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It's more fun, though, to catch the way ''Jack Maggs'' glints off Dickens's work and life. With its great forward rush of a narrative, the novel stands on its own as an adventure story, and can be read without reference to ''Great Expectations.'' The most alluring quality of ''Jack Maggs'' is also the simplest. The novel transforms Dickens's characters and his London into a fable about class, national identity and art: contemporary subjects dear to Carey, an Australian living in New York. In ''Jack Maggs,'' the bright 19th-century surface masks a world-weary 20th-century Life of Tristan Smith'' (a bleak, futuristic fantasy that owes much to the 18th-century ''Tristram Shandy'').

This is a strangely enticing combination, and it has become the hallmark of Carey's best work, informing such wildly different novels as ''Oscar and Lucinda'' (an antiromantic 19th-century romance) and ''The Unusual

In ''Jack Maggs,'' Carey creates a rousing old-fashioned narrative, and brings to it a distinctly modern, unromantic sensibility. There is more than chatter going on here. Though its hero claims that he got his name because his foster mother thought he chattered like a magpie, The thief who gave Pip his expectations, was surely a scoundrel turned magician.Īll these allusions and dozens more resonate through ''Jack Maggs,'' Peter Carey's wondrous, sly, Dickensian swirl of a novel.

In the 19th century ''to magg'' meant ''to pilfer,'' and Magwitch, The name resurfaced, slightly changed, for the convict Magwitch in ''Great Expectations,'' and proved a better fit. More on Peter Carey, from The New York Times ArchivesĮfore settling on David Copperfield as the name of his most autobiographical hero, Dickens called the character Thomas Mag, and the novel ''Mag's Diversions.'' Peter Carey's novel takes Dickens as a starting point, then turns the tables on some familiar characters.