Peter Carey
HIS ILLEGAL SELF
272pp. Faber. £16.99.
978 0 571 23151 5
Peter Carey’s fiction is populated by impostors, hoaxers and confidence
tricksters: patchwork people, constructed selves caught up in the fraught
and absorbing process of reinventing themselves. They are not always
likeable, but even the least likeable have that spark of vitality, the high
colouring, that distinguishes a successful fictional creation. Think of Jack
Maggs, the Dickensian convict determined to find redemption as a benevolent
father; Irish-Australian rebel Ned Kelly, who responds to the casual
injustices of colonial rule by re-fashioning himself as a legend; grotesque
Bob McCorkle, the bogus poet conjured out of thin air as a cruel joke,
hellbent on proving his bona fides to an unbelieving public; crippled
Tristan Smith’s obsessive quest to defy his physical deformities by becoming
an actor; psychopathic Benny Catchprice’s doomed attempt to escape his
memories of childhood abuse by turning himself into an angel. Carey’s most
famous pair of self-inventors, Oscar and Lucinda, with their taste for
gambling and their compulsive utopian dreams, happen to be the most
charming. But even they contain that element of the monstrous, that whiff of
Frankenstein triumphantly animated that is Carey’s hallmark.
Carey reopens the question of the fragile nature of identity in his new novel,
His Illegal Self. The book may not have the im-mediate, eccentric appeal of
Oscar and Lucinda, the imaginative brio that infuses The Unusual Life of
Tristan Smith and My Life as a Fake, or the ability to shock of The Tax
Inspector, but it is still unsettling, and it has a main character as
original as any Carey has ever created. Adopting the activities of the
militant US underground in the early 1970s as his background, Carey has
written a quietly disturbing story about the external assaults and pressures
to which the self is subject. Unlike, say, Philip Roth, Carey is not really
interested in politics: his concern is with people and places. If this makes
the thriller-like aspects of his plot, which are handled perfunctorily, more
than a little unconvincing, it frees him to play to his greatest strength,
which is to suggest a profound and sympathetic interest in the human animal.
In Che Selkirk, Carey has drawn a persuasive picture of an identity in search
of definition that is distinctive both for its emotional richness and its
light touch. This particular constructed self is all the more difficult to
bring off – and all the more compelling – because Che, like Benny and
Tristan, is one of Carey’s troubled children. Born into a life of apparent
privilege, the trendily named Che is the seven-year-old son of radical Ivy
League-educated parents whose anti-American activities have put them on the
FBI’s Most Wanted list. It is 1972, the year of Watergate (we get a snatch
of the news report announcing the break-in at the Watergate Hotel) and the
high point of the Vietnam war. Che’s mother Susan is a member of a terrorist
organization with similarities to the violent Weather Underground; a Diana
Oughton-like figure who makes the headlines by throwing herself and her baby
son in front of the US Secretary of Defense’s Lincoln, and later gets blown
up when putting together a homemade bomb. His father, Dave Rubbo, is a
former Harvard golden boy, a delinquent charmer constantly on the run
between assorted “safe houses”, and has no real interest in his son either.
Che, raised by his disapproving patrician grandmother in her Upper East Side
apartment without access to television or any other potentially upsetting
sources of information about his parents, has only a rudimentary grasp of
who they are. His idealization of the pair, and his dreams of being reunited
with them, are fuelled by a hip teenage neighbour who assures him, “They
will come for you, man. They’ll break you out of here”. Che’s guilelessness
and innocence are bleakly contrasted, throughout the book, with the
opportunistic self-absorption, thinly disguised as a conscientious
radicalism or a sense of class entitlement, of the adults around him. When a
beautiful young woman with a backpack and tinkling anklets steps out of the
lift of his apartment building one day he recognizes her, in a moment of
desperate wishful thinking, as his mother. The three – mother, child and
grandmother – descend on Third Avenue to buy Chanel perfume. The mother and
the grandmother squabble over the pronunciation of the boy’s name (his
grandmother has, perhaps wisely, decided to call him “Jay” rather than “Che”
in Bloomingdale’s). By this time, however, in spite of his growing
disorientation, Che is smitten with the young woman, and he is ecstatic when
she bolts into the subway with him on the way home. Their haphazard,
picaresque journey, which takes them from New York to Philadelphia by
Greyhound bus, and from there to a hippie commune in Queensland via Seattle,
Sydney and Brisbane, is recounted alternately by Che and by the woman – who
insists that he call her Dial – in contrapuntal perceptions that establish
the child’s absolute capacity for trust while revealing the ways in which
that trust is being betrayed. For Dial is of course not Che’s mother at all,
but an outsider co-opted to escort him to her. Dial’s actual name turns out,
rather heavy-handedly, to be Anna Xenos (Greek for “stranger”), while her
nickname, equally pointedly, is short for “dialectic”: Anna is not a violent
activist but a Vassar bluestocking. But Che’s real mother, Susan Selkirk, is
of course already dead, blown up by that bomb, and Dial finds herself on the
run from a kidnapping charge while she tries to work out how best to return
Che to New York.
It is at this point, after a series of plot twists and turns that are
dashingly improbable enough to deserve to be called flourishes, that Dial
and Che arrive in the heart of Queensland’s counterculture. The
helter-skelter action of the novel’s first half slows down so abruptly that
one cannot help suspecting that it was a device, all along, to get the
ersatz mother and child into an Australian setting. As the two try to settle
into the outback commune where Dial hopes they will be safe from the law,
the novel’s focus shifts resolutely from the political to the personal.
Dial’s deepening relationship with Che – her reluctance to tell him the
truth about his parents, and his own complicity in upholding the myth of her
as mother – is worked out against a densely poetic evocation of the bush at
Yandina, with its forest “laced with narrow winding trails, like veins in a
creature as yet unnamed”. As Dial gardens and picks wild cherry tomatoes and
tries to improve their hut with crookedly nailed planking, Che struggles to
come to terms with his sense of dislocation. Carey brilliantly captures the
child’s shifting reality in language that is a blend of the seen and the
felt: “It was not home no matter what she called it, but sometimes he saw
how it contained the parts of home he would rather have forgotten – the
colour of sadness, the same light on the moss side of the trees”.
The commune is host to a gallery of what seem, at first, to be grotesques:
dropouts and potheads, hippies who are predictably fascist in the
enforcement of their liberal principles; the antipodean equivalent of the
didactic US counterculture Dial has just fled. Carey exploits the comic
potential of the frequent clashes between the dialectically trained Dial,
formerly the Alice May Twitchell Fellow in English at Vassar, and her
nebulous new sparring partners in the Crystal Community. Dial has given Che
a kitten, but the community has a rule against cats:
"The woman with the starving chest said her sister was into cats. The
sister was not yet at a stage of development where she could get by without
her cat. She said everybody couldn’t grow at the same rate. She thought Dial
would in time. Then she said, Yes, a fading away kind of sound. Then she
said, So."
The humour cuts both ways. While the commune members, partly thanks to the
mess in Vietnam, harbour an unthinking anti-American prejudice, Dial is
equally ignorant of the realities of Australian life. “She had never heard
of Cedar Bay, helicopter raids and arson committed by Queensland police. She
did not know there was a Queensland Health Act which permitted police to
search her house without a warrant.” In fact, she does not even know about
the Australian presence in Vietnam itself. It is the sort of mutual cultural
incomprehension that Carey has explored before to good effect – most
spectacularly, in the tensions between Efica and Voorstand in The Unusual
Life of Tristan Smith – but here, as there, the socio-political context
exists primarily to give density and shape to a private quest.
One of Dial’s chief antagonists is hardened, feral Trevor, the casualty of a
brutal childhood at the hands of the Christian Brothers in South Australia:
another of Carey’s damaged survivors. Trevor, however, senses that all is
not as it seems between Dial and Che, and begins to woo them both with a
mixture of bluff sympathy and practical help. The bruised affection between
Che and Dial, and its gradual expansion to include this unlikely father
figure, is the emotional heart of the book. In spite of Che’s misgivings,
the child begins to find an accommodation with his rough new surroundings,
with the lantana bushes and the dusty roads and the eucalyptus trees, so
unlike his former plush life in Manhattan. Che’s sense of the possibilities
of existence in the rainforest is subtly expanded by the books Dial reads to
him: Jack London’s The Call of the Wild and Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn,
tales of adventure and escape that parallel his gradual inner reorientation
away from civilization and privilege. These become “the best days he had
ever lived so far”:
"In Sullivan County he had seen red-neck boys through the windshield of
his grandma’s car, kids throwing stones below the creek or bashing their
bikes down through the woods. He had thought he would have to live behind
the windshield.
Now he was the kid who lived in the bush at night; he instructed the hippie
kids how to make shelters in the bush, digging down into the black soil of
the rain forest. They laid fishbone fern as he ordered, then sticks and
branches on the top. He had never done this in his life before but no one
knew that."
While the segue from coddled city boy to liberated savage seems schematic and
rather facile at times, the anguish Che feels in his search for
authenticity, and for the truth about his mother and father, is harrowingly
realized. He has the shaky poise, the fragile dignity, of a real child, and
there is a taut, bitten-back emotion in his grief when it dawns on him that
he might lose Dial and Trevor that is truly terrible. Che seldom cries;
instead, when overhearing Dial about to reveal the truth about his mother to
Trevor, “His own breath was held like a crumpled milk carton in his bony
chest”. His recurring moments of defiance and rage, his neediness; his
insights into the limitations of the adults who wield such power over his
future, and his helpless attachment to them, are completely convincing. So
are his easy capacity for affection, his “sly shy smile”, the wad of old
business cards and newspaper cuttings he keeps in his back pocket and refers
to as “my papers”; his slightly rancid boy smell. He is the best thing in
the book, and easily the best child Carey has ever invented.
The iron grip Carey keeps on the emotional content of his material ensures
that the novel always steers well clear of sentimentality. The ending is
unexpected, and deliberately downbeat. If I have a cavil, it is that Carey
does not relax his hold at the very moment when we really do need to know
more. There have been hints throughout the novel that Che, against the odds,
manages to survive his childhood in a state of grace; that his irregular,
“illegal” life with Dial and Trevor, far from damaging him, not only
continues but in some sense makes him the successful man he later becomes.
We are told that in adulthood Che “would be known as someone who took large
and reckless actions”, and in the very last line there is a tantalizing
reference to his “comic and occasionally disastrous life”. But we do not see
or know enough of the adult Che Selkirk, or his future, to understand in
what sense, precisely, it is either comical or disastrous, or both. What
happens to Che later, once he grows up? Does he become an also-ran for the
2008 US presidential race? A human rights lawyer in Guantánamo Bay? A
shareholder in IBM? Is he at least happy? Somehow the fate of this trusting,
intelligent, utterly engaging child seems, after 272 all too brief pages, to
matter very much.
Elizabeth Lowry's novel The Bellini Madonna will be published next
year.
