His Illegal Self (Hardcover)

by Peter Carey (Author)
Key Phrases: boy washed, Susan Selkirk, Phoebe Selkirk, Phil Warriner (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
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.)
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From School Library Journal
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
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Knopf (February 5, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 030726372X
• ISBN-13: 978-0307263728
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 5.7 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (34 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #405,015 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Nature and Nurture, March 18, 2008

By	Jill I. Shtulman (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This novel has a lot to recommend it: original, compelling, descriptive writing, a unique plot, and characters that are distinctive and memorable.

But in the midst of the story, there's a gap -- one that was too difficult for this reader to navigate. We are to believe that "the mother" -- aka Anna Xenos -- who is on the cusp of academic success decides to take a huge risk in bringing Che, the young boy, to visit his birth mother. But why? The motivation is never explored. She is treated as a peripheral member of the underground, as an inferior being by the boy's grandmother, and in essence, seems to have moved on from the passions of college years. Why risk it all without an internal motivation? And why go to Australia when there are certainly many countries (Canada, Mexico, Costa Rica) that are closer and also provide anonymity?

Carey is far better in his lush descriptions of nature in the communes of Australia. He devotes page after page painting a fine portrait of the wild natural beauty of the land. What I wanted him to do was spend equal time in descriptions of the inner life of Anna; for that, there were broad strokes. He does do that admirably for Che; it's difficult to create a plausible child who is not too cloying or too mature or too naive. Che is none of these things; he is truly an original.

In short, this is a fine book with some flaws that make it less than an extraordinary one.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Through a Child's Eyes, April 11, 2008

By	Elaine (USA) - See all my reviews

Carey has done a superb job of presenting the harrowing experience of a young boy who is forced to travel from the safety of his grandmother's cushy digs in NYC to the scary and foreign world of Australia's underground with a woman he thinks he knows. Seen through the innocent, trusting eyes of a child, there is a ring of truth in every scene. The overuse of similes (some cringe worthy)is a distraction, and the title is certainly not memorable; nevertheless, Carey's beautifully crafted story and memorable characters - Dial, Trevor, and Che - stay with the reader long after the last page is read.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The ending is as fitting as it is startling, February 25, 2008

By	Bookreporter.com (New York, New York) - See all my reviews

For the portion of the United States population under the age of 30 or so, the anti-war activism of the 1960s and '70s probably seems as remote as some obscure medieval conflict. In recent novels like Dana Spiotta's EAT THE DOCUMENT and Neil Gordon's THE COMPANY YOU KEEP, talented authors have given us glimpses of that era in the form of middle-aged fugitive radicals who surface in the present and now must come to terms with the consequences of their youthful actions. Now, two-time Booker Prize winner Peter Carey thrusts us into the heart of the era, with the profound and moving story of a young boy and his protector forced to face those circumstances in real time.

The year is 1972, the end of the Vietnam War almost three years away and Richard Nixon, the President first elected on a cynical promise to end it, on the verge of re-election. Seven-year-old Ché David Selkirk, under the care of his maternal grandmother after his radical activist parents are arrested following a violent demonstration, divides his time between a luxury apartment on New York's Upper East Side and a rustic lakeside retreat in upstate New York. His privileged, sheltered life changes abruptly when a woman by the name of Anna Xenos, known only to Ché as "Dial," takes him one afternoon for what his grandmother believes is a brief, clandestine reunion with his mother. Instead, the outing turns into a trip across the United States, shepherded and financed by members of "the Movement," from bus station to safehouse to motel and ultimately to Queensland, Australia. Ché aches to be reunited with his parents and fantasizes about the possibility that Dial, an English professor and friend of his mother, may even be her.

Ché and Dial eventually land in a commune known as the Crystal Community, where Dial has purchased 14 acres of desolate ground populated by a handful of ramshackle structures and a group of equally dubious inhabitants. Undermining the prototypical "peace and love" ideology of the time, the "hippies" are as suspicious and unwelcoming as any middle-class suburbanites, even going so far as to demand Ché and Dial rid themselves of Che's kitten, Buck. In this environment, Carey sketches with painstaking tenderness and care the emotionally complex relationship between Dial and Ché --- sometimes warm and more often tense and challenging --- that's at the heart of the novel.

At the commune, Ché is befriended by Trevor Dobbs ("a strong man, sleek as a porpoise, sheathed in a good half-inch-thick coat of fat which seemed to feed his brown, taut skin, giving it a healthy fish-oil kind of shine"), a tough and oddly compassionate character who becomes a father figure, teaching him skills that will enable him to survive in the bush and imparting both his rugged values and his barely contained paranoia about those in authority.

The success of HIS ILLEGAL SELF rests on two pillars: Carey's acute insight into the mind of Ché, and the consistent lyricism of writing that gives life to the harsh beauty of the Australian landscape. Of the boy, finishing a gardening project for Trevor that conjures up memories of lakeside summers with his grandmother, he writes: "Then he did cry, secretly, mourning everything he lost, all the cold empty hollows, the marrow stolen from his bones." And, in one of the countless arresting examples of his keenly observant prose, the author pictures for us "the inky green of rain forest where arm-thick vines wound around trees with skins like elephants. Beyond the hut, behind the car, the lonely darkness was bleeding along the course of Remus Creek and washing up into the muggy hills."

When Trevor and Dial enlist an Australian lawyer of questionable competence in a plan to return Ché to his grandmother, the life they've been living in the rugged wilderness begins to unravel. As befits a novel of this maturity and power, HIS ILLEGAL SELF doesn't falter by trying to bring the story to a close in any kind of tidy fashion. The ending is as fitting as it is startling, all the more satisfying because of the careful craftsmanship that leads up to it.

In an interview on the occasion of the publication of his last novel, Carey said that he's motivated by "the thought that one might actually make something very beautiful, that had never existed before." By that standard he has more than satisfied his goal in this rich and complex work.

--- Reviewed by Harvey Freedenberg ([e-mail])