Literary hoaxes are by their nature small acts, designed to irritate people within the publishing establishment while barely generating a ripple in the wider world. But in 1944 a hoax was perpetrated in Australia that had much more serious consequences than anyone could have anticipated.

Two minor poets decided it would be fun to create a humble garage mechanic called Ern Malley who had written genius-standard poetry, but who had died tragically young. The duo sent a letter to editor Max Harris, purporting to be Malley's bereaved sister Ethel and explaining the sad situation.

Ethel was no poetry-lover, but she felt that the work might have some value. Would Harris take a look at the verses?

As the two rogue poets had hoped, Harris was entranced by the faked work. He published it in his magazine, Angry Penguins, deeming Malley "a great man, and in the opinion of many people, a great poet".

When the hoax was uncovered, Harris' professional reputation was ruined. Worse, he soon found himself facing criminal charges. A policeman had identified sexual innuendo in Malley's verses and Harris, in accordance with the contemporary laws, was duly prosecuted for publishing the poetry.

In his new novel, Australian-born Peter Carey makes a brave attempt to recast these dramatic events as fiction. Here, a failed poet called Christopher Chubb creates Bob McCorkle and his lyrical musings in order to embarrass a literary editor who has previously rejected his submissions.

The editor adores the work of the dead poet and swiftly publishes it. The ruse is detected and the editor prosecuted for the same sexual lines that dogged Max Harris.

But worse is to come. During the court proceedings, a wild-haired man appears from nowhere, claiming that he is Bob McCorkle, poet extraordinaire and creation of Chubb.

This leap of the imagination is manifestly inspired by Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. The book even opens with a quotation from the famous gothic novel: "I beheld the wretch - the miserable monster whom I had created. He held up the curtain of the bed; and his eyes, if eyes they may be called, were fixed on me."

Mc C ork le considers Chubb his father and, in a parallel with Shelley's epochal work, seeks revenge on him for bringing him into the world. Unfortunately, despite the strength of these divers e narrative strands, Carey never succeeds in wringing a decent story from his raw material.

The novel's greatest weakness is its unwieldy, unnecessarily complex structure. Rather than creating a firstp erson nar rative from Chubb's perspective, Carey opts to cast him as an old man, revealing his troubled past with McCorkle to an Englishwoman named Sarah Wode-Douglass.

This technique distances the reader from the action, rendering some potentially impactful scenes dull and turgid. Carey's three main characters are also hugely dislikeable. Sarah is angry and bitter, Chubb is half-demented and manipulative, while Sarah's travelling partner, the famed poet John Slater, comes across as pompous and sly.

All three protagonists reveal themselves through the course of the narrative, but none ever truly comes to life on the page. Even when terrible things happen to them, the reader feels little sympathy. These are bad guys cast in the role of good guys; all too often, you find yourself rooting for McCorkle.

Carey is on surest ground when evincing the thematic concerns of the novel.

The small distance between what is fake and what is real is well delineated. In this fictional world, real poets are exposed as fake poets and fake poets, like McCorkle, become increasingly real.

Carey also neatly illustrates the fact that all the best art is a contrivance and that, in fact, should people attempt to keep their art `real', they would have very little of worth at all.

As Sarah thinks to herself when reading the `real' work of Chubb: "If this was his `real' poetry, then I preferred the fake. Frankly, these dry yellow pages were priggish, self-serving, snobbish."

These themes are intriguing and worthy of exploration, but they are not enough in themselves to hold an entire novel together.

In the final analysis, My Life As a Fake is a resolutely average book from an often brilliant writer.Those searching for greatness should look elsewhere.