His Illegal Self, Peter Carey, Faber, Rs 475Che in AustraliaEven amid the colourful outcasts, rebels and adventurous travellers who fill the pages of Peter Carey’s novels (True History of the Kelly Gang, My Life as a Fake, Theft: A Love Story), Che and Dial, the main characters in Carey’s tenth novel, His Illegal Self, are most unusual. Che Selkirk is a child of the revolution, the son of student activists who disappear underground while Grandmother Selkirk (who calls him Jay) brings him up in affluent isolation in an apartment in New York’s Upper East Side. Dial (short for dialectic), who appears one morning at this apartment, is not Che’s mother (as the boy assumes with mistaken delight), but Anna Xenos, the daughter of a woman who worked for Mrs Selkirk.It is 1972 when the novel opens. Once committed to the revolution, Anna Xenos is now poised to embark on a teaching career at Vassar — until she gets a message from the Movement. In a moment, she becomes Dial again — Dial holding a little boy’s hand in hers and racing through the subway, in and out of seedy motels, flying across the country, getting further and further away — until suddenly they are in the middle of an Australian rainforest and they couldn’t possibly be further away from it all. Here, deep inside the Australian wilderness, they stumble upon an alternative community where they might find refuge. But Dial finds that even this community is built on some rules — rules that turn out to be so inflexible that she must perform an act of physical violence if she and the little boy are to fit in here. At one level, Carey’s novel is about reaping the whirlwind of implacable ideology. Che’s mother Susan Selkirk became a legend in her times for an act she staged during the protest at the 1966 visit of secretary of defence Robert McNamara to Harvard. She rolled in front of his car with her baby in her arms. (The baby was unhurt, but Che’s grandmother took charge of him from then on.) A few years later, just before meeting her little boy, Susan blows herself up, leaving Dial in charge of the child. The revolution, it seems, makes brutal demands of its disciples.But in the elemental setting of the rainforest, where everything thrives, the relationship between the child and the young woman grows into a beautiful and utterly natural thing. And this is the real story at the heart of this affecting novel. It is told in Carey’s incandescent prose: “The sky was so clear. The sounds were so distinct. The cries of the Australian magpie, like nothing else on earth…. Everything had become so familiar, the kookaburras marking out their territories at dusk, flying in the path of squares and triangles which made a fence, visible to them at least, meaning that this land was theirs.”All along, as Che and Dial hurtle from one place to another, we have felt as if there is still some secret, some great revelation that remains to be made. And in the final wondrous moments of the novel, we realise what that secret is, how it was unfolding before our eyes all along, how it is one of the last miraculous things left in the world: the happy ending.
