Awkward Pacing Dooms This Dud
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I've read a few of Carey's novels and generally found them to be quite good, even gripping in ways I hadn't expected. Like some of these, the premise of his latest book didn't sound that promising, but I decided to take a chance since he had surprised me in the past. Unfortunately, his usual captivating prose isn't enough to disguise the plodding dud of a story.
Set around 1972, the story starts in Manhattan's Upper East Side, where we meet 7-year-old Jay/Che and his ultra-wealthy WASP guardian/grandmother. They are met by a striking young woman named Dial, who has just taken a job as professor at Vassar. She's apparently an old friend of Che's mother, and has agreed to a mysterious mission to escort Che to meet his on-the-run-from-the-law mother for an hour. However, within a scant number of pages this simple rendezvous has gotten drastically complicated. Dial and Che hop on a bus to Philadelphia, Che's mother is killed, and Dial inexplicably kidnaps Che and takes him to Australia.
I was going along fine with the book until this sequence of events, which struck me as so wildly incomprehensible that I never regained any confidence in the story. Dial and Che's mother were both involved in the student radical movements of the 1960s, in particular the Students for a Democratic Society. But while the working-class girl Dial saw through the romantic allure of the radical movement, Che's blue-blood mother drifted into the more extreme violent fringes of the movement, and became a wanted woman. Dial's decision to help engineer the mother-son reunion seems based on some rather unlikely desire to prove her radical credentials in the face of having joined the establishment (eg. Vassar). However her flustered panic when the arrangement goes awry seems totally at odds with her tough Greek upbringing in South Boston.
When Dial and Che arrive in Australia, she seems even more implausibly inept, and they soon find themselves a hideout in a kind of nasty hippie commune. Carey himself apparently lived in such a commune, and it shows in the rich language he uses to describe the huts, the surrounding jungle, and the rather prickly relationships between its members. They try to make a kind of "back-to-nature" primitive life of it, with the semi-assistance of an illiterate hippie named Trevor. Many readers will probably find the most meaningful aspect of the book to be the attempt between Dial and Che to form some kind of mother-son bond, and while it works to a certain extent from his side, I never bought into her maternal desire.
Ultimately, the murkiness of motivations throughout the book left me more confused than moved. And unlike the other books I've read of Carey's the pacing is very awkward and a general narrative lethargy pervades the story. Unless you're really into the era or settings, or can't live without Carey's descriptive prose, I'd say give this one a miss.
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Don't Be Put Off
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Carey's prose is all about words and the sounds of words. Forget all the guff about hippy colonies in Queensland and bizarre student radicals in the 70s. This novel's about those pesky human relationships that so often blow people's lives off course, about those moments when emotion defeats rationalism and we all end up struggling to figure out why we've ended up where we are.
Savour every word.
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A Love Letter To Nature
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"With our protagonists no longer on the run, it finally becomes apparent what this novel is really about. It is a love letter to nature, and to the Australian wilderness in particular. Through the characters of this boy and woman, both cosseted urbanites who find themselves forced to live against their will in a tough, back-to-the-soil community, both of whom slowly and reluctantly come to terms with their changed circumstances, Carey pays moving homage to the kind of "hippy" lifestyle that is more commonly given comic or dismissive treatment." William Sutcliffe
Peter Carey has written a novel that is difficult to interpret. While engrossed in the reading, I kept thinking "Is this all there is"? Something is missing here. And, I never found that something. The writing is pure prose, brilliant, sweet and uplifting and coarse and gritty. The story centers around Che, or Jay as his grandmother calls him, Selnick. A seven year old living with his grandmiother in the glass windows of New York. They have money and security, but the boy is cut off from the world. He cannot watch television. He is told by a next door neighbor that his mother and father are radicals from Harvard, part of the SDS movement and on the lam. Grandmother won't mention them. Che is left with a vision, long lost of his father. On one fine day, the front door opens and a woman called 'Dial' comes into his life, and off they go to adventure. His world has opened. First on the subway and then to Philadelphia and it is there that Dial discovers that Che's mother has blown herself up attepting to make a bomb. Plans change, a trip to the west coast and then they are sent to Australia.
Along the way we learn that Dial was a babysitter for Che when his mom was at Harvard. Dial has left her job as assistant professor at Vassar to help her old friends. Why? Che thinks of Dial as his mother and as time moves on that is what she becomes. She is a little naive- not understanding what Australia is about or what life outside of the US is all about. And, why Australia, wouldn't Canada seem more logical? Life in Australia in a commune is the life that Che grows up with. Some communication is made to grandmother via a lawyer who is sent to NYC to make things ok again. Time heals all wounds, we are told. Really? We are looking for the timebomb and all along the real hero is Che. Che taken willingly from what he knows with grandmother, to a new world on the other side of the ocean. He absorbs all of this and the new culture he finds he is ready, able and willing. He has struggled to make sense of this new world and it is his.
"Carey's emotional choreography isn't sure-footed enough to make Che's story live up to its dramatic opening. As you'd expect, he does a good job of creating a lively - and carefully Americanised - idiom for his central characters. And having lived in one himself, he clearly knows a lot about alternative communities in Queensland. Yet, coming as it does on the heels of such books as True History of the Kelly Gang, the new novel seems badly paced and weirdly dull. Carey is a formidable writer, and this isn't a complete disaster by any means, but it's hard not to see it getting filed under "occasional misfires". Christopher Taylor
What is this story all about? The 1970's and radicalism is but a part of the plot that entices. The trip to Australia and the story told from Che's point of view, and then from Dials viewpoint intercept and the real story is left with Che. The writing of Peter Carey is the best there is, the writing of a master.
Recommended. prisrob 03-01-08
Theft
My Life as a Fake
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Fool For Love
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HIS ILLEGAL SELF (HIS) is my fifth Peter Carey novel. (The others were JACK MAGGS: A NOVEL, TRUE HISTORY OF THE KELLY GANG, MY LIFE AS A FAKE, and THEFT. They're all terrific.) While the stories in these five novels are very different, the narratives are alike in one respect: Carey establishes his stories quickly; then, his narratives become totally engrossing sprints. While the novels are spotted with wonderful metaphors and lyricism, they mostly have great pace. They are riveting rushes--like the beautiful Australian bird in HIS that Carey captures jetting over a remote stream. There is little navel gazing in these novels.
Another element in some of Carey's books is the offbeat, somewhat quirky, dynamic of his narratives. To make my point, think of Philip Roth, sort of Carey's narrative opposite, who brings the awesome power of his analysis to the subjects of aging in EVERYMAN or the relation of the ill and elderly to youth in EXIT GHOST. In those books, Roth takes common experiences head on. But Carey? Well, he finds a twist so that the situation he explores does not require power so much as narrative talent. Carey's approach to the familiar is subtle.
In HIS, Carey's starting point is SDS in New York in the early 1970s. Basically, a young woman and associate professor, Dial, without any malice aforethought, goes underground with a boy, Che, whose mother is SDS and whose grandmother lives on Park Avenue. Gradually, Carey unfolds this story so that what appears like a capricious disaster--the abduction of the boy--makes perfect sense. Then, the climax of the novel turns on an element in Dial's character, which emerges with angry clarity in a final conversation with Che's grandmother. It's a fascinating story, told like a mystery, that comes together with logic and power in the final few pages. Bravo Peter!
Of course, the dynamic driving some of Peter Carey's novels is not quirky at all. For example, it's easy to get the story of Ned Kelly, growing up poor and despised Irish in Australia. It's easy to get the story of the Boone brothers in THEFT, since the action is driven by love and ambition. But HIS is one of Carey's subtler books and this reader had to mull its issues when finished. Then, I got it. HIS is Carey's take on something we all understand: Fool for Love.
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I was disappointed - maybe a second read?
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I mostly love Peter Carey, but sometimes he foxes me a bit. This book has a brilliant beginning, as a small boy (whose radical activist parents are in hiding) is kidnapped back off his grandma to "go and see his mum". He ends up in a hippy commune in Australia, a fact which many reviewers have already remarked upon as faintly ludicrous.
The writing is beautiful but finally didn't hold me as tight as the wonderful "Theft". I loved the descriptions of the boy's longing for his father - the Australian rainforest - the struggles between members of the commune. But the book felt lightweight: I didn't end up feeling I'd been swept up into a drama, rather that I'd stood on the edge of something, feeling rather confused about what was going on. I might read it again and see whether it improves on a second time.
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