Sydney ardour yet to cool

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Peter Carey has subtitled this love/hate letter to his former stamping ground "a wildly distorted account". The man who rewrote the history of his country in the brilliant novel Illywhacker has not lost his appetite for tall tales. There are stories here about abseiling down 2,000ft cliffs, climbing inside the Sydney Harbour Bridge and sailing through a perfect storm on a boat that was "dangerous, not by accident, but by design". Then, as Carey reveals, recklessness is next to lawlessness and Aussies have a sneaking respect for both.

Carey plays a masterstroke in letting his "bantering, heckling, joking" friends tell most of these tales. The book is dedicated to Kelvin, Lester, Sheridan, Marty, Jack and Geordie. Its author admits that these are not their real names but the buttonholing result is like being taken on a whistle-stop tour of a community rather than a dutiful slog through a Lonely Planet itinerary. Sheridan, for example, shows us the very tree into which "piss-faced drunk" Paul smashed his "old man's perfectly restored '57 Chevrolet" and broke both his buddy's wrists. What follows touchingly demonstrates the iron strength of true mateship. Carey sees Sydney as "a coral reef, all its denizens bunching in intimate complexity". Coral is a living rock, and Carey brings to life the sandstone foundations on which the capital of New South Wales was eventually built.

An hour or two from the centre you can go down canyons in the Blue Mountains, "the jail walls of Sydney", "where no human being has ever been before". Closer in, suicides fling themselves off the sandstone cliffs at The Gap at the end of Old South Head Road. Other sermons in stones include the story of a hilarious lunch at Rockpool, Neil Perry's ground-breaking restaurant; how the first convicts learned to fire bricks for Captain Bligh (yes, that Captain Bligh); and how the Opera House at Bennelong Point hides evidence of a civilisation at least 50,000 years old. Carey refers to the twin atrocities of Aboriginal slaughter and penal transportation as "those two cruel vectors which shape us to this very day". He despises a prime minister who can make it up with the Turks at Gallipoli but will not apologise to Australia's indigenous inhabitants "for 200 years of murder and abuse". "History," says Carey, "is like a bloodstain that keeps showing on the wall no matter how many new owners take possession, no matter how many times we paint over it."

However, this is not a negative work. The adoptive New Yorker may describe, accurately, the development of Darling Harbour as "Coney Island with fine dining ... the bastard child of Corbusier and Ronald McDonald", but he returns again and again to the inexhaustible beauty of Sydney Harbour, the joys of sailing, and glugging Dead Arm Shiraz. Carey has bottled a world city in 248 small pages. It is a vintage performance. He makes you want to get on the next Qantas flight out of Heathrow.