His Illegal Self
One of Peter Carey’s best early stories, American
Dreams, is a beautifully ironic comment upon America’s
powerful hold over the Australian imagination. To the characters
who populate the tiny unnamed town in which the story is set,
America appears both familiar and distant. Its chimerical glamour
enthrals them. It is a land of movie stars, giant televisions,
luxurious cars. It represents escape.
When the enigmatic Mr Gleason startles everybody by transforming
their mundane lives into art, crafting a perfect replica of the
town and its inhabitants, they are puzzled and discomforted at
being exposed in such a way.
The story ends with Americans coming to see the model, which has
been transformed into a tourist trap, and gawk at the locals, but
in a neat ironic reversal the tourists have trouble accepting that
the inhabitants are really the people being represented.
American Dreams becomes less a tale of mutual
incomprehension than of wilful blindness. The two cultures gaze at
each other but each prefers the representation to the unglamorous
reality.
Not the least significant aspect of Carey’s 10th novel, His
Illegal Self, is that it turns the small town perspective of
American Dreams on its head. Its two main characters, a
young woman named Anna Xenos, who goes by the nickname Dial, and a
six-year-old boy named Che Selkirk, are Americans. They spend much
of the novel stranded in a hippie commune near the towns of Namboor
and Yandina in southern Queensland.
The sense of defamiliarisation as Dial and Che adjust to the
strange landscape and its odd inhabitants is one of the novel’s
achievements.
Carey has, on occasion, explored questions of cultural
difference in a very colourful fashion - notably in the elaborate
allegory of Efica and Voorstand in The Unusual Life of Tristan
Smith, and in his amusing memoir Wrong about Japan.
But in His Illegal Self, which is written in an
unobtrusively Americanised idiom, the quiet sense of dislocation
provides impetus to the book’s deep emotional undertow.
The novel is set in the early ’70s against the backdrop of the
political radicalism of the time. Che is the son of two disaffected
children of the privileged classes, both of whom have joined the
militant fringe of the counter-culture. They have abandoned Che to
the care of his grandmother, a wealthy New York matron, who
describes herself as a “bohemian”, deplores her daughter’s
revolutionary zeal and insists upon calling her grandson Jay.
The opening chapters, in which Dial absconds with Che, taking
his hand and running away from his grandmother on a New York
street, are as taught as any thriller. The point of view switches
back and forth between Che and Dial, and the overlapping
perspectives are brilliantly handled, gradually revealing the
farcical nature of the plot and the bungling that compels the pair
to go underground.
Carey is not particularly interested (a la Philip Roth) in the
destructive passions that politics can unleash but the novel does
set out a pointed contrast between the countercultures of Australia
and the US. The American radicals, for whom the narrative displays
no sympathy whatsoever, are self-important and ruthless. They are
full of passionate intensity and are genuinely dangerous: they rob
banks and build bombs.
The Australian hippies, with whom Dial and Che eventually come
to reside after a series of on-the-road travails, are hapless
ferals in Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s Queensland, which the omniscient
narrator (not a character) describes at one point as “a police
state run by men who never finished high school”. (Would it have
improved matters, one wonders, if they had finished high school?)
They are not apolitical but they are mumbo-jumbo spouters, bumbling
and ineffectual.
Dial and Che might have no knowledge of the country in which
they have sought refuge but there is more than a hint of mockery in
the way some of the Australian characters’ understanding of the US
is revealed to be little more than a jumble of preconceptions.
But if there is mockery in Carey’s portrayal of the hippie
commune, there is affection too. Trevor, a dodgy character who is
an illiterate but smart petty criminal, as well as a keen nudist,
is revealed to be a soft-hearted chap, who becomes an unlikely ally
for Dial and Che.
Even the unwelcoming Rebecca, a minor character who is initially
portrayed as the kind of laid-back fascist who doesn’t care what
you do as long as you obey the rules, is granted a degree of
empathy towards the end of the book.
This is reflective of the overall movement of the novel and is
ultimately more significant than its contextualising politics.
His Illegal Self is concerned with loss of innocence but
also with the painstaking creation of personal trust.
In the book’s gently paced second half the fragile and evolving
relationship between Dial and Che is deepened. Che’s conflicted
feelings about his estranged father are explored and the two exiles
slowly come to develop something like a sense of affinity for their
shambolic new home, whose landscape the novel affectionately
evokes.
His Illegal Self is a sad story but it has a warmth and
directness, an earthy poignancy, that one does not immediately
associate with Carey’s boisterously inventive fiction.
His recent novels have not been shy about acknowledging their
debt to classic literature. He has rewritten Charles Dickens in
Jack Maggs, William Faulkner in True History of the
Kelly Gang and Mary Shelley in My Life as a Fake. His
writing has also at times revelled in its virtuosity, most
obviously in the booming voice of Ned Kelly and the rambunctious
double-act of “Butcher” Bones and his perceptive idiot brother Hugh
in his previous (and very different) novel, Theft.
His Illegal Self is in its quiet way a technically
accomplished work but it does not flaunt its proficiency. A few
passing references to Huckleberry Finn, which highlight
the novel’s sympathy for Che’s child’s-eye view of the world and
the sense of freedom he discovers as he romps through the bush with
the commune’s hippie children, are as close as the book gets to a
canonical homage. It is none the worse for this unassuming
quality.
His Illegal Self might be a relatively straightforward
and understated tale by Carey’s usual standards but it is a fine
novel.
