The Catchprices; a lowlife Australian family all of whom have been sexually abused by their father. They run a second hand car sales business out of some urban sprawl industrial area on the outskirts of Sidney. They are being investigated by Maria Takis a heavily pregnant tax office official. The abusive father is dead, his 86 year old wife Frieda still lives with the family and carries around a block of gelignite in her handbag. The youngest son Benny; lives in a filthy basement below the workshops and is mentally disturbed, Vish his elder brother has become a member of the local Hare Krishna group while Cathy the eldest daughter is a member of a Country music band, but feels tied to the business and dares not go on the road. Its all bat shit crazy.

The story follows Maria's three day investigation. It is obvious that Cathy and her husband Howie have been fiddling their tax returns. Maria the tax inspector is resentful at having to investigate such a crummy enterprise, she is used to dealing with much smarter and richer operators. Benny wants to fuck Maria, Frieda wants to blow up the business, Vish does not want to get drawn back into the nightmare family, Uncle Jack a successful property dealer appears on the scene and fall in love with Maria, Sarkis desperate for a job is hired by Frieda and is tortured by Benny, resentful at being fired by his sister: the craziness goes on and on and on..................................

The plot builds to a violent crescendo and although I get that this is a satire of sorts, it is written so graphically and exuberantly; with enough realism that makes it seem all too feasible for this reader. It is certainly not a good take on Australia or on humanity as a whole and for me it felt like the author was enjoying a little too much the shit show that he was depicting. Ugh not for me, but three stars for the quality of the writing. ( )

I’m not a Carey fan; I think he’s overrated. But I did enjoy this early work. ( )

Imaginative but depressing and, in the end, it seems pointless. Not my cup of tea. ( )

En skruvad historia med många minst sagt annorlunda karaktärer. Trots allt läsvärd och trovärdig i alla stolligheter. ( )

Peter Carey is one of those authors whose personal life seeps into their writing in interesting, identifiable ways. His years working for an advertising agency and then living on a hippie commune in Queensland are very evident in Bliss, and the fact that his parents owned a car dealership in a small town can be seen in Illywhacker, where Herbert Badgery spends much of his time in the 1920s selling Fords to farmers. It’s even more relevant in The Tax Inspector, which revolves around the Catchprice family and their failing auto dealership in the outer suburbs of Sydney in the early 1990s.

It’s tempting to say that Peter Carey is a hit or miss author depending on whether he’s writing historical fiction or not; I loved Illywhacker, Oscar and Lucinda and True History of the Kelly Gang, all of which are historical novels, but didn’t like Bliss and was indifferent to The Tax Inspector. But I feel like that must be a coincidence, because there’s something lacking from the writing which has nothing to do with the era in which it’s set. The Tax Inspector rambles along a series of unlikely events and unbelievable characters in the same way that an early Michael Chabon or Jonathon Lethem novel might, and no single passage of prose holds the same sticking power as Ned Kelly and his changeling host in True History of the Kelly Gang, or the Aboriginal tribe discovering and keeping Lucinda’s shards of glass in the aftermath of a massacre in Oscar and Lucinda. It doesn’t feel like it amounts to something worthwhile in the same way that even one of his middling novels like Jack Maggs does.

The Tax Inspector is not a bad novel but not a great one either. If I didn’t know any better – if you gave me his books and asked me to arrange them in chronological order – I’d say The Tax Inspector feels much more like a sophomore novel Carey might have written after Bliss, rather than a follow-up to the literary powerhouses that actually precede it. ( )