Fiction:Peter Carey's displaced and misunderstood characters make his novel succeed through honesty, writes Claire Kilroy
His Illegal Self By Peter Carey Faber and Faber, 272pp. £16.99 Peter Carey has justifiably earned himself a name as one of the great masters of voice. The term "literary ventriloquism" was applied to his Man Booker-winning novel The True History of the Kelly Gangalmost as insistently as the adjective "funny" was applied to Beckett during the 2006 centenary celebrations. Carey novels are notable for the rambunctious, irreverent, humorous voices that bulldoze their way through the prose like tanks, bouncing the reader along for the ride. A Carey narrator will excel at giving a good account of himself, never mind whether that account is true.
Despite living in New York these past 20 years, Carey's native Australia still preoccupies his imagination, as do meditations on the characteristics of that nation, the convict narrative in particular. His Illegal Selfis about outlaws, but it is an unusual contribution to the Carey backlist in that the main characters are foreigners - two Americans and a Londoner. Another key difference is that this novel does not specialise in rollicking charm. There is no lovable rogue to win the reader over with the sheer energy and audacity of his tall tales. Instead, there are only the displaced and misunderstood.
This may seem like a criticism. It is no such thing. The bookselling world is obsessed with sympathetic protagonists. Whether a reader "engages" with the characters or not is interpreted as the measure of a novel's success. This anxiety to retain the reader's sympathy has resulted in a flowering of manipulative sentimentality in the contemporary novel - The Time Traveler's Wifeand The Kite Runnerare recent examples, designed to make you cry. Toxic niceness limits creativity because it draws a line in the sand that the writer crosses at their peril. In His Illegal Self, Carey crosses the line.
This is a brave novel about a peculiar time, when 1960s idealism was souring into political radicalism. Che - or Jay, depending on which version of the child those around him wish to cultivate - is the seven-year-old son of super-wealthy (college libraries are named after them) Harvard kids who have become radicalised by a far left political movement, the SDS. Che's grandma, Phoebe Selkirk, gains custody of the boy when he is almost killed in the arms of his reckless young mother, Susan Selkirk, a "star child too, so blessed that when you saw her do the simplest thing, pull on a sweater or break into a jog, for instance, you were aware of a perfectly symmetrical being, each foot the same, each blue eye identical, her even white teeth beyond the reach of orthodontics."
Susan is a Park Avenue princess who announced on her 12th birthday that she wanted to be the American ambassador to France. She is also pathologically ruthless, subjugating everything, including her son, to the importance of "the Movement". Che hasn't seen his mother since she went "underground" when he was just two years of age. He thinks that "underground" is a specific place, and he dearly wants to find it.
When Dial (short for dialectic) steps into his grandmother's apartment five years later, Che recognizes her immediately as his mother. Dial is actually Che's babysitter of old. She has reluctantly agreed to bring Che to visit his estranged mother. "Now his hand was inside his true mother's hand and they were marsupials running down into the subway, laughing."
EXCEPT THAT THE visit goes horribly wrong. Susan blows herself up while planting a bomb, and Dial - realising that she is now guilty of kidnapping - panics and goes on the run with the child. They end up in the Australian bush. "The boy had no idea where on earth he stood." Nor does Dial. She cannot bear to tell Che that she is not his mother, that his mother is dead, and so she lets the misunderstanding blossom.
They run into Trevor, a London orphan, on a road in Queensland during a storm. ("Hello kid, said Trevor. You're with feral hippies.") Che and Dial end up living in a hippie commune, but instead of blustering their way through, Aussie style, as previous Carey protagonists might, the pair flounder. They withdraw into themselves. And unlike previous Carey protagonists, people dislike them. "We didn't even know these people were out here," Dial observes, "and all this time they'd been hating America."
His Illegal Selfrecalls not so much Carey's earlier work as Cormac McCarthy's The Road. Both centre around an adult and child fighting for survival in a difficult environment. Whereas The Roadundermined its credibility by proposing that a loving mother abandoned her child to a post-apocalyptic world, His Illegal Selfsucceeds through its honesty. "Oh Christ," thinks Dial, "what have I done? This had been an unblemished boy and the most remarkable thing about him had not been his handsome father's face but his perfect trust." The story reverberates long after the book has been closed, and that's a truer guide to a novel's merit than the likeability of its characters. Besides, they are likeable. They are funny, intelligent and heroic. As Dial says of Che: "He's a fucking prince." The same can be said of this book.
Claire Kilroy's second novel, Tenderwire, is published by Faber and Faber