His Illegal Self

Liesl Schillinger

This idea, this truth—that a child in distress is hard-wired to seek protection from a woman, any woman, whatever her failings, her confusions, her ideology—is the heartbeat that races through Peter Carey's enthralling new novel, His Illegal Self, a book as psychologically taut as a Patricia Highsmith thriller and as starkly beautiful as Mulisch's [The Assault]…This novel marks a departure—an altogether successful one—for the versatile author, who usually paints gorgeous whorls of story around outlandish figures from the untouchable past, real or imagined: gamblers and dreamers, circus freaks, outlaws, prodigals and passionate eccentrics. Here, the world he inhabits—the protest movement of the '60s and '70s—is both familiar and recent.
—The New York Times

Ron Charles

His Illegal Self is front-loaded with shocks and twists that gradually fade into a contemplative tale of disrupted lives. Like two of his previous novels, My Life as a Fake (2003) and Theft (2006), this one is about acts of deception between characters—and between Carey and his readers. But whereas those earlier novels boasted clever tricks, His Illegal Self develops the kind of emotional impact that renders it even more enriching and satisfying…Carey's startling, kaleidoscopic plots are now so well known that we can't help overanticipating them, but he's still the master, still capable of staying two steps ahead of us. And in His Illegal Self the most surprising maneuver of all isn't so much a sudden revelation but his tender portrayal of the desperate love between this accidental mother and a little boy who she knows deserves better.
—The Washington Post

Donna Seaman

A psychologically astute and diabolically suspenseful novel . . . Carey has a gift for bringing to creepy-crawly and blistering life Australia’s jungle and desert wilds. His latest spectacularly involving and supremely well made novel of life on the edge begins in New York [and] ends up in Australia . . . Carey’s unique take on the conflict between the need to belong and the dream of freedom during the days of rage over the Vietnam War is at once terrifying and mythic. PLACE CODE AT END OF TEXT
— Booklist

School Library Journal

Adult/High School- It is 1972 and seven-year-old Che Selkirk, the son of radical parents he has never met, lives in isolated privilege with his well-to-do grandmother. Denied access to television and the news, he picks up scraps of information about his outlaw mother and father from a teenage neighbor who assures Che that his parents will come and "break you out of here." When a woman named Dial arrives at the boy's Park Avenue apartment to take him on a day excursion, he assumes that she is his mother. Unfortunately, things go terribly awry and Che becomes a fugitive himself. He and Dial end up in the Australian bush in an inhospitable commune. Carey uses a stream-of-consciousness style that poignantly communicates Che's confusion about his life on the lam and what he really wants. The explosive conclusion is worth the wait as the author vividly portrays the hardscrabble, primitive life of a group of hippies in his native Australia. Young adults will appreciate His Illegal Self for its main character-an orphan by circumstance-who struggles to understand his predicament and ultimately gains not only wisdom, but also the love he has sought.-Pat Bangs, Fairfax County Public Library, VA

Kirkus Reviews

This isn't the first fictional work to explore the militant radical underground of the late 1960s and early '70s, but it may well be the best. What freshens the familiar material is the child's-eye perspective with which Carey begins the story. Impressions and chronology take time to coalesce, as seven-year-old Che (called "Jay" by the patrician grandmother who has raised him) has little idea what is happening to him or why. Take the title as irony, because Che is the embodiment of innocence, with his only possible guilt by association. Most of what Che knows about his parents he has learned from his babysitter, who has promised him that he will be liberated: "They will break you out, man. Your life will start for real." Both his mother and his father, neither of whom he knows, are notorious underground militants, and Che himself has some sort of fame from a photo taken of him as a baby with his mother at a demonstration. One afternoon, the babysitter's prophecy appears to come true, as a woman whom Che believes to be his mother visits and flees with him. Whatever the relation between the two, a bond develops between Che and the captor/rescuer he has been told to call "Dial." As the novel's perspective shifts between the two characters, it appears that Dial has little more idea than Che what is going on. She has risked her career as a fledgling professor at Vassar to take the boy, and whatever relation she has with him, she has a history with the boy's father. The action quickly shifts from New York-where Che's grandmother lives, as does the novelist-to Australia, where Carey was born and raised and where revelation awaits for both the characters and the reader. Carey's mastery of toneand command of point of view are very much in evidence in his latest novel (My Life as a Fake, 2004, etc.), which is less concerned with period-piece politics than with the essence of identity. First printing of 60,000

The Barnes & Noble Review

Peter Carey has a knack for creating characters that would run into a heap of trouble with Homeland Security. Some ignore borders altogether. Others, like the painter hero of his 2006 novel, Theft, would almost certainly attempt to smuggle their own contraband across. But there are things in this world which cannot slip so easily -- no matter how wily the mule -- from one state to the next. Like a child, for instance.

Meet Che, the human hot potato passed around Carey's tenth novel, His Illegal Self. As the book begins, Che is living in Park Avenue splendor with his grandmother, the legend of his estranged parents fading fast. In the late '60s Che's mum and dad were radical activists at Harvard, but in 1972 they're among the FBI's most wanted. "They will come for you, man," says one of his friends. "They'll break you out of here." And then they do -- sort of.

Che's guide out of this world and into the next is a Vassar professor nicknamed Dial (short for "dialectic"). Having finally climbed out of activism into academe, Dial is going to do one last thing for the movement. She will break Che out of his bourgeois life. In a terrific early scene, her department head at Vassar slips her the number of her contact.

His Illegal Self is full of portent and mystery, both for Dial and her young charge. They are living in a world of surveillance and safe houses. But how quickly, when they are actually on the run, it all becomes so unglamorous. Carey brilliantly describes their zigzag from hotel to motel, to Sydney head shops, where the '60s motto -- "Turn on, tune in, drop out" -- has become an ironic slur. "I never want to hear that hippie [expletive] again," Dial says.

While Dial falls out of love fast with this life, to Che this unfolding disaster is just a big adventure, a field trip long awaited for and finally happening. The speed of movement, coupled with his giddiness over finally getting to see his father, makes his mind jumpy and jagged. Narrating beautifully from his point of view, Carey shows how the great wash of new senses and smells falls over him softly, while the increasing desperateness of the scenario is lost upon him, until it isn't.

Before long Che and Dial are walking along the gutter of a highway in Australia, and Carey finally lets his prose get out and gallop a bit. "Two black lanes north, two lanes south, some foreign grass in the middle," he writes, slowly peeling back from Che's point of view. "To the east and west were neatly mown verges about thirty feet wide and then there were the dull green walls of the Pinus radiata plantations, sliced by yellow fire roads but deathly quiet -- not a possum or a snake, not even a hopping carrion crow, could ever live there."

Here is where His Illegal Self begins to diverge from so many other novels about the countercultural downshift into dissipation. Like T. C. Boyle in Drop City, a satire of a hippie collective going bust in the Alaskan wilderness, Carey has numerous opportunities to needle the self-importance and chintzy mercantilism that grew out of the late '60s.

But Carey has already done that a bit -- in Bliss, his novel about an adman who moves to a commune -- so here he does something far cleverer. By shuffling back and forth from Che's point of view to Dial's, we get a brilliant portrait of how rough and confusing a time it was -- especially in Australia -- when the movement lost its purpose.

Our first clue as readers is provided by the landscape. Few novelists alive, and no one in Australia, not even Les Murray, can describe Australia's Outback with the fury and rhythmic accuracy Carey brings to his prose. This is not your typical back-to-the-land narrative. There will be no salvation in the earth, not only because the soil itself is tough but because the people are, too.

As they travel north it gets hotter, more mosquito-laden. Che and Dial are picked up by two ne'er-do-wells in a Ford full of funk: "Inside...were smells which the boy could not have named or untangled," Carey writes, "long wisps of WD-40 and marijuana, floating threads of stuff associated with freaks who made their own repairs, dandelion chains of dust and molecules of automotive plastics which rose up in the moldy heat."

This pair rob Dial, only to reencounter her at a muggy fug of a commune where Che and she live out the rest of their time in Australia. It is the 1970s, and these back-to-the-land advocates are ahead of their time. Amazingly, Carey resists the urge to paint this world in broad, satirical strokes, keeping the novel close to the friction between Dial and Che, the boy's rising alarm that his father is truly nowhere to be found.

It's the contrasts between Dial and Che's experience that give His Illegal Self its richness. Dial grows depressed, suddenly realizing what she has signed on for, while Che -- being young and optimistic, finally begins to start over. He befriends a mud-flecked, vegetable-growing crank named Trevor, gets a pet cat. He reads Tom Sawyer. It is not Edenic, this life, but it is -- in a way -- what Dial had hoped for him, if not for herself.

Time and again, His Illegal Self thwarts our expectations about it. What begins as a road novel full of momentum gets to Australia and then grinds to a halt, turning into something else entirely -- in part, the story of a woman reluctantly learning to become a mother. Isn't this, in part, why the '60s had to end? There were, in many cases, children to raise.

Sitting in their dense commune, rain pounding down, listening to the "adenoidenal whisper of his sleep," Dial finally realizes Che is her responsibility. He is, in fact, her revolution. And as with all revolutions, it's what happens when the dust clears that truly counts. --John Freeman

John Freeman is president of the National Book Critics Circle. He is writing a book on the tyranny of email for Scribner.