The Joys of Glass and Gambling OSCAR AND LUCINDA

By Paul Gray

The year is 1866, and an English governess consigned to doleful duty in a remote Australian backwater has her thoughts interrupted by a preposterous vision: "She was running through her list of unsatisfactory or irritating or boorish suitors when she saw a church made from glass towed into her field of vision by two men in wide straw hats." This is no hallucination. The crystalline minicathedral that floats into view, with a framework of iron, measures 50 ft. in length and 22 ft. 6 in. across. It weighs twelve tons.

By the time the governess beholds the church, Australian Author Peter Carey's third novel has begun to build to a spectacular finish. But none of the surprises to come are any more outlandish than the trail of circumstances and coincidences that have led up to them. Like the glass structure it celebrates, Oscar and Lucinda seems the stuff of shimmering, transparent fantasy, held together by the struts of 19th century history and the mullions of painstaking detail. The book does not, of course, weigh twelve tons, but it will seem substantial enough to readers unable to put it down.

Carey's title provides an answer to the first and most obvious question: Who on earth would go to the considerable trouble of making a glass church materialize in the Australian outback? Why, Oscar and Lucinda, naturally. But who are (or were) they, what brought them together, and why did they conceive such a pointless, improbable dream? Explanations, as the author supplies them, grow ever less simple and more entertaining.

Oscar, for openers, is the sole surviving child of a widower named Theophilus Hopkins, a naturalist renowned for his studies along the rugged English coast of Devon and a fire-breathing evangelical preacher. The lad eventually tastes a Christmas pudding, strictly forbidden by his father's severe regimen, is punished and rebels. He leaves home, settles in with the local Anglican minister, and eventually enters Oriel College, Oxford, to study < for holy orders in the Church of England. Unfortunately, no one has seen fit to pay his way -- not his impoverished adoptive father and certainly not his real one, who views an Oxford education as "sending his only son into the everlasting hellfire." Oscar's financial salvation comes when a well-to-do classmate looking for company knocks on his door by accident and then remarks, "I say, Odd Bod, do you like a flutter?" Slowly, Oscar realizes that he is being invited to bet on horses at Epsom Downs. He would indeed like a flutter: "He knew that God would give him money at the races."

While Oscar is successfully mastering and profiting from the odds, half a world away Lucinda Leplastrier finds herself orphaned in New South Wales. Her parents' experimental farm has been subdivided and sold by her legal guardian, leaving her with an inheritance of more than (pounds)10,000 and the freedom to move to the colonial metropolis of Sydney, where she buys one of the first things she sees, the Prince Rupert's Glassworks. Lucinda's purchase is not entirely impulsive; she has already come under the spell of glass, with the conviction "that it is invisible, solid, in short, a joyous and paradoxical thing, as good a material as any to build a life from." The unconventional young factory owner soon finds another obsession in the freewheeling world of Sydney: the joy of playing cards in particular and of gambling in general.

Carey's next trick is to bring these two similarly addicted but far-flung young people together. Lucinda journeys to London, where she consults with the designer of the Crystal Palace, the glass-and-iron housing for the famed Exhibition of 1851, about new directions her factory should take. Oscar, meanwhile, successfully out of Oxford and teaching school, has begun to feel that his method of raising money, while not in itself sinful, has inspired unholy passions in his soul. He longs, in short, to bet on everything. So, on the toss of a coin, he decides that he has been chosen to "bring the word of Christ to New South Wales." He and Lucinda take the same ship out to Sydney.

The meeting of these strong-willed, lethal innocents is at first a comedy of errors. She, seeing his clerical garb, feels obliged to ask Oscar to hear her confession, even though that is the last thing she wants. He, shy, seasick, and terrified of the ocean view he knows he must face through her first-class porthole, reluctantly drags himself to his duty. He listens: "She confessed that she had attended rooms in Drury Lane for the purposes of playing fan- tan." He leaps to her, and his, defense: "Our whole faith is a wager, Miss Leplastrier . . . we bet that there is a God. We bet our life on it."

And suppose they are wrong? On the surface, at least, the events that ripple forth from the meeting of Oscar and Lucinda strongly suggest that possibility. Carey slowly, almost imperceptibly, introduces tragedy into his narrative. For all their individual charms, his hero and heroine have a way of both exalting and destroying everything and everyone around them, including each other. And behind their individual fates lies another, equally ambiguous story, which may be either the arrival of civilization in a barbarous land or the destruction of an Edenic world by pompous, ignorant invaders. Like the best fiction, Oscar and Lucinda does not require a choice between its alternative visions. It offers instead an enchanting contradiction, a mirror and a glass, a joyous reflection of how much and how little mere mortals are ever allowed to see.