Peter Carey is a Great Australian Novelist, in exactly the way that Americans used to aspire to write the Great American Novel. Australia is not just the setting of his fictions, but their inspiration and their obsessive theme. For the last two decades, Mr. Carey has been writing fables about his native country, taking on its history and legends in a series of tumultuous, exuberant novels. Two of them, “Oscar and Lucinda” and “True History of the Kelly Gang,” have won the Booker Prize, showing that his deeply rooted work has a universal appeal.

In America, we seldom think of Australia as a “post-colonial” society. But Mr. Carey, no less than his English-speaking contemporaries in Africa and the Caribbean, is a post-colonial writer, grappling with the rich and poisonous legacy of empire. And like them, Mr. Carey takes a subversive view of his society’s official values. His great enemy is the rigid, Anglophilic idea of gentility embraced by Australia’s bourgeoisie in its effort to forget the country’s origins as a penal colony. Mr. Carey, on the other hand, takes his cues from criminals, gamblers, and outlaws. These are men who live by their wits, and he suggests that their self-reliant, skeptical, improvisatory genius represents the best of Australianness.

In Mr. Carey’s new novel, “Theft: A Love Story” (Alfred A. Knopf, 274 pages, $24), we once again find ourselves among Australians, artists, and con artists – three species, he suggests, that have much of their DNA in common. This time, however, the arena in which they play out their elaborate game is international. For as Michael Boone, Mr.Carey’s artist hero, knows all too well, Australia is only a minor outpost of the art world.Fame in Sydney – the kind Michael enjoyed in the mid-1970s, a few years before the novel begins – does not translate to Tokyo and New York.”I knew what it felt like to be Lichtenstein in Sydney,” he complains, “but I could never be Lichtenstein in New York. I was a no-one. I went to Elaine’s and meekly accepted my table by the kitchen. All this I had expected. Why would it be otherwise?”

Did Mr. Carey himself nurse such grievances when he first came to New York, already a well-known writer, in the late 1980s? It is a safe guess, since Michael, it becomes clear, is his own bleakly comic self-portrait – a portrait of the artist as a son of a bitch. Like his creator, Michael Boone was born in the early 1940s in the small town of Bacchus Marsh, near Melbourne, and never allows himself to forget his provincial origins. In “Theft,” he spends a good deal of time in the small Australian town of Bellingen, where Mr. Carey once lived; in Tokyo, about which Mr. Carey recently wrote a travel book (“Wrong About Japan”); and in New York,Mr. Carey’s current home. Like Mr. Carey, too, Michael Boone has recently been through a bitter divorce,referring to his ex-wife throughout the novel only as “the Plaintiff.” (Such literary score-settling, distasteful though it may be, has a long history – see Bellow’s “Herzog” and Roth’s “I Married a Communist.” It has also made “Theft” a minor scandal in the British press, which lives for this kind of gossip.)

The problem with turning a novel’s narrator into an obvious surrogate for the author is that the clamor of ego can replace the detachment of art. To head off this danger, Mr. Carey divides the narrative duties between Michael and his “slow,” unsocialized brother, Hugh. From Michael, we constantly hear about the burden of taking care of Hugh, with his gross habits, compulsive tics, and spasms of violence. When Hugh is put in charge of the story, however, things are slyly reversed. Now it is Michael who seems the difficult brother, constantly demanding praise and attention, drink and sex, while Hugh patiently tags along.

More important still, given Mr. Carey’s obsessions, is that Hugh is utterly at home in his Australianness. In his slangy narration, the Boone family name is transformed to Bones, and his brother is nicknamed Butcher Bones – an elemental name that makes Michael sound like a character in a folk ballad. Hugh is always summoning up their childhood in Bacchus Marsh, down to the slightest detail, while Michael tries to leave it all behind. “Night and day my brother was in a fret about the place in history which had been given to him,” Hugh observes. “What happiness had he gained by leaving home?”

That is the novel’s most important question. Oddly, however, Mr. Carey has chosen to ask it in the form of a ludicrously implausible mystery story. The plot of “Theft,” in bare outline, sounds like something out of a heist movie, involving a stolen painting, an international art forgery ring, a dogged police investigator, and finally a gruesome murder.The problem with this plot, the details of which it would be a shame to reveal, is not that it is too superficially exciting, but that it plainly fails to excite Mr. Carey enough. The dual-narrator structure means that the details of the mystery are doled out slowly and awkwardly, so that the denouement can be seen coming long before Mr. Carey seems to intend. What’s more, it leaves the femme fatale at the center of “Theft” – Marlene Cook, Michael’s lover and temptress – a shadowy, lifeless figure, never really convincing as more than a plot device.

Unsurprisingly, it is the ordeal of the Australian artist, not the international art world, that really seems to interest Mr.Carey.The shady dealers, the greedy collectors – above all, the fictional Cubist master Jacques Leibovitz, around whom Marlene’s scam revolves – all feel superfluous, the products of research rather than necessity or inspiration. (This feeling is confirmed by the author’s note, which thanks a number of art-world tutors.) As always, Mr. Carey has valuable things to say about the dilemmas and temptations of the provincial artist. It is too bad that, in “Theft,” he has chosen such an awkward way of saying them.

akirsch@nysun.com