The creation of genius : Peter Carey's My life as a Fake

Peter Carey’s 2003 novel My Life as a Fake challenges received ideas about the nature of genius through the invention of a hoax poet, Bob McCorkle, whose poetry is considerably better than his inventor, Christopher Chubb. No stranger to works of fiction that draw on history or established literary texts, Carey incorporates Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as a textual skeleton, while the real life story of two Australian hoaxers from the 1940s, James McAuley and Harold Stewart, prove the historical guts and gizzard. To demonstrate Carey’s thinking – McAuley and Stewart ‘created’ Ern Malley as a deceased modernist poet and fooled the editor of the avant-garde Australian magazine Angry Penguins into publishing ‘The Darkening Ecliptic’, only for the poetry to live on, lauded as surrealism by such critics as Robert Hughes. In My Life as a Fake, McCorkle as hoax poet more literally comes to life, stealing Chubb’s daughter and making his life one of terror and pursuit, under the power of the monster let lose by his own pen.