Theft: A Love Story

From AudioFile Peter Carey's characters are always dodgy and unreliable. In Theft, Michael Boone is a once-famous Australian painter now out of fashion and fresh out of prison. He lives in a backwater, taking care of a former collector's property and his autistic savant brother, Hugh. Beautiful, manipulative Marlene wants to resurrect Michael's career. But is it all a cover for getting a missing painting out of the country? Simon Vance develops a hardscrabble Australian accent for Michael that is completely authentic, with his belligerence, arrogance, and obsession perfectly rendered; we understand Michael, but we don't like him much. Vance deals with the significant challenge of making Hugh believable--both "slow-witted" and linguistically playful--by developing a booming voice that expresses both independence and impairment. A.B. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine Product Description From the two-time Booker Prize-winning author and recipient of the Commonwealth Prize comes this new novel about obsession, deception, and redemption, at once an engrossing psychological suspense story and a work of highly charged, fiendishly funny literary fiction. Michael-a.k.a. "Butcher"-Boone is an ex-"really famous" painter: opinionated, furious, brilliant, and now reduced to living in the remote country house of his biggest collector and acting as caretaker for his younger brother, Hugh, a damaged man of imposing physicality and childlike emotional volatility. Alone together they've forged a delicate and shifting equilibrium, a balance instantly destroyed when a mysterious young woman named Marlene walks out of a rainstorm and into their lives on three-inch Manolo Blahnik heels. Beautiful, smart, and ambitious, she's also the daughter-in-law of the late great painter Jacques Liebovitz, one of Butcher's earliest influences. She's sweet to Hugh and falls in love with Butcher, and they reciprocate in kind. And she sets in motion a chain of events that could be the making-or the ruin-of them all. Told through the alternating points of view of the brothers-Butcher's urbane, intelligent, caustic observations contrasting with Hugh's bizarre, frequently poetic, utterly unique voice-Theft reminds us once again of Peter Carey's remarkable gift for creating indelible, fascinating characters and a narrative as gripping as it is deliriously surprising. From Publishers Weekly Vance splits the difference between Cockney and Aussie in his reading of Carey's tale of art and family. At times, he sounds significantly like Michael Caine in his broad working-class tones, elongating his vowels in an English version of a Southern drawl. For other characters, the Australian in Vance wins out, likely reminding American listeners of Crocodile Dundee or the narrator in those Foster's beer commercials. Vance pulls off both styles admirably in reading Carey's book about two brothers, one a painter and the other a childlike innocent, who are drawn into stealing paintings belonging to the father-in-law of a beautiful stranger. Vance does a credible job of echoing the half-tempo cadences of the impaired Slow Bones, bringing the hurtling pace of his reading to a relative halt each time he wrestles with his dialogue, imitating Slow Bones's thick-tongued efforts to translate thought into speech. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Review "A feisty ironic comedy.... The author's mastery of details of artists' lives and the racy energy of his prose...make this edgy, irreverent, often hilariously profane novel soar.... A certifiable hoot." ---Kirkus About the Author Peter Carey is the author of nine novels, including the Booker Prize-winning Oscar and Lucinda and True History of the Kelly Gang.Simon Vance, a former BBC Radio presenter and newsreader, is a full-time actor who has appeared on both stage