PETER CAREY is a feral writer. His novels pin down outlaws, criminals and other violent men in strong sentences that break the rules of grammar. The women in his books can be brutal, brutalised, or both. Animals, typically, come off badly: the victims of natural or perverted killings. There is scarce comfort in the wild landscapes or dirty cityscapes, where Carey's characters lead “comic and occasionally disastrous” lives; but there is gritty pathos, laced with residual faith in the transforming power of love.

His Illegal Self, Carey's tenth novel, pushes to the extreme questions of personal, cultural and historical inheritance that have long preoccupied him. At the centre of the story is Che, an eight-year-old boy, born in 1965 to American revolutionaries. Che's parents are members of the Harvard-based SDS (Students for a Democratic Society), but he is removed from their care after his mother hurls him under Robert McNamara's car during a student protest. Che is raised by his privileged grandmother in New York. She calls him Jay, especially when in Bloomingdale's. The novel's opening sentence reveals the void around which Che has constructed his emotional life: “There were no photographs of the boy's father in the house upstate.”

There are, on the other hand, photographs of his mother, but none distinctive enough to prevent him mistaking another woman for her: when she “stepped out of the elevator into the apartment on East Sixty-second Street he recognized her straightaway.” They say be careful what you wish for, but Jay is too young and needy to heed such second-guessing advice.

Che is rapidly and willingly abducted by the woman he takes for his mother, whose name is Dial (short for “dialectic”, her nickname among the Harvard comrades). His childhood babysitter has long predicted that “They will come for you, man. They'll break you out of here.” Dial's motivation for effecting the reckless abduction remains obscure: her old loyalty to the SDS fragments and fades with the “Movement” itself. “You don't have no revolutionary situation,” her father, a war veteran, remarks. “This is America. God bless America.”

Dial's personal credentials are also suspect. “She could not make a bed, let alone a revolution.” Whatever is she doing stealing the famous child of notoriously rebellious parents, and flying off to Australia with him to hide out in a jungle squat in Queensland?

“Queensland was a police state run by men who never finished high school. They raided the hippies in Cedar Bay with helicopters and burned down their houses. They parked out on Remus Creek Road at night and searched the hippie cars without permission from a judge. So if you thought you came to Remus Creek Road to get away from being illegal, that was just a joke.”

Carey sees the joke with piercing clarity, but remains compassionate towards his characters, following them steadily into their folly, never condescending to their material and emotional squalor. “How could he have been happy? It was in almost every sense impossible. He had been torn from his soil, thrown through the sky. In spite of which he remembered, vividly, years later a brief period of deep tranquillity.” Che returns obsessively to the question: how will his father find him? Dial responds to his flagrant need for love while reckoning the impossibility of motherhood: “She did not know how real mothers did anything, how they could live without being driven mad.”

The situation is hopeless and disgusting: deceitful hippies, horrible insects, lack of sanitation, drug-induced stupor, practical and emotional incoherence. But it is also touching and funny. “‘I am an academic,' she said. ‘I shouldn't be here.' She gestured at the puzzling plank nailed crookedly on the wall. ‘I hate all this shit.'”

Che is a convincing child. Alternately vulnerable and resilient, weathering the storms of the adult lives he encounters, learning to steer fixedly towards a future of his own. “In the humid darkness, Dial screwed up her face imagining how it would feel to have the whole foundation pulled from underneath your life.” It would feel like being at the centre of a revolution, trying to find a way out; something Carey understands politically and emotionally.

Since winning the Booker Prize a second time with his portrait of the outlaw Ned Kelly (True History of the Kelly Gang, 2000), Carey has published two novels, My Life as a Fake and Theft. His Illegal Self further explores the underbelly of the Western world. All the prizes in the world could not turn Carey into an Establishment figure, and for that his fans are for ever grateful. “A tree fell in Australia”, is the simple opening to one chapter. Carey makes you hear the crash and see the debris so vividly that the world seems turned upside-down.

His Illegal Self by Peter Carey

Faber, £16.99; 300pp

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