Book Review: His Illegal Self by Peter Carey - Page 2

Carey handles it all very subtly, weaving privilege, pain and damage together into a beautiful tapestry. Nothing seems stable, and yet there’s something solid growing -- that “sharp searing pain that didn’t hurt” -- something real, absolutely true, and physical that stays through life’s changes.

There are no fireworks in His Illegal Self.  The prose is light and smooth, but looking closely, each sentence is wrought with meaning and intensity. Che is “gooseflesh, head to toes” as he realizes how helpless he is. When Dial hears a girl calling for the lost Che, she recognizes this “dreadful sympathy.” The hippy landscape of Nambour, from the home grown vegetables to the scruffy undergrowth, is lovingly depicted in spite of Dial's disdain.

Like even the blackest of Carey’s novels (and for me, it’s tempting to almost see this novel as an antidote to The Tax Inspector), there’s a strong undercurrent of humour. Dial is subsumed in the small-mindedness of Australia, and yet she holds on desperately to her status: “Her mother would have died to see her genius in a dump like this.” (36) She was an “SDS goddess”, the Alice May Twitchell Fellow at Vassar College, stuck in the backwoods of Australia where, as with any commune, the pettiness is all pervasive. She puts up shelving for lentils, lines the house with crooked boards, and tries to procure the services of a Zoot-suited lawyer to argue her case back in America so Che can go home, but her ignorance is obvious enough to the hippies whose commune she joins. Right from the start of Dial's journey, Carey pokes a hole in American myopia as he displays Dial's lack of knowledge about the world outside of the US:

She had no idea of what Australia even was. She would not have imagined a tomato would grow in Australia. Or a cucumber. She could not have named a single work of Australian literature or music. Why would she? (79)

Article Author: Maggie Ball

Magdalena Ball runs The Compulsive Reader. She is the author of Sleep Before Evening, The Art of Assessment, Quark Soup, and, in collaboration with Carolyn Howard-Johnson, Cherished Pulse and She Wore Emerald Then. …

Visit Maggie Ball's author page — Maggie Ball's Blog