Responsibility for running the business rests mainly with Frieda's daughter Cathy, an aspiring Country and Western singer, and her manager husband, Howie McPherson, a "Rockabilly throwback" with pencil-line moustache and ducktail haircut.

The elder has escaped to join a Hare Krishna ashram in Sydney; though he has changed his name from Johnny to Vishnabarnu, he remains a Catchprice at the beck and call of his family.

Into this scenario enters Maria Takis, the Tax Inspector, who takes vengeful pleasure in investigating the affairs of the rich and privileged.

As the buildings blow up about the waterlogged cellar in which he has his den, Maria gives birth and bludgeons Benny to death in order to save her child.

Begun as a reaction to hearing the then premier of Queensland declare his intention to cut the taxes of the affluent classes, his "nihilistic Gothic saga" went through twelve drafts and raised controversy for its references to child abuse and its criticism of high level corruption.

"Peter Carey writes beautiful sentences, worked on but not labored; his descriptive passages sweep us along and leave us in some felicitous, unanticipated place.

He "concentrates on the characters and their stories, conveying his wonderful knack for detail and the twisted yet compelling logic that underpins his societies", but for all that "the novel didn't really work".