A tale of love and courage
His Illegal Self
By Peter Carey
272 pp. Knopf $24.95
Reviewed by Jane Woodward Elioseff
Australian writer Peter Carey, who was awarded the Booker Prize for Oscar and Lucinda in 1988, and again in 2001 for True History of the Kelly Gang, has now given us a novel centered on the experiences of a twice kidnapped seven-year-old boy. His Illegal Self should appeal to all of us who can still pretend we were part of the action in 1971 because we knew someone who knew someone who’d helped to hide Daniel Ellsberg, or knew an original Weatherman before SDS splintered in 1969 and a small but anarchic number of its former members began bombing banks and government buildings.
When the story begins, it is 1972 and Che is living an unusually protected existence on New York’s Upper East Side, in the legal custody of his wealthy maternal grandmother. He is intelligent but does not yet attend school. Television watching is forbidden. He can read only a few words.
Che’s deepest hope is to be reunited with a mother he remembers only as a scent and a feeling, and with a father he has never seen. What little he knows about his parents—militant radicals now in hiding—he has learned from servants and from Cameron, an older boy living in the same building. This savvy prophet assures Che his parents have not forgotten him: “They will come for you, man. They will break you out of here.”
Sure enough, one morning a woman steps out of the elevator and into the apartment on East Sixty-second Street and Che recognizes her “straightaway.” The “splendid stranger” is greeted coolly by the grandmother and with joy by the boy.
He knew who she was although no one would say it outright. He knew her the way he was used to knowing everything important, from hints and whispers . . . He had thought of her so many nights and here she was, exactly the same, completely different—honey-colored skin and tangled hair in fifteen shades. She had Hindu necklaces, little silver bells around her ankles, an angel sent by God.
Within a few pages the reader, but not Che, learns that Dial is not his mother, “America’s most wanted woman.” She is his mother’s former Radcliffe classmate and the nanny of Che’s infancy, which is why her touch and smell are so familiar to him. Dial has put on sixties’ garb because the famous felon, after five years, wants to spend an hour with her son. Dial has come to take him to her.
My Illegal Self is a love story with two distinct arcs, Che’s and Dial’s, told from two points of view, each with its own larger narrative halo. Che knows that his parents—not married, not together—are being separately hunted. He has overheard that they have gone underground, a phrase he interprets literally. His new life begins when he and Dial part company with his grandmother on the sidewalk outside Bloomingdale’s.
Now his hand was inside his true mother’s hand and they were marsupials running down into the subway, laughing . . .
They had entered another planet, and as they pushed down to the platform the ceiling was slimed with alien rust and the floor was flecked and speckled with black gum - so this was the real world that had been crying to him from beneath the grating up on Lex . . . then he was in Grand Central for the first time ever and they set off underground again, hand in hand, slippery together as newborn goats.
So begins the pair’s Movement-assisted escape through the underground to Philly, Oakland, Seattle, Sydney, Brisbane, Caboolture, and finally to the tiny hinterland town of Yandina, a name which means “to go on foot.”
Peter Carey must have had a wonderful time writing this book. It is good humored and full of small jokes, literary and antipodean. The story pulls us along at a merry pace. We sense that some great truth is about to be discovered, and then there we are in Queensland with Dial and Che, abandoned by the self-protecting Movement, robbed and on foot—passports scooped up by the police—each of them desperately wishing they could just go home to New York.
My Illegal Self began for me as a page-turner, but there was a stretch in the middle of the book during which I had to push myself to keep reading. The writing continued to be astonishingly good, but Dial and Che were now unhappy, physically uncomfortable, and unprepared to cope. For a time, I also stopped trusting Carey because he twice misdirected me with ominous foreshadowing. If this was intended as a poke at screenplay writers, I was too seriously involved with the story to smile.
The problem that tried my patience, however, was that I could not get a fix on the landscape. From one page to the next, in my imagination, Dial and Che were encountering a different geography. This happened because I do not speak Australian English.
Phyllis Fahrie Edelson, in her introduction to a 1993 anthology of Australian writing, tells us that our American idea of the West is not synonymous with the Australian image of the bush.
The word “bush” as used by Australians refers to uncultivated wilderness, unsettled and uncleared . . . Geographically, it can refer to desert, semi-desert, grassland, and jungle. Australian use of the word even extends to what Americans would call “the country.”
I sincerely hope that other American readers, thus armed, will push through to the rewards His Illegal Self has in store, beginning with our ultimate understanding of how much Che’s privileged, if isolated, early life and his grandmother’s love of art contribute to his sensibility. And of how much courage his name has given him.
Jane Woodward Elioseff is fiction editor of
The Internet Review of Books. She lives in Houston.
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