Outsiders and outlaws have always appealed to Peter Carey’s imagination. So have story lines that go wide-rangingly walkabout. In his fiction, con men and convicts, refugees and bushrangers crisscross Australia’s vast land-mass. Misfits, from transported felons to Victorian eccentrics disastrously addicted to gambling, embark on voyages across the globe. His Illegal Self – a return to form for Carey after his two rather uncertain novels about forgery and fraud, My Life as a Fake (2003) and Theft (2006) – shows his talents assuredly getting back on track by accompanying more escapees on the run.

Opening in New York in 1972, the story swiftly travels, via fleeting touchdowns in Philadelphia, Seattle, Sydney and Brisbane, to the jungly recesses of Queenland’s rain forest. It is propelled there by the plight of Che Selkirk, the abandoned son of two radical militants whose bank-robbing and bomb-making activities have put them high on the FBI’s Most Wanted list.

For most of his life, carefully shielded from television and newspaper bulletins about his parents’ violent antics, seven-year-old Che has been under the guardianship of his grandmother, a wealthy Wasp gorgon whose imperious existence alternates between her Park Avenue apartment on the Upper East Side and a lakeside retreat in remote rural upstate New York. When she reluctantly permits Che a clandestine meeting with his mother – her deplored, renegade daughter – he is dramatically pulled into a very different world. The scarcely recognised young woman wearing Hindu necklaces and anklets tinkling with silver bells who now goes under the name of Dial (short for dialectic) whisks him off to the antipodes and a life that is the antithesis of the privileged one he has hitherto enjoyed.

Flashbacks, hints and delayed revelations gradually piece together a picture of what occurred on the day of his abduction, and ear-lier. But Carey’s prime focus is on what happens to Che and Dial amid the dense tangles of lantana shrub, vines as thick as arms and rampaging tropic vegetation hemming in the ramshackle hippie commune at Yandina, where they end up.

In this makeshift milieu, their arrival causes consternation. Spite and envy, jealousy and suspicion fester over lentil-laden meals and erupt in group assemblies, reeking of marijuana and patchouli oil, that are strident with counter-culture platitudes and pieties. Here, Dial – dismayed at becoming the target of regulation antiAmerican animus – finds an unlikely ally in a one-time Barnardo’s boy immigrant from south London, left twitchy with near-feral paranoia after the abuse he met with at a horrific Christian Brothers’ orphan farm in south Australia.

The slowly growing trust and rapport between him and Dial is nicely achieved in the novel, much of whose tough comedy comes from plunging a hyper-educated young woman, once the Alice May Twitchell Fellow at Vassar, into the trials and hard-earned satisfactions of the wilderness. One of the books Dial reads to an entranced Che during their odd odyssey is Jack London’s The Call of the Wild. In tribute to its canine hero who adapts triumphantly to being transferred from tameness to savage surroundings, Che gives the dog’s name, Buck, to a pet cat he acquires. But it is he and Dial who respond most resourcefully to drastic relocation.

Never letting you forget the hazards of their new habitat – cyclones upend trailer homes, two-inch-long ants with pincers as hard as steel lurk in the undergrowth, there are periodic raids on the commune by oafish Queensland police – Carey at the same time keeps you aware of its remarkable beauty. Sentences that resemble little imagist poems (“the wind blew and schools of eucalypt leaves turned like silver knives above her head”, “the tops and bottoms of paperbark trees were already drowning in the melancholy night”) decorate his narrative of his uprooted couple’s struggle for safety. The allure of the landscape as it glistens under gentle rain (“little pools of water gathering in the banana leaves, then spilling in a crystal rush you would never tire of”) is conjured up with lucid freshness.

This headily sensuous environment is one to which the tormented hero of Carey’s first novel, Bliss (1981) – written at an “alternative” commune in Yandina along with stories that appeared in his 1979 collection, War Crimes – journeyed in search of paradise.

Nine novels later, Carey has returned to the location in a vividly idiosyncratic narrative highlighting the concerns often central to the fiction he has produced over the past 25 years: tensions between Australia and colonising super-powers (a subject treated with especially inventive brio in his high-fantasy novel, The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith, 1994); the damage wreaked by corrupt authority (on striking display in Jack Maggs, 1997, and True History of the Kelly Gang, 2001, his recreations of 19th-century casualties of colonial cruelty); and childhood vulnerability (most searingly laid bare in The Tax Inspector, his 1991 shocker about a dysfunctional family). Complementing the last of these preoccupations with an engaging display of how parent-like protectiveness emotionally fulfils adults as well as nurturing children, His Illegal Self brims with robustly unsentimental likeability.

His illegal self by Peter Carey
Faber £16.99 pp272

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