SOURCE: "An E-Ticket Ride," in Los Angeles Times Book Review, February 5, 1995, pp. 3, 8.

In the review below, Eder comments favorably on The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith, but finds the second half of the novel less compelling than the first.

If the 17th-Century Dutch hero, Admiral Tromp, had used a bigger broom—he attached it to his mast to signal that he was about to sweep the English from the seas—perhaps our world would have resembled the one set out in Peter Carey's prickly futurist fantasy. In The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith, the era's dominant military, economic and cultural empire resembles the United States in a number of ways, except that its heritage, like that of white South Africa, is not British but Dutch.

The empire is called Voorstand. It is a vast continental realm, run by a moneyed class that speaks a kind of Dutch-Afrikaans patois...