The history of Australia, noted Mark Twain, "does not read like history, but like the most beautiful lies. ... It is full of surprises and adventures, the incongruities, the contradictions, and incredibilities."
It reads like life itself. The words and works of Peter Carey, the Australian-born Booker Prize-winner include everything from science fiction to gothic romance and contain more than a touch of the surreal and grotesque, and more than enough beautiful lies and surprises and incredibilities of their own. And so into this variegated fray that takes in Oscar and Lucinda, Theft, True History of the Kelly Gang and more, comes His Illegal Self, a taut and seamlessly cohesive novel about “how beautiful and strange the world is” for American academic Anna Xenos, nicknamed Dial (for “dialectic”), drunk on the “richness of her new life which was intensifying daily — Vassar, MoMA, Manhattan…” That is, until life throws her for a loop when it throws her together with a bright and sensitive 7-year-old boy named Che Selkirk (more pragmatically called “Jay” by his Park Avenue grandmother) — born in 1965 to radicalized Ivy Leaguers.
After his Patty Hearst-styled mother stumbles during a protest at Harvard and tumbles under a car, baby Che held to her chest like a football, Grandma Selkirk takes over her grandson's care, while Che’s father makes himself scarce, despite the child’s repeatedly unmet hope that he will one day see his famous parents again while they — as a result of their Weathermen-like revolutionary activities — are on the run from the FBI.
But you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the bomb blows. When Dial, a family friend and former babysitter for Che, is enlisted to take him to finally meet with his fugitive mother, mom (who “could not make a bed, let alone a revolution”) recklessly blows herself up with a homemade bomb, smithereens-style. Suddenly, Dial and the boy, stuck in bus station limbo, and on the outs with a distrusting grandma, are all over the news. A panicking Dial, with boy in tow, turns to the revolutionary underground, and is bounced to the west coast to regroup with reluctant fellow radicals: “While [Che] held Dial’s skirt balled up inside his fist, they began to beat on her. Dial was on an ego trip. Why was she telling jokes? Had the Vietnamese won? Had the pigs left the ghettos?”
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