His Illegal Self

Peter Carey

Editions

Review

There is a bravura to Peter Carey’s new novel, an in-your-face energy that reminds one of – well, other novels by Peter Carey.  He establishes a voice so fast, and with such assurance, that the reader is swept into the story without a moment’s doubt: ‘There were no photographs of the boy’s father in the house upstate.  He had been persona non grata since Christmas 1964, six months before the boy was born.’

The boy is Che, whose parents belong to an extreme political faction protesting against the Vietnam War.  Brought up by his rich grandmother, Che knows little about his parents but he idolizes them.  Shortly before his eighth birthday, a woman called Dial steps out of the elevator to take him away.  He believes her to be his mother come to take him to his father but she is a socialist academic who used to look after him as a baby.  Just as she secured herself a job at Harvard, chance renewed her contact with the family and she agreed to take the boy to meet his mother.  But things turn complicated after Granny has been given the slip in Bloomingdales because, unknown to Che, his mother has blown herself up.  Within a few pages he and Dial are hiding out near a community of hippies in the Queensland bush.

His Illegal Self  ripples with Carey’s genius for inhabiting language.  Character and landscape are created by rhythm and style as much as by precise description.  This makes him a difficult author to quote from because his effects depend as much on place in the narrative, or association with a particular character, as on anything inherent in the words themselves.  Striking images can be found at random: ‘His own breath was held like a crumpled milk carton in his bony chest.’  But the context actually better illuminates the way in which Carey’s narrative works:

Trevor turned off the propane lamp.  In the sudden quiet the boy heard the panic of a single insect in a web.  His own breath was held like a crumpled milk carton in his bony chest.

Trevor sat, his back against the doorframe opposite where Dial was squatting.

You know those boards are going to shrink, he said.

The emphatic ‘Trevor’ at the start of each of these paragraphs, with its adjoining verb, expresses the firmness underlying this somewhat sinister but capable and ultimately benign man, and contrasts economically with both Che’s sense of suspension and Dial’s ineptitude.  He sits before he speaks, makes himself comfortable and then, in his own time, says something perfectly sensible.

Carey’s skill is nowhere more evident than in his dialogue.  By not using quotation marks he depends on rhythm and juxtapositions simply for sense.  This is very difficult to achieve.  Where it doesn’t quite work satisfactorily – as, for example, in Ondaatje’s Divisadero – it can seem mannered.  But where it is seamless, as it is here, it is integral to the narrative’s energy.

There are familiar themes here for regular readers of Carey.  The shaping of circumstance by chance, the fight against the System, the outlaws, the plucky child, theft.  But what dominates is the impression of intense individualities grappling with difficult situations that life has thrown at them and which they often help generate by their own, often admirable, cussedness.  In this novel, as in others by Carey, redemption seems to be attained through sheer force of identity: the characters manage when they allow themselves, and others, to be themselves.  This is endorsed by the uneasy but compelling irony that a case of mistaken identity is the pivot around which the novel turns.

Were it not for this uneasiness, the satisfactory outcomes that Carey offers us would be more sentimental than they are.  At the end of True History of the Kelly Gang, Kelly’s ultimate failure to keep his promise to protect the children casts a shadow over the heroics.  Similarly, in His Illegal Self, for all the growling against conventions, the real tyrants are Che’s parents, the freedom fighters.  There is always another way of looking at it; something else might have happened.  The outcome is not straightforward and perhaps amounts to no more than a reflection of what is best in the characters’ aspirations for themselves and the world into which they were born.  But Carey’s ability to give life and value to those aspirations is dazzling.

From my review in the Literary Review - review by Johnny de Falbe