A little bit of literature

“It would not be apparent to anyone watching Oscar Hopkins that this was a young man who had sworn off gambling now he had no further ‘use’ for it. His views seemed not only passionate but firmly held. So even if you had not agreed with him, you would not have doubted his conviction. 

Lucinda had no idea that she had witnessed a guilty defence*. She thought all sorts of things, but not this. She thought what a rare and wonderful man he was. She thought she should not be alone with him in her cabin. She thought they might play cards. She thought: I could marry, not him, of course not him, but I could marry someone like him. There was a great lightness in her soul. 

‘Every instant,’ he said. 

She felt she knew him. She imagined not only his passion for salvation, but his fear of damnation. She saw the fear that would take him ‘before dawn.’ It was a mirror she looked at, a mirror and window both. 

‘That such a God,’ said Oscar, ‘knowing the anguish and the trembling hope with which we wager …’ He stopped then, looking with wonder at his shaking hands. This shaking was caused by the fervour* of his beliefs as he revealed them, but there was another excitement at work—that produced by the open, admiring face of Miss Leplastrier. ‘That such a God can look unkindly on a chap wagering a few quid on the likelihood of a dumb animal crossing a line first, unless,’ (and here it seemed he would split his lips with the pleasure of his smile, which was, surely, caused more by Lucinda’s admiring face than by the new thought which had just, at that moment, taken possession of him) ‘unless—and no one has ever suggested such a thing to me—it might be considered blasphemy to apply to common pleasure that which is by its very nature divine.’” 

Vocabulary build-up

The words defence and fervour are written in British English. In American English they would have been written defense and fervor.

The noun wager means “a matter bet on; a gamble; something that is staked on an uncertain outcome; a bet.”

In this context, the noun quid means “slang British for a pound sterling.”

Comments

Peter Carey is one of the most prestigious Australian writers and is known for featuring the surreal in his short stories and novels. However, “Oscar and Lucinda” is more realistic and has a sharp humor throughout the story. Carey received the Booker Prize in 1988 and 2001 for “Oscar and Lucinda” and “True History of the Kelly Gang”, respectively. “Oscar and Lucinda” is a satire about two ill-fated lovers that takes place in the mid-nineteenth century. Oscar Hopkins is a contradictory British man, both devoted and corrupt. He was raised by a strict, religious father, but he abandons his father's religion in favor of Anglicanism. Then he spends the rest of his life wondering if his decision has damned his soul to hell, as his father believes. Oscar further endangers his soul when he takes up gambling while in divinity school, but he justifies his vice by philosophizing that believing in God is a gamble anyway. Meanwhile, over in Australia, Lucinda, a young lady with feminist sympathies and a large inheritance, is also becoming addicted to gambling. “Oscar and Lucinda”, being a love story, has a pattern implied in its title. The two characters grow up, in the novel's early chapters, thousands of miles apart, but are destined to be brought together. Groups of chapters alternate between England and Australia as, we suppose, the paths of Oscar and Lucinda move to some unlikely intersection. Oscar, now a clergyman, embarks on a mission to bring Christianity to Australia. Lucinda is on the same ship because, having visited London more or less in search of a husband, she has given up hope and decided to return. Religion is their ostensible bond: Lucinda seeks Oscar to hear her confession. But in fact it is gambling. In Lucinda's cabin the two experience a kind of ecstasy, playing poker together for penny bets. The story develops this duality between religion and addiction, which are made inextricable as a way to get to the workings of chance in the lives of the main characters.