Book Reviews - Review 36

A heavily pregnant tax inspector comes to audit a failing garage in a small town near Sydney. The family that runs the garage, the Catchprices, is largely dysfunctional and riven by internal antipathies. Most deranged of all its members is the teenaged Benny, who lives in a waterlogged cellar and is trying to become, simultaneously, a car salesman and an angel. Entering into the story late on is Jack Catchprice, a rich property developer and the one member of the family who - on the surface at least - has managed to put his miserable early environment behind him.

I didn't know quite how to take this novel. At first it seemed a study in social realism, but gradually it acquired a grotesque and rather surreal character - an obvious comparison is with Ian McEwan's The Cement Garden. Like the latter novel, The Tax Inspector is well-paced and (for the most part) disturbingly convincing at the psychological level. A less happy similarity, though, is a certain flavour of meretriciousness about it: one doesn't come away with any sense of a message having been conveyed.

We get a glimpse of social commentary, as Maria the tax inspector, idealistically committed to the welfare state, comes into contact with Sydney's substantially corrupt high society and finds it uncomfortably appealing. But this strand is never fully developed and in no way ties in with the central thread of the narrative, which traces the dying throes of the Catchprice family business.

I guess you could say the novel is broadly about disappointed hopes, but that seems almost accidental - you feel what Carey really wanted to do was revel in the seedy psychological worlds of the characters. Which is fine, but I feel the book would therefore have been better as an all-out, unpretentious psychological thriller, without the narrative byways and background filling-in that hint at more "literary" ambitions.

It didn't surprise me to find out after reading this novel that Carey was once a high flier in advertising: there's flair here, but little real depth, and little real heart either.