Question 1

Why does Oscar and Lucinda involve a glass church?

Accepted Answer

The glass church is Oscar and Lucinda's great gamble — a bet that concentrates all the novel's themes in a single image. Oscar is a man of enormous faith and no common sense, whose religious vocation coexists with an addiction to gambling that he understands as a form of submission to God's will; Lucinda is a woman of enormous practical intelligence and entrepreneurial ambition in a society that will not allow women to exercise either, who has channeled her energy into a glass-and-iron factory that produces the materials for the church. The bet — that they can transport a prefabricated glass church from Sydney to the remote Outback mission at Bellingen — is their declaration of love and their destruction simultaneously. The church is also a religious image: its transparency represents Oscar's faith, its fragility represents both Oscar and Lucinda's temperaments, and its final destination in the Outback represents the collision of European religion with Australian wilderness. The Reverend Dennis Hasset, for whom the church is destined, never asked for it; its transportation is entirely the product of Oscar and Lucinda's passionate excess.

Question 2

How accurate is Oscar and Lucinda's historical setting?

Accepted Answer

Oscar and Lucinda is historical fiction in the mode of careful research rather than invention: the novel's depiction of Victorian religious culture, colonial Australia, and the social conditions of the 1860s and 1870s is grounded in extensive historical knowledge. Carey researched the glass and iron construction techniques that make Lucinda's factory plausible, the evangelical religious culture of both England and Australia in which Oscar's faith is formed, and the conditions of the Australian frontier into which the church must travel. At the same time, the novel is not primarily interested in historical accuracy as such — it uses the nineteenth-century setting as a laboratory for examining the themes of faith, chance, and self-destruction that are its true subject. The narrator of the novel claims to be descended from Oscar and Lucinda, which gives the historical material a personal dimension and allows Carey to comment on the relationship between historical narration and family myth.

Question 3

What is Peter Carey's connection to Australian identity?

Accepted Answer

Peter Carey is one of Australia's most internationally acclaimed novelists and also one of its most persistent critics: his work is as interested in Australia's colonial violence, its relationship to Britain, and its national self-mythology as it is in celebrating Australian culture. Oscar and Lucinda is, among other things, a novel about colonialism — about the arrival of British culture (embodied in Oscar's glass church and Lucinda's factory) in a landscape that does not want it and the violence that this arrival produces. The journey through the Outback, and particularly the confrontation with the Indigenous people the party encounters, makes the novel's colonial critique explicit; the glass church, brought to a mission at the end of a forced march, is a monument to cultural imposition. Carey has lived in New York for many years — a detail that some Australian critics have found significant in relation to the detachment with which he views Australian culture and history.

Oscar and Lucinda Reading Order

Complete Oscar and Lucinda Book List