SOURCE: Hensher, Philip. “Great Expectations Disappointed.” Spectator 279, no. 8825 (20 September 1997): 36, 38.

In the following review, Hensher appreciates the control Carey employs while writing the characters in Jack Maggs but argues that Carey's abrupt prose style clashes with the subtlety of Charles Dickens's Great Expectations, the novel on which Jack Maggs is loosely based.

Jack Maggs is something of a disappointment, but the reader's disappointment is rather a compliment to Peter Carey than anything else. It contains so many excellent things; its constrained and stifling atmosphere is so distinctive that, in the end, it only disappoints because it feels so much smaller than its splendid predecessors. It tries to do one thing, and succeeds in its confined ambition. The best of Carey's other novels—Bliss, Oscar and Lucinda and The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith—seem to establish what they want to do only as they progress, and leave the uncontainable...