|
Peter
Carey gave an interview to The Paris Review while writing
the manuscript that became His Illegal Self. In it,
he said, "I'm writing a book now about an orphan. But it's
also the story of Australia, which is a country of orphans.
I have the good fortune that my own personal trauma matches
my country's great historical trauma."
Carey
describes himself as an orphan because his childhood was shaken
up by a traumatic stay in a dreary boarding school. The "orphans"
of his native Australia are the soldiers and convicts who
colonized it for the British Empire. But it's a bit more challenging
to explain the orphan at the heart of His Illegal Self.
Eight-year-old
Che Selkirk lives with his wealthy, aristocratic grandmother
in New York. He barely remembers his mother and only knows
his father by the newspaper clippings he carries in his pocket.
Che is an orphan because his parents were SDS radicals in
the late 1960s, and they are still in hiding when the story
begins in 1972. Che's only desire is to be reunited with them.
Everything
goes wrong when a family friend, known as Dial, shows up to
escort Che to a secret meeting with his mother. Dial screws
up the rendezvous, making it appear that she has kidnapped
Che for a ransom. Meanwhile, Che's mother accidentally blows
herself up with explosives. Lacking the heart to tell him
the truth, Dial allows Che to believe that she is his real
mother. She has no choice but to grab the boy and go underground.
On the run, they wind up—where else?—in the backwoods
of Australia, the country of orphans.
Carey
manages all of this in the first 50 pages, and if the plot
sounds far-fetched, it's mediated by an almost preposterous
amount of skill and cunning on the author's part. Carey has
already won the Booker Prize twice, and some parts of His
Illegal Self are better than his best work to date. This
is how Carey introduces Trevor, an Australian "feral hippie"
who looks after Dial and Che:
The
boy did not know Trevor but he would be familiar soon
enough, and for a damn long time after that as well, and
he would always connect the name to that particular body—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. He had a mashed-up
ear, a short haircut, as short as a soldier's, reddish
brown, smelling of marijuana, papaya, and mango. When
Trevor was not naked, and he was naked every chance he
got, he wore baggy Indian pajama pants, and when he smiled,
like now, at the fleeing tourists, he revealed a jagged
tooth.
Carey
makes a point of revealing the story—how the adults respond
to this precocious, sheltered boy and make decisions about
his fate that he cannot possibly comprehend—in a series
of glimpses from the boy's point of view. Often, these glimpses
involve the subtle changes that come over the adults' bodies
as Che watches them discuss things that are far too complicated
for a boy to understand. Che, for example, lays his head in
the crook of Dial's warm neck and feels her motherly embrace,
and suddenly he's convinced that she's his mother. But Carey
is more than capable of accelerating his prose and running
headlong into an action scene as well:
Scratchy
eyed and heavy headed, [Dial] clambered down the ladder
and ran to fetch her dew-damp overalls and then, hearing
the thud and slam of the car as it bottomed on the track,
she sprinted down the hill toward the road, straight through
the uncut feathery grass. She heard the bang as its engine
slammed the yellow rock, and then she leaped from the
cutting and she was in its deadly path.
After
such an effortless and plot-driven beginning, the middle of
the novel feels like a miscalculation. Dial and Che basically
mope around the Australian rainforest and come up against
a community of local revolutionaries. None of the pressures
that drove the early scenes—mistaken identities, escaping
the police—apply here, and the novel languishes for about
50 pages. It's never dull, but it's a frustrating change of
speed, as if readers are being told to walk instead of run
into the swimming pool.
Carey
does redeem the novel with an ending as all-out and impressive
as the beginning. Dial's situation as the presumed criminal
turns ever more treacherous, and Che slowly comes into his
own. The boy and his accidental kidnapper share a genuine
affection—something more precious and strange than anything
an orphan could have imagined.
Although
it doesn't rank with Carey's best work (Oscar and Lucinda,
Jack Maggs, True History of the Kelly Gang),
there are few authors who could pull off as lively and finely
wrought a tale as His Illegal Self.
(April,
2008)
|
