Sheridan Griswold
4 April 2008
book review
Gaborone — Peter Carey (2008). His Illegal Self, London, Faber and Faber, 272 pages, paperback, P162, ISBN 978-0-571-23153-9. Available at Exclusive Books, Riverwalk.
"His Illegal Self" treads territory familiar to Peter Carey and his addicts. This time he focuses on two Americans, one a young woman caught up by accident in the 1960s and early 1970s, in extreme leftwing movements modelled on the Maoists and the Weathermen, the other a seven-year-old boy who thinks she is his long lost mother whom he has never seen since he was a small baby. Through an unusual plot device he quickly extricates them from American shores and dumps them in Nambour in southern Queensland, Australia, not far from Brisbane, but rural enough to sound eons away from civilization-and far enough from northern New South Wales where Bliss (1981), his first novel, also on commune life, was set.
Carey has an addiction to unusual characters. He loves charlatans, fakes, the surreal and the macabre, people posing as what they are not. "Illywhacker" (1985) is the comic tale of a 139-year-old confidence man. "Jack Maggs" (1997) is about a man who had been deported to Australia but succeeds in returning to London. Carey's first Booker Prize was in 1988 for "Oscar and Lucinda" about religious impostors and a floating glass church. His second Booker was for "True History of the Kelly Gang" (Mmegi, April 26, 2002). His second Commonwealth Writers Prize went to "My Life as a Fake" (Mmegi, December 17, 2003), a novel that explored the nexus between fact and fantasy in writing.
"Theft: A Love Story" (Mmegi, August 25, 2006), Carey's last novel, explored the world of art from the perspective of fraud. Carey is an expatriate Australian novelist who has based himself in New York City for 20 years. Currently he is the director of the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at Hunter College. His Illegal Self is yet another novel that will not disappoint his followers. The class struggle is within each of us. Does having gone to Harvard really mark a person forever?
In "His Illegal Self" Che Selkirk is taken by Anna Xenos a.k.a Dial (short for dialectic, a Greek with Turkish blood), to meet his mother in Philadelphia, United States of America. Dial looks like the picture Che's babysitter Cameron has shown him of his mother in 1966 before she went underground after a violent bank robbery in Bronxville.
His father also vanished then and he has never met him, but Cameron tells Che a bit about him too. Both parents are on the government's most wanted list. Che's Grandmother Phoebe Selkirk won custody of him when he was a baby and has raised him mainly in a cabin on Kenoza Lake a few hours north of New York City, but kept their Park Avenue penthouse for monthly refurbishments. Grandma Selkirk has never told Che, whom she calls Jay, anything about his parents.
Dial is instructed by the movement to take Che to Philadelphia, where she will find his mother. While on the bus south from New York City, Che's real mother accidentally blows herself up in a house where they are making bombs (modelled on events on 13th Street in Greenwich Village). On TV in a motel Dial sees her and Che's pictures and learns that they are missing and she is wanted for kidnapping. The movement helps her fly to Oakland, California, then Seattle where they are given false passports, and finally Sydney, Australia; then north to Brisbane. Cameron had told Che that he "would be busted free by parents" so he went willingly south, across the continent, across the Pacific Ocean and then north to Queensland. He could feel that Dial loved him, the way she read to him from Jack London and played cards with him.
Dial had just been interviewed and won a job as an assistant lecturer teaching English at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, where she was to be the Alice May Twitchell Fellow. She thought of herself as both an academic, a Harvard graduate, and a socialist. She respected Susan Selkirk, but she had an affair with David Rubbo, the SDS leader, and Dial still has a soft spot there, thinking of herself as an SDS [Students for a Democratic Society] goddess.
In the feral hippie commune, "the Crystal Community", along Remus Creek Road outside Yandina they meet Trevor and Adam. From Adam a.k.a Jimmy Seeds and James Adamek she buys three small cabins on stilts on a hillside near Yandina and Adam took off with the money for a purer wilderness in Far North Queensland, supposedly in the Daintree.
The advert says "Fourteen acres on the edge of the rain forest. There is water from a spring. There are five hundred fruit trees and an established vegetable garden ... two log huts with cute shingle roofs". The local lawyer, Phil Warriner, a man of unusual talents, who knew how to please people on all sides including those who had gone feral. To them he was the hippie lawyer. He helped Dial acquire her shares from Adam.
There first adventure is getting caught in a cyclone that hits where they have shelter and rolls over the trailer the are hovering in. But their critical mistake is to have acquired a small kitten, Butch, who violates all the rules of the commune and offends any sensible nature loving Australia, as cats kill birds, and birds are sacred. Dial and Che are told, "you should know that your cat is destroying our environment and you've got a choice. You get rid of this cat or we will get rid of you" (page 165). When evidence is produced of Butch's activities, they are read the riot act: "The Feral cat is declared as a class two species under the Land Protection Act" (page 199).
Trevor is an orphan and thief who has made a fortress on a hill nearby and has a variety of secrets stoked away in the area. Trevor is illiterate, but has the knowledge that goes with living in the bush. He befriends Che and gets him to work for him, mulching his garden and other duties. Trevor and Che share past stories and some of their secrets. "The road to Trevor Dobb's hideout was like he had bragged to the boy already-outlaw, very steep, washed away, potholes, tank traps, killer rocks, one stained with very black oil, the death of an auto owned by someone who had no business" (page 145).
Later, it is through eavesdropping on Trevor and Dial talking that Che learns more about his past than he is meant to know. His discoveries lead to his falling back on his own bush craft and a theft that instead of liberating him leads to his acceptance by others in the Crystal Community and a change in his life. Che taught Trevor how to swim - he said to him, "No matter how sad you were, swimming always cleaned your soul".
"His Illegal Self" is obviously a tale Peter Carey enjoys sharing with his readers. What is surprising is how easy it is to become intrigued by Dial and her young ward Che, their relationship, and the role of the feral people on the Sunshine coast in their lives.
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