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Here is a review of The Tax Inspector that I originally posted to MeFi Books. more…

It seems to me that the central theme in The Tax Inspector is abuse.

Of course abuse was explicit in the story, but I also felt it was brought out through some fairly clumsy metaphors and motifs. I guess if Carey subscribes to Hemingway’s theory that a story should be like an iceberg with the majority below the surface, he also thinks that it should have a neon sign blinking, screaming ICEBERG * ICEBERG * ICEBERG just in case you missed it.

I suppose for my sake it’s a good thing he did choose to club us over the head because through most of the story I have to confess to thinking it was (or maybe hoping it was) about something else. I’m not sure, but think that may have come as a result of an ongoing series of deliberate misdirections on the
part of the author.

One of the first examples of this was on page 8 of my edition where we are first introduced to Granny Catchprice’s doll collection:

“[…] but the truth was she could not even look at the dolls, their condition upset her so. She would walk into the room and look up towards the neon tubes, or down towards the white-flecked carpet. She ducked, dodged, avoided. She always sat at one place at her dining table, with her back hard against the case of dolls. The glass on the case was smeared. Sometimes it became all clouded up with condensation and the dolls had streaks of mould and mildew which, at a distance, looked like facial hair.”

My problem is that passage immediately follows an initial description of Granny as an old tough thing who doesn’t like to think of herself as an old tough thing. So we’re set up through standard montage editing (a + b = c) to equate the dolls and their decay with Granny aging. She knows she’s growing older, but she turns her back on it. I’m thinking this is an interesting take on something like Wilde’s The Portrait of Dorian Gray. But, rather than hiding our evil and the corruptions of time from the public, here it’s on display for the world to see. All the world that is except Granny who chooses to deliberately hide it from herself, to literally and figuratively turn her back to it.

So, for the next 3/4’s of the book, I’m trying to force it into this theme of self-deception. But, there are all these lose ends that are driving me crazy because they just don’t fit. It’s like trying to build a crossword puzzle around a first word “love” when it should have been “hate”. You’re ruined from the start. I suspect as I said that this was deliberate.

This didn’t just happen in metaphor. It happened a lot in the narrative as well. Throughout the book, we’re continually told that people are one thing, then later find out they are something else.
It’s actually a little suggestive of Kurosawa’s Rashomon. Except that it’s never so clear in this book that we’re seeing the perspective of the character. It seems to be the author who is describing the characters the way the characters see themselves.

It’s fine if people want to lie to themselves, but I’m not used to authors lying to me. You trust the author’s narrative voice, and if it continually betrays you, then you don’t know what to believe. It’s like you’re on quicksand. Compare that to the family, to parents that should be loving. If they betray that and abuse you, then you can never quite get your footing.

I think this was a deliberate abuse by the author intended to invoke parallels to the characters in the story. It’s also possible
I’m just inventing all of that. Did other people feel the same sense of not knowing what to trust? If it was deliberate, then what do you think of that as a device?

I don’t want to monopolize the conversation too much more.

There is a lot more to talk about with this book. In particular, what do you all think Carey wants to say about abuse? When Benny’s mother discovers the abuse, she tries to shoot the father and ends up hitting the boy. Explosives give Granny a sense of personal power, and in the end, when she is forced to confront the abuse, she blows up the car lot. I think you could make the case that the car lot is a metaphor for the family. Is Carey saying the only way break the cycle is to violently break the family?

What do you think of Maria’s interlude with Jack Catchprice? The tone for that portion of the book certainly seemed to change. It was actually the only part of the book I really enjoyed. What’s going on there? Is it related to an earlier scene where Granny gives Maria one of the dolls that had been corrupted by the noxious fumes of the car lot?

There are several references to people looking like their parents.
In fact Benny transforms himself and ends up looking exactly like his mother. Does that have any meaning to the story?