"His illegal self" the story of a family by fate

"His Illegal Self"

by Peter Carey

Knopf, 272 pp., $24.95

Peter Carey, the two-time-Booker-prize-winning novelist, has a matchless imagination. His novels, many set in his native Australia, are hallucinogenic in their visual intensity and breathtaking in their Dickensian plot twists. But after reading "His Illegal Self," this reviewer believes she has detected a key tie that binds Carey's crazy quilt of characters to one another: that of family, the emotional, sometimes irrational connections that hold us in thrall to one another — whether related by blood or not.

In "True History of the Kelly Gang," Carey's 2001 Booker winner, Carey looked through his fictional lens at a true-life Australian outlaw. He found a criminal terminally devoted to his mother, a woman whose idea of proper job training was to indenture her son to a horse thief. "True History" is written in the form of the outlaw's letter to his daughter, one he would never see.

"Wrong About Japan," Carey's slight 2005 nonfiction book about traveling through Japan with his 12-year-old son, was still a wry, affectionate homage to a father-son relationship. "Theft," his 2006 novel, told the story of two Australian brothers whose love for the same woman couldn't sunder their familial bond.

And now we have the novel "His Illegal Self," about another family held together by love and desperation, though blood ties are only partly to blame.

The plot of "His Illegal Self" is a shaky construction. In the 1960s, a renegade from a Weatherman-style radical group gives birth to a son (named Che, or Jay, depending on who's talking) and then goes underground; the boy's grandmother, a Park Avenue bohemian, raises him alone in splendid Victorian isolation (no television; he might see his famous outlaw parents).

When Che is 7 his mother, hiding out in a Philadelphia squat, decides she wants to see him. The grandmother enlists Anna, an old Harvard comrade in arms who's about to take a plum job at Vassar, as a go-between for Che's transfer between grandmother and daughter.

This being Peter Carey, who excels in nasty surprises, the Vassar job gets depth-bombed by one fatal telephone number passed into Anna's hand. A townhouse in Philadelphia blows to pieces, sending Anna and Che on the run into the middle of an Australian nowhere.

Having jury-rigged his plot together, Carey proceeds to do what he does best: present a cast of vividly drawn characters thinking their anguished thoughts, feeling the rain, sweat and tears on their skin. There's Grandma Selkirk, with a steel blue-blood spine and a forge-hot love for her grandson. There's Trevor, an illiterate but not dumb outlaw, whose past involves the very worst incarnation of an adult-child relationship. There's a star-crossed cat. Plus Che and Anna, unrelated by blood but bound by a cats'-cradle of love and desperation into the roles of parent and child.

Whether you've ever been hot, sweaty and desperate in the Australian bush or not, what parent at the end of her rope couldn't relate to this exchange?

"She almost told him, I'm not your mother, but she got out of the car, pretending to look for something. She could not live like this, day after day. Some barbarian had been through these woods with bulldozers. There was not a flower to pick, nothing but these spooky injured trees with flaking skin like psoriasis. She tugged at the bark, and it came off in a long sheet, like paper.

Look, she said. Isn't this is cool?

He looked at her more than at the bark. Did he know she had gone mad? "

The adults in "His Illegal Self" are beautifully drawn, but the supreme gift to the reader of "His Illegal Self" is Carey's portrait of a scared little boy, confused about the most basic of premises — who is his family, anyway? — who becomes brave. By the end, Che/Jay has learned to trust himself:

"But now he was the kid who had lived in the bush at night: he instructed the hippie kids how to make shelters in the bush, digging down in the black soil of the rain forest. They laid fishbone fern as he ordered, then sticks and branches on the top. He had never done this in his life before but no one knew that. He was a prince of liars. He won two dollars underwater. He could stay on the bottom beneath the waterfall and pick up pebbles in his teeth. The water was cold but it tasted of bracken and something else, maybe gold. He thought so definitely."

If only all children could leap into adulthood on such a platform of confidence and courage. Che's "illegal self" is really the authentic one, Carey's portrait of him the best reason to pick up this novel, sit down and not get up until it's done.