Books of The Times
Dickensian Happenings for a Child of the ’60s

HIS ILLEGAL SELF
By Peter Carey
272 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $24.95.

(Random House NZ $55)

Review by Michiko Kakutani writing in The New York Times, Feb. 5

Peter Carey’s novels — from the Booker Prize winners “Oscar and Lucinda” and “True History of the Kelly Gang” through recent ones like “My Life as a Fake” and “Theft” — tend to feature improbable undertakings, sudden reversals of fortune and elaborately manufactured or forged identities. Most of his characters inhabit a boldly colored limbo land somewhere on the great fiction map between Dickens’s world of improbable coincidences and the old-fashioned world of the picaresque, where odd happenings and even odder people are strung together willy-nilly into rollicking, improvisatory tales.

Mr. Carey’s latest novel, “His Illegal Self,” is very much a distillation of these proclivities, and the book, like many of his earlier efforts, turns out to be a herky-jerky affair that lurches between the compelling and the lackadaisical, the intriguing and the preposterous.

Its basic premise is so absurd that the reader starts off burdened with a passel of doubts. The premise is this: It is 1972, and 7-year-old Che (a k a Jay), the son of two ’60s radicals who have gone underground, is being raised by his wealthy grandmother on Park Avenue; Dial (a k a Anna Xenos), a friend from the radical movement, arranges to pick up Che and take him on a surreptitious visit to his mother, Susan, but before Dial can deliver him, she hears that Susan has blown herself up while making a bomb. Instead of simply returning Che to his grandmother, Dial decides to go on the run with Che. She takes him from Philadelphia to Oakland, Calif., and Seattle, and then to a desolate spot in Queensland, Australia, where they go to ground at an isolated, ramshackle farm that she buys with the cash she smuggled into the country in the hem of her skirt. Che believes that Dial is his long-lost mother (who has come to fetch him from his grandmother’s, the way he dreamed she would), and for a long time Dial allows him to believe this.

Mr. Carey never offers any remotely plausible reason for why Dial, who has just been made an assistant professor at Vassar, would decide to kidnap Che and flee to Australia. She doesn’t seem to have a particularly strong attachment to Che, and doesn’t even seem to like the idea of taking care of a child. She has apparently had something of a passive-aggressive relationship with the radical left and with Che’s mother and father too. But as far as the reader learns, nothing in any way explains why she decides to take Che away from the only life he has known, jettison her own identity and invent a new life off the grid in the wretched, bug-infested bush country of Australia, among hostile “B-list hippies,” vagabonds and ne’er-do-wells.

Because the reader never for a moment buys this setup, a lot of Mr. Carey’s impressive authorial energy is wasted in an attempt to vamp his way through Dial’s and Che’s back stories, which we learn in bits and pieces through a narrative that continually loops back on itself in little flashbacks. The forward-moving portions of the story are lumpy as well: some beautifully observed sequences, showing how Che and Dial’s relationship evolves, are juxtaposed with tiresome debates about what to do with Che’s pet kitten, whom their hippie neighbors hate; and gripping scenes displaying the author’s intimate knowledge of the harsh landscape of his native Australia are sandwiched between contrived scenes depicting Che and Dial’s encounters with a cranky, eccentric named Trevor.

What propels this jerry-built narrative is Che’s gradual discovery of his own identity: his realization that Dial is not his real mother, that she stole him from home and lied to him, that his mysterious father is never going to come and find him. Mr. Carey shows us how this little boy, who carefully carries with him a bunch of news clippings and photos that hold clues to his parents’ radical past, moves from delight (at having found the woman he thinks is his real mother) to confusion to anger at Dial and her betrayal. And he also shows how isolation and necessity force Che and Dial to depend upon each other, and how that need gradually evolves into affection, and that affection into a kind of love, as Dial grapples with the realization that she must return Che to his real life and make plans for doing so without getting herself arrested.

The reader sees Che grow from a frightened child into a plucky, even daring young boy who years later will think back to his time in the bush “where he had first gone beyond what he was brave enough to do and changed himself because of it.”

But while the portrait of this wild child attests to Mr. Carey’s ability to write just as powerfully about heartfelt, emotional matters as he has, in the past, about raffish adventurers and outlaws, this achievement does not, in the end, compensate for this novel’s ridiculous mise-en-scène or its longueurs and lazy, haphazard storytelling.

And for a very different take on Carey's new book here is Lucy Clark's review from The Courier Mail.