The Review of Contemporary Fiction

His Illegal Self, by Peter Carey
reviewed by Neil Murphy

Untitled document

If Milan Kundera’s insistence that the novel must offer insight into “a hitherto unknown segment of existence” is accurate, then Peter Carey’s recent His Illegal Self easily clears the first hurdle. The uniqueness of this novel, unlike, say, The True History of the Kelly Gang, is based not on an original technical or formal contribution but on the author’s capacity to construct a plot that genuinely defies the expectations of the most seasoned of readers. Briefly, this is the story of Che (or Jay, as his grandmother names him), the son of radical Harvard activists in the sixties who has been cocooned in his grandmother’s deeply conservative closed world while his parents are fugitives from the law. He is subsequently kidnapped by a woman named Dial, at the request of his mother—who is almost simultaneously killed. Dial then flees to the Australian outback and hides out in a hippy commune until the plot moves to an unlikely denouement. Framed against the alternating narrative perspectives of Che and Dial, the sequence of events initially appears to be more Hollywood that what one would expect from Carey but as soon as the two central figures move to Australia, the voices grow increasingly convincing, the landscapes begin to reek of authenticity in this peculiar isolated slice of 1970s Australia, a far-flung, post-hippy world in which people persist and take refuge on the margins of bigotry and increasing modernity. It isn’t pretty; initially Che and Dial are almost consumed by the harshness of the pre-modern landscape but their gradual assimilation with their surroundings is quite beautifully rendered, and in this sense we have vintage Carey, although the novel is essentially quite different in focus to all his previous work, especially in the central fascination of the novel, which can only be described as a very deep human love between the boy and Dial. In this utterly odd invented world, Carey enacts a ponderous, moving account of how genuinely meaningful existence and vastly complex relationships are played out in every space that people occupy.


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction His Illegal Self, by Peter Carey reviewed by Neil Murphy Untitled document If Milan Kundera’s insistence that the novel must offer insight into “a hitherto unknown segment of existence” is accurate, then Peter Carey’s recent His Illegal Self easily clears the first hurdle. The uniqueness of this novel, unlike, say, The True History of the Kelly Gang, is based not on an original technical or formal contribution but on the author’s capacity to construct a plot that genuinely defies the expectations of the most seasoned of readers. Briefly, this is the story of Che (or Jay, as his grandmother names him), the son of radical Harvard activists in the sixties who has been cocooned in his grandmother’s deeply conservative closed world while his parents are fugitives from the law. He is subsequently kidnapped by a woman named Dial, at the request of his mother—who is almost simultaneously killed. Dial then flees to the Australian outback and hides out in a hippy commune until the plot moves to an unlikely denouement. Framed against the alternating narrative perspectives of Che and Dial, the sequence of events initially appears to be more Hollywood that what one would expect from Carey but as soon as the two central figures move to Australia, the voices grow increasingly convincing, the landscapes begin to reek of authenticity in this peculiar isolated slice of 1970s Australia, a far-flung, post-hippy world in which people persist and take refuge on the margins of bigotry and increasing modernity. It isn’t pretty; initially Che and Dial are almost consumed by the harshness of the pre-modern landscape but their gradual assimilation with their surroundings is quite beautifully rendered, and in this sense we have vintage Carey, although the novel is essentially quite different in focus to all his previous work, especially in the central fascination of the novel, which can only be described as a very deep human love between the boy and Dial. In this utterly odd invented world, Carey enacts a ponderous, moving account of how genuinely meaningful existence and vastly complex relationships are played out in every space that people occupy.

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