284
PEARL
K.
BELL
into the ground, is mad, bad, and dangerous to know. Grandma is a
gaga octogenarian, who hoards explosives in her purse and knows how
to use them. All she ever wanted was a flower farm, "but what she got
instead was the smell of rubber radiator hoses, fan belts, oil, grease, petrol
vapour ... overdrafts and customers whose bills ran 90, 120 days past
due." Her middle-aged daughter Cathy, who worships Elvis Presley,
lon~
to escape from the car business and become a famous country-and–
western singer despite her dismal lack of talent. Grandma's son Mort is a
pervert who sexually abused his son Benny when the boy was only three,
and Benny has grown into a repulsive sixteen-year-old creep who "had
been in trouble with almost everything, lying, cheating, truancy, shop–
lifting, selling bottled petrol for inhalation. . . . " His favorite pastime is
thinking up grisly forms of torture, when he isn't listening to his "self–
actualization" cassettes. And his brother Johnny, who has joined the
Hare Krishnas, is recurrently lured back to the foul bosom of his family
by Grandma's pleas for help. Only Jack Catchprice, Grandma's eldest
son, a sleek, successful businessman in Sydney, has managed to escape the
family trap of defeat, and the dilapidated house behind the dealership.
Into this grotesque oubliette arrives Maria, an auditor for the Aus–
tralian tax department - beautiful, hugely pregnant, and unmarried -
who takes her job with stern, uncompromising seriousness: she hates
people who fiddle with their taxes, especially the rich who brag about
their loopholes, and she stalks their transgressions with an iron will. She
soon realizes that both the Catchprice business and the family are in a
hopeless state of dishevelment and self-destruction, but she is determined
to do her job and, against her better judgment, becomes insidiously
involved with the awful clan as she keeps returning in a futile effort to
inspect the books.
Throughout the mare's-nest plot of
The Tax Inspector,
it's clear that
Peter Carey intends the soberly conscientious Maria to serve as the moral
counterbalance' - the sane figure of reality - to Catchprice decrepitude
and madness; every member of this tribe is skewed in some terribly irre–
versible way, from nutty Grandma to the diabolical Benny. Yet although
we can understand the role Carey means Maria to play in his scheme, she
never becomes a convincingly realized character. Although Peter Carey
claimed, in a recent interview, that the original impulse behind this novel
was his outrage against the cheating rich, what really interests him is the
trashiness of Australian low life represented by the Catchprices. Carey is a
master of the smirk-and-snigger school of black comedy, and for this he
pulls out all the stops.
He is inordinately attentive to the prevailing junk and detritus of
Australian life, the demented illusions of people like the Catchprices, in
all their twisted nastiness. He is uncannily alert to smells and manages to
