest.
    • 2/5
      found this book very confusing and hard to follow ,dissapointed
    • 3/5
      First book I have ever read from Peter Carey. I won this book in a giveaway for an honest review. Honestly I can say I got a little confused half way thru the book but things came around at the end.
    • 1/5
      I have been seeing this book make its way around the internet for a while. I was very excited to read this book. So you can imagine my excitement when I got my hands on a copy of this book. Ok, so I can see a slight glimmer of hope that this book could be but it was very brief and thus this book turned out to be a big disappointment to me. I really tried to like this book and give it a chance but that chance kept getting smaller and smaller. There was no drama/action that took place in the first fourteen chapters that I read. Even though the set up for the story was good. None of the characters had any life to them. They were just one dimensional. They did not draw me in. In fact as I kept read this story, I was falling asleep. Too much talking and not enough action. I needed some hardy meat to chew on to make this story good.
    • 4/5
      I enjoyed this a lot, although I can understand why those not familiar with Australian political history, and particularly Australian Labor history, might find it a bit of a challenge. Those not familiar with Australian idiom, particularly the idiom of the 70s and 80s might find some parts hard to understand as well. Australian language has changed a bit now, something Peter Carey, resident in New York, might not have noticed, and this gives some of the early passages of the book an old fashioned airGaby Bailleux is alleged to have released the angel worm virus, a virus which opens the doors of prisons, detention centres and the like in Australia and spreads to facilities run by the same private corporations in America. She is instantly branded a terrorist and goes into hiding to avoid potential deportation. Luckily for her, her mother is a well known actress, Celine Bailleux. Supported by Woody Townes, a rich property developer with murky motives, she believes the best way to defend her daughter is to commission a biography that will influence public opinion in her favourFelix Moore, an old school discredited left wing journalist, friend to Townes, former admirer if not actually boyfriend of Celine, is the man for the job. And the structure of the novel is based on Moore's attempts to find professional redemption for himself through writing a truthful history of Gaby and her familyThe book is divided into two sections. The first is in the voice of Felix Moore, his relationship with Celine and Woody and his attempts to meet Gaby and his writing of Celine's background and history - with references to the Battle of Brisbane, fought between US and Australian military personnel, and also to the Eddie Leonski case. In many ways this is the best part of the book; wartime Brisbane and the incendiary impact of American servicemen arriving in ramshackle Brisbane is beautifully evoked In the second part of the book the voice changes - for no obvious reason - to the third person, as Felix attempts to construct Gaby's story and innocence or otherwise from a series of tapes she has recorded for him. And again Carey is very convincing in describing an adolescence filled with family disharmony, misadventures with tragic consequences and the normal vicissitudes of teenage life leading her to find peace in the world of programming, hacking and environmental activism. Its hard not to sympathise with Gaby whilst at the same time feeling she needs someone to give her a good shake.Not everything in the book works though. As mentioned there is a change of voice halfway through which seems unnecessary. There is also an attempt to run a thread through the narrative of Australian / American conflict, from the Battle of Brisbane to the 1975 dismissal to American corporate behaviour today. This isn't very convincing though; especially as most of the players in the 1975 dismissal, even those on the left, have long since dismissed the idea that there was any active CIA involvement .The ending is unsatisfactory too. Its almost as though Carey had a deadline to hit and didn't quite know how to tie the threads together. The method he chooses didn't really work for me and actually served to break the connection I had created with Gaby and Celine. I was also puzzled by the motivation of Townes - I don't think we ever got to the bottom of his characterBut never the less, although not perfect, I enjoyed the book a lot, especially Celine and Gaby's stores. Its also Peter Carey's pean to Melbourne - with the inner Northern suburbs of Calrton, Coburg and Parkville and the contrasts between them - 10 minutes apart by bike but completely different worlds - again beautifully evoked. As a former Brunswick resident I really enjoyed the role that the suburbs of Melbourne, almost a character in their own right, play in this
    • 3/5
      Not my favourite Peter Carey. An interesting idea, a bit Wikileaks. Something happens in the second half and the voice changes which I found disconcerting.
    • 2/5
      It had been a long time since I last read a book by Peter Carey and it will be even longer before I read another. It seems difficult to believe that the author of such marvellous novels as 'Oscar and Lucinda' or 'The Illywhacker' could also have produced the trial by ordeal that this book represented. I think Heracles was let off lightly though reading this did sometimes feel like cleaning the Augean Stables with a broken pitchfork.I readily acknowledge that, like all too many Britons, I am lamentably ignorant of Australian history, and the publisher's blurb for 'Amnesia' sounded very enticing. The reader is promised a tantalising combination of a contemporary plot based around an up-to-the-minute digital crime that sparks an international terrorism alert, with more than a nod towards the plights of Edward Snowden or Julian Assange, and a recapitulation of darker elements of twentieth century Australian history involving largely-suppressed stories of clashes with America.As the novel opens, Felix Moore, a left-leaning political journalist is about to be found guilty of libel, resulting in the imposition of punitive damages and a requirement that all copies of his offending book should be destroyed. Returning home he finds that his publisher has already sent several cases of his book to his house, for him to arrange destruction. Not thinking clearly Moore decides to burn the guilty works but, owing to his terminal lack of practicability, he also manages to burn down much of his house. His wife does not take this well and departs back to her family, leaving him to fend for himself. Apparent salvation comes from one of his lifelong friends, Woody Townes, an immensely rich property developer, who commissions Moore to write a biography of Gaby Ballieux. She has just been identified as responsible for the release of a computer worm which resulted in electronically controlled prisons across Australia releasing their inmates. The impact spread far beyond Australia, however, as many of the prisons affected were run by an American firm, and the worm compromised its systems back home, resulting in the release of many American criminals too. Ballieux is immediately branded an international terrorist and the USA demands her extradition to face trial on potentially capital charges. Townes believes that the prompt publication of an engaging biography of Ballieux might help to crystallise a sufficiently vocal campaign to prevent her extradition. This scenario certainly sounds promising, and in the hands of the Carey of the 1980s would have led to a compelling and engaging book that one might have struggled to put down. Sadly, though, the gripping prose and fluid plotting of 'Oscar and Lucinda' seems to have evaporated. Carey's unyielding current style seems to have pounded any semblance of enjoyment out of the book leaving an unfocused, inchoate shambles. I would welcome a dose of amnesia to excise the memory of this book from my mind.