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Summary
Summary
When the boy was almost eight, a woman stepped out of the elevator into the apartment on East Sixty-second Street and he recognized her straightaway. No one had told him to expect it. That was pretty typical of growing up with Grandma Selkirk . . . No one would dream of saying, Here is your mother returned to you.
His Illegal Self is the story of Che--raised in isolated privilege by his New York grandmother, he is the precocious son of radical student activists at Harvard in the late sixties. Yearning for his famous outlaw parents, denied all access to television and the news, he takes hope from his long-haired teenage neighbor, who predicts, They will come for you, man. They'll break you out of here.
Soon Che too is an outlaw: fleeing down subways, abandoning seedy motels at night, he is pitched into a journey that leads him to a hippie commune in the jungle of tropical Queensland. Here he slowly, bravely confronts his life, learning that nothing is what it seems. Who is his real mother? Was that his real father? If all he suspects is true, what should he do?
Never sentimental, His Illegal Self is an achingly beautiful story of the love between a young woman and a little boy. It may make you cry more than once before it lifts your spirit in the most lovely, artful, unexpected way.
Author Notes
Peter Carey was born on May 7, 1943 in Bacchus Marsh, Victoria, Australia. His first two books, The Fat Man in History (1974) and War Crimes (1979), were short story collections. His first novel, Bliss, was published in 1982. At the time he was balancing his writing career with the operation of an advertising agency in Sydney, and his books were not generally known outside of Australia. He began to receive international attention when Illywhacker was published in 1985. He won the Booker Prize in 1988 for Oscar and Lucinda and in 2001 for True History of the Kelly Gang. His other works include The Tax Inspector, Parrot and Olivier in America, and The Chemistry of Tears. He also won the Miles Franklin Award three times. In 2015 he made the Australian Book Designers Association Award shortlist for his title Amnesia. This title also made the 2015 Prime Minister's Literary Awards shortlist.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
School Library Journal Review
Adult/High School-It is 1972 and seven-year-old Che Selkirk, the son of radical parents he has never met, lives in isolated privilege with his well-to-do grandmother. Denied access to television and the news, he picks up scraps of information about his outlaw mother and father from a teenage neighbor who assures Che that his parents will come and "break you out of here." When a woman named Dial arrives at the boy's Park Avenue apartment to take him on a day excursion, he assumes that she is his mother. Unfortunately, things go terribly awry and Che becomes a fugitive himself. He and Dial end up in the Australian bush in an inhospitable commune. Carey uses a stream-of-consciousness style that poignantly communicates Che's confusion about his life on the lam and what he really wants. The explosive conclusion is worth the wait as the author vividly portrays the hardscrabble, primitive life of a group of hippies in his native Australia. Young adults will appreciate His Illegal Self for its main character-an orphan by circumstance-who struggles to understand his predicament and ultimately gains not only wisdom, but also the love he has sought.-Pat Bangs, Fairfax County Public Library, VA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Publisher's Weekly Review
Carey, who has made a career out of boring into the psyches of scoundrels, delivers a cunning fugitive adventure set largely in the wilds of Australia. Raised by his boho-turned-bourgeois grandmother on New York's Upper East Side, Che Selkirk, seven years old in 1972, hasn't seen his Weathermenesque parents since he was a toddler, but when a young woman who calls herself Dial walks into Che's apartment one afternoon, he believes his mother has finally come. Within two hours, Dial and Che are on the lam and heading for Philly as Che's kidnapping hits the news. Unexpected trouble strikes, and soon the boy and Dial, who doesn't know how or if to tell Che that she is only a messenger who was supposed to escort him to meet his mother, land in a hippie commune in the Australian outback. The novel sags as Dial, with the help of local illiterate "feral hippie" Trevor, tries to make the primitive living situation work; the drama consists largely of commune infighting and the travails of living without running water, but the narrative eventually regains its thrust and barrels toward a bang-up conclusion. While this novel lacks the boldness of Theft or the sweep of Oscar and Lucinda, it's still a fine addition to the author's oeuvre. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
This isn't the first fictional work to explore the militant radical underground of the late 1960s and early '70s, but it may well be the best. What freshens the familiar material is the child's-eye perspective with which Carey begins the story. Impressions and chronology take time to coalesce, as seven-year-old Che (called "Jay" by the patrician grandmother who has raised him) has little idea what is happening to him or why. Take the title as irony, because Che is the embodiment of innocence, with his only possible guilt by association. Most of what Che knows about his parents he has learned from his babysitter, who has promised him that he will be liberated: "They will break you out, man. Your life will start for real." Both his mother and his father, neither of whom he knows, are notorious underground militants, and Che himself has some sort of fame from a photo taken of him as a baby with his mother at a demonstration. One afternoon, the babysitter's prophecy appears to come true, as a woman whom Che believes to be his mother visits and flees with him. Whatever the relation between the two, a bond develops between Che and the captor/rescuer he has been told to call "Dial." As the novel's perspective shifts between the two characters, it appears that Dial has little more idea than Che what is going on. She has risked her career as a fledgling professor at Vassar to take the boy, and whatever relation she has with him, she has a history with the boy's father. The action quickly shifts from New York--where Che's grandmother lives, as does the novelist--to Australia, where Carey was born and raised and where revelation awaits for both the characters and the reader. Carey's mastery of tone and command of point of view are very much in evidence in his latest novel (My Life as a Fake, 2004, etc.), which is less concerned with period-piece politics than with the essence of identity. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Two-time Booker Prize winner Carey has a thing for outlaws, whether he's writing about the famous folk hero Ned Kelly or schemers involved in a literary hoax or art crime. He also has a gift for bringing to creepy-crawly and blistering life Australia's jungle and desert wilds. His latest spectacularly involving and supremely well made novel of life on the edge begins in New York as Che, a boy of seven living with his rich, no-nonsense grandmother, takes off with a woman festooned with beads and bells. It's 1972, and Che is certain that he and his fugitive mother will join his father, the FBI's most wanted. But things go awry quickly and irrevocably, and he and Dial (short for dialectics) end up in Australia with a band of scary off-the-grid hippies. Precocious, observant, and resourceful, Che becomes suspicious of Dial and the reason for their wretched exile as he scrambles to protect himself from dangers natural and human. For every lurch forward, Carey throws this psychologically astute and diabolically suspenseful novel in reverse to reveal the truth about Dial and her love for the boy. Carey's unique take on the conflict between the need to belong and the dream of freedom during the days of rage over the Vietnam War is at once terrifying and mythic.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2007 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
WHEN circumstances throw a child into the company of a stranger, do you wish for that stranger to be male or female? What would the child prefer? In Harry Mulisch's novel "The Assault," a young Dutch boy is separated from his parents at the end of World War II, after members of the underground assassinate a collaborator outside the family home. Alone and afraid, he is taken to a police station and pushed into a dark cell. "All about him he could feel the presence of the man who must be in there somewhere." When a voice in the blackness says, "Why are you here?" relief washes over him. Why? Because it is "the gentle voice of a woman. Suddenly it was as if a great danger had been averted." As the woman pulls him close to console him, the boy smells sweat and something strangely sweet - perfume, he thinks. But it's blood. The woman who comforts him is one of thetassassins, a "terrorist" in the words Of the soldiers who imprisoned her. Her actions led to the death of the boy's parents, but he doesn't know that, nor does she. Still, as she holds him, he hears "her heart pound, really much too hard for someone who was just comforting someone else." Years later, he sobs when he learns she has died: "She was resurrected together with all she had meant to him, hidden there in the darkness." This idea, this truth - that a child in distress is hard-wired to seek protection from a woman, any woman, whatever her failings, her confusions, her ideology - is the heartbeat that races through Peter Carey's enthralling new novel, "His Illegal Self," a book as psychologically taut as a Patricia Highsmith thriller and as starkly beautiful as Mulisch's modern classic. Carey's protagonist is a 7-year-old boy named Che Selkirk (called "Jay" by his starchy Park Avenue grandmother), born in 1965 to radicalized Ivy Leaguers. After his mother stumbles during a protest against Robert McNamara at Harvard and rolls under a car in the motorcade, the 1-year-old Che clutched to her chest like a football, Grandma Selkirk takes over her grandson's care. After Che's mother robs a bank in Bronxville, Grandma gets permanent custody of the child, resolving to "bring him up Victorian. It was better than 'all this.' " Meanwhile, Che's mother goes underground. Inevitably, the characters evoke storied figures from the counterculture - Che Guevara and the socialist revolution, Patty Hearst and the Symbionese Liberation Army, Diana Oughton and her West Village basement bomb factory. From this, Carey takes a daring imaginative leap: What if Patty Hearst, on the run with the S.L.A., had had a baby in her arms, along with her machine gun? What if the town house where Oughton and her fellow Weatherman Terry Robbins blew themselves up had had a nursery on a higher floor? Can you midwife the revolution and raise a child at the same time? On the day the book begins, Che's sheltered life of doormen, museum visits, country house retreats and spinsterly games of ludo comes to an end. The elevator to his grandmother's apartment opens upon a defiant young hippie, come to collect him. Beholding her, Che is "deaf, in love," dazzled. "He had thought of her so many nights and here she was, exactly the same, completely different - honeycolored skin and tangled hair in 15 shades. She had Hindu necklaces, little silver bells around her ankles, an angel sent by God." When he asks her, "Can I call you Mom?" she responds, "You can call me Dial." Dial is short for "dialectic." A self-styled "S.D.S. goddess," Dial has just become an assistant professor in the English department at Vassar, but she's still caught in the ideological web of the Movement, "although what the Movement was by 1972 depended on whom you were talking to." As the boy looks at the unknown woman, "adoringly," giving her "little glances, smiles," she thinks "how glorious it was to be loved, she, Dial, who was not loved by anyone. She felt herself just absorb this little boy, his small damp hand dissolving in her own." Where does Dial want to take Che, and is it for the Movement or for herself? She doesn't know, and Che's entrenched WASP code keeps him from questioning her too closely: "It was his upbringing, to 'not say.' " Still, even as you worry about what kind of guardian Dial will make, it's hard not to share in Che's exhilaration as he takes the hand of the woman he regards as his liberator: "Slippery together as newborn goats," they rush down a subway stairwell to meet messengers of the Movement. "Giddy, giggling," Che exults at his freedom: "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." The real world turns out to be mightily uncomfortable: first the Port Authority, then Philadelphia, where a bomb blast propels them to further flight. They travel to the West Coast, where callous ideologues from the Movement give them money and plane tickets to make them go away. They wind up in Australia, where Dial buys a hideout on the muggy, overgrown edge of the Queensland jungle - two grimy huts infested with black flies and bats. Their nearest neighbors are uptight, self-righteous hippies and coarse rogues. To the West Coast hippies, Dial had seemed "petit bourgeois"; to the Aussies, she's "twitchy and sarcastic." Even Che baits her. With each new encounter, Carey gives weight and heft to the concept of class struggle, showing that the conflict occurs not just between groups but among individuals, even within a single person. "You want to live an Alternative Lifestyle," an Australian criminal named Trevor mocks Dial as he commandeers her savings. "She had a degree from Harvard," she thinks, as if that means anything in the wilds of Queensland. "He couldn't speak or spell." Dial knows that if she and Che are to survive, they must make peace with their hostile environs, but when Trevor and Che forge a friendship, jealousy consumes her, and she's "hurt by his reticence." Che is all she has, but is he even hers? As always with Carey, Australia provides a staging ground for primordial forces. While Dial labors to preserve their walls and her freedom, the boy labors to understand his new circumstances, unaware that ideology has orphaned him. Nursing fantasies that his father, whom he's never met, will rescue him, he asks Dial, "How can my dad ever find us now?" He's intelligent enough, in spite of his youth, to sense that Trevor is dangerous, that Dial is clueless, and that he is in an untenable position: "It was absolutely clear, even to a boy, that the mother could not take care of him. She had no idea of where she was or what she'd taken on." In their hut, over a game of cards, Che feels "a cloud of sadness settle on them both, like bugs around a lamp." What will become of them? Will the neighbors turn violent? Will Dial get arrested? Will Che make it out of the wilderness before he's forgotten how to play ludo? Put another way: Will the kid be all right? IN "His Illegal Self," Peter Carey draws as much magic from the muslin of contemporary speech as he has previously from the lustrous velvet of his more fanciful prose. This novel marks a departure - an altogether successful one - for the versatile author, who usually paints gorgeous whorls of story around outlandish figures from the untouchable past, real or imagined: gamblers and dreamers, circus freaks, outlaws, prodigals and passionate eccentrics. Here, the world he inhabits the protest movement of the '60s and '70s - is both familiar and recent. Arguably, it lives on, remembered in every campus protest, every new burst of civic activism. You might think this would constrain Carey's creative powers, but if anything, it has concentrated them. His backdrop is no less exotic for its realism, and his close portrait of the relationship between one benighted woman and the child who depends on her is exquisite, enlarging the story beyond the frame of its epoch. The personal is political, Dial might say, and Che is that statement's living proof. "The executive will not support this, Dial," a Movement representative tells her early on, refusing Dial and the boy shelter. But Dial can't think of Che as "this." To her, Che is "him" - a person. "She thinks the revolution is a part-time job," someone else sneers. Dial is neither a full-time revolutionary nor a full-time child-minder; she's just a woman who learns too late that there's no practical way to combine the two jobs, but whose conscience won't let her sacrifice either one. What if Patty Hearst, on the run with the S.L.A., had a baby in her arms, along with her machine gun? Liesl Schillinger is a regular contributor to the Book Review.
Library Journal Review
A child of Sixties activists wanted by the FBI, eight-year-old Che always dreamed that his parents would rescue him from grandma. Now he has his wish-maybe. With a five-city tour. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.