Peter Carey’s His Illegal Self is the story of Dial, a young woman on the verge of accepting an assistant professorship at Vassar, who, through a combination mix-up and framing, finds herself fleeing to Australia with the son of a wealthy and notorious family she has accidentally abducted. Dial and the boy, Che, find refuge in a primitive hippie commune in the outback. They live there for years, as Dial tries to reconcile herself to the direction her life has taken, and Che struggles to discover who his real parents are.
Set against a backdrop of the chaotic activism and political turbulence of the ’60s and ’70s, the book focuses on a quieter and more remote – but no less fraught and significant – conflict between individuals. Unfortunately, Carey often employs a sort of odd, self-conscious muddling tone – in such passages, he seems to be willfully obscuring his meaning to make it seem more significant, and he’s inconsistent with it, so that the tone becomes extremely jarring and distracting. I ought to give some examples of what I’m talking about here, but sadly, I’ve already returned the book to the library. Despite the confusing style, however, His Illegal Self is a unique and beautiful novel about the basis for human connections, about what makes people family, what makes them belong to one another.
