Peter Carey talks about prose, politics, and his passion for Australia

Erica Wagner, writing in The Times, meets Australia's greatest literary export to discuss his latest novel, His Illegal Self .

Best to come straight out with it. Peter Carey, your new book is entitled His Illegal Self. Before that there was My Life as a Fake; and then, three years later, Theft: A Love Story. What's that all about?
Carey's usual ebullience suddenly seems muted. “I know, it's a shame,” he says, not exactly joking. Sitting across from him in the cosy environs of Lupa, a trendy Italian place in Greenwich Village, New York, I persist. Are the books a kind of trilogy?
“No.” There's a pause. “I don't know. I don't think it's something I want to address, I think it's kind of unfortunate...” Another, very long pause. “What are we going to put that down to? The convict system? I don't know. The illegal thing comes from a subject, a very personal thing between my youngest son and I, being in the country and Charley being worried about ‘illegal' drivers... there were the rednecks and the illegal drivers, so it's some kind of tribute to Charley, a little joke.”
Just an accident, then? “Yes, and it's why I was very clear about the jacket and why it had to be a little kid's face, because it makes sense of the understanding of illegality, his illegal self. But the repetition of theft, fake, illegal is rather unfortunate ... in the sense that it suggests something much stronger than I feel. On the other hand who's making these patterns, Doctor? It's me.” And he grins, at last, the wicked Carey grin, its slight goofiness an effective screen for the remarkable perception and imagination that hallmarks his work.

His Illegal Self takes place in the early 1970s. It is the story of Che, who, at the beginning of the novel, is stolen away from his grandmother - and a life of privilege - in New York, by a woman whom he believes to be his mother. His mother, he knows, is an outlaw, a member of a violent political group that bears some resemblance to the Weather Underground. “Dial” (short for “Dialectic”, her nickname in the activist world) takes him to Queensland, a place that Carey knows well but which is painted vividly afresh through Che's eyes.
Somehow - thanks to Carey's sure hand and true heart - this wilderness of bugs, drugs and hippies becomes a place transformed by love.

Carey talks of the genesis of the novel in a matter-of-fact way. When someone asked him why he set My Life as a Fake in Indonesia, his answer was simply: “I liked the food”; the reasoning behind this latest book is a little more elaborate, but still as bounded by the real. He had loved finding that he could describe the New South Wales he remembered in Theft; so the setting of His Illegal Self seemed a logical progression.

“Living in Queensland is like living in Paradise. It's just gorgeous. You live in this rainforest, in the afternoon you go to the beach, and ride - so that was one thing. And the other thing was when I did live in that community some of the characters around were the sort of characters who were needed for the book; the people who lived there were really nice and very open. It's the only place in my life I've ever lived where no one ever asked me what I did. That's really unusual.

“Into this came this American guy, and nobody asked what he did either, and it turned out in the end that he was actually wanted by the FBI for conspiracy to import cocaine into the US from Mexico. But we didn't know that. He just turned up. Suddenly one morning there was this huge police raid with helicopters; that was the first we knew.”
Although this description may seem exotic to British readers, Carey recounts it with a deadpan style that makes his alchemical transformation of the plain stuff of life even more striking. But, then, it's clear that Carey is a storyteller in his very bones; and my opening question was, in a sense, unfair - in that his whole body of work is peppered with chancers, liars, thieves. That is: people who make their lives as stories, just as the novelist does.
Read the rest of the review/interview.