From Goodreads:

Irene Bobs loves fast driving. Her husband is the best car salesman in western Victoria. Together they enter the Redex Trial, a brutal race around the ancient continent over roads no car will ever quite survive.

With them is their lanky fair-haired navigator, Willie Bachhuber, a quiz show champion and failed schoolteacher whose job it is to call out the turns, the grids, the creek crossings on a map that will finally remove them, without warning, from the lily-white Australia they know so well.

This thrilling, high-speed story starts in one way and then takes you someplace else. It is often funny, the more so as the world gets stranger, and always a page-turner, even as you learn a history these characters never knew themselves. Set in the 1950s amid the consequences of the age of empires, this brilliantly vivid and lively novel reminds us how Europeans took possession of a timeless culture – the high purpose they invented and the crimes they committed along the way.

Peter Carey has twice won the Booker Prize for his explorations of Australian history. A Long Way from Home is his late-style masterpiece.

A Review

An amazing and thoroughly Australian narrative (or narratives really). There a two if not three stories being told here by Carey and substantially, due to his immense skill, it almost works as a whole. While it would have been nice to have completed the tale about the Redex story and the Bobs, it was clearly just a carry bag for the real issues he wanted us to be confronted with – indigenous racism in early and recent Australia and the equally insidious female discrimination that he believes was/is rampant in outback and urban Australia. He interweaves these profound issues over and over throughout the book.

Whether you agree with his points of view or not, he makes solid impressions on the reader of the injustices people suffer at the hands of those who hold power over them. Mind you he does deliver some rough justice back to them at times. The indigenous dialogues are challenging to follow if one is quick reading but the depth of research he has undertaken is apparent and for those wondering about indigenous story and culture there is much to be gained.

Scattered throughout the book are a multitude of Australian iconic scenes and behaviors reminiscent of early writers like Katherine Prichard’s “Coonardoo” and others. He even gives old Banjo Patterson a nod.

Overall it is an impressive if at times difficult read with multiple points of view well handled and provided with rich characterizations.

Here is a small redex example – enjoy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BoQYM7TOnLI