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His Illegal Self | 
 enlarge | Author: Peter Carey
Publisher: Knopf
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
Buy Used: $5.82
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Rating:  28 reviews
Sales Rank: 123844
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 288
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.1
Dimensions (in): 9.4 x 5.7 x 1.3
ISBN: 030726372X
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.914
EAN: 9780307263728
ASIN: 030726372X
Publication Date: February 5, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
When the boy was almost eight, a woman stepped out of the elevator into the apartment on East Sixty-second Street and he recognized her straightaway. No one had told him to expect it. That was pretty typical of growing up with Grandma Selkirk . . . No one would dream of saying, Here is your mother returned to you.
His Illegal Self is the story of Che—raised in isolated privilege by his New York grandmother, he is the precocious son of radical student activists at Harvard in the late sixties. Yearning for his famous outlaw parents, denied all access to television and the news, he takes hope from his long-haired teenage neighbor, who predicts, They will come for you, man. They’ll break you out of here.
Soon Che too is an outlaw: fleeing down subways, abandoning seedy motels at night, he is pitched into a journey that leads him to a hippie commune in the jungle of tropical Queensland. Here he slowly, bravely confronts his life, learning that nothing is what it seems. Who is his real mother? Was that his real father? If all he suspects is true, what should he do?
Never sentimental, His Illegal Self is an achingly beautiful story of the love between a young woman and a little boy. It may make you cry more than once before it lifts your spirit in the most lovely, artful, unexpected way.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 23 more reviews...
 A love Letter To Nature March 1, 2008
prisrob (New EnglandUSA)
14 out of 22 found this review helpful
"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 grandmother in the glass windows world of New York City. 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 offset the abduction scene and 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
 Why? March 21, 2008
D. Kanigan (CT, USA)
9 out of 11 found this review helpful
Story set in the 60's and 70's. Mother (Susan Selkirk) abandons son (Che/Jay) to lead a radical U.S. revolutionary movement (hippies, communes, etc). Son is left to grow up with his wealthy grandmother on NYC upper east side. Friend (loosely defined) of boy's mother (Anna Xenos calls herself Dial) was a babysitter for the boy and was heading for Harvard as an assistant professor - kidnaps 7 year old boy to deliver him to Mother (who is in hiding) when plan goes off track. Dial and boy end up on the run and eventually in the Australian outback. Story then expands into a friendship between Dial and boy living in primitive conditions.
Author is talented writer with crisp, visual and powerful passages especially depicting the landscape and conditions in the outback. Problem I had was that I couldn't make any sense of why Anna Xenos would walk away from a bright future at Vassar to kidnap a boy and smuggle him all the way to Australia when she was never all that close to the boy or the Mother or the revolutionary movement? Is this truly plausible? Was Dial that naive or gullible or is there more to the story? I couldn't get the talented writing to hang on the reasons why Dial and the boy ended up in Australia. Sorry, this book wasn't for me.
 Real Love and Visual Artifice February 11, 2008
Magdalena Ball
5 out of 8 found this review helpful
Che Selkirk is a boy whose parents, members of the increasingly violent Students for a Democratic Society, have both disappeared, leaving him with his very rich grandmother. At the age of eight, a woman that Che recognises as his mother suddenly arrives and kidnaps him, taking him from New York to Australia. This is how the book begins, and Che's adventure through hunger, love and loss becomes almost a coming of age tale as he starts to understand who he is and where his future lies.
On the simplest of levels, the book is a super fast-paced race across the globe as Che and Dial attempt to hide from the police and carve an existence for themselves. The plot is propelled by both the readers own dislocation as they come to grips with the distortions between the two narrative voices. Both Che and Dial are presented as equals - joint narrators in this story, but their stories aren't identical. The reader is put in the uncomfortable position of being between them, unable to discount either the intensity of Che's needs, or the combination of confusion and desire which motivates Dial. Both need one another, and continue to work together at avoiding the truth and avoiding the law, at the same time they find themselves removed from their usual lives, and co-opted for causes they don't believe in.
As in so many of Carey's novels, real love and visual artifice become the two forces that move the narrative along. It's a search for a truth that isn't nearly as obvious as one might think. It's about the way love crisscrosses us - marks us, makes us whole, and hurts us at the same time. It isn't just the love--both real and imagined--between Che and Dial, but also the odd love circulating uncomfortably between Dial, Susan Selkirk, Che's father, Che, and Trevor.
In an act of remarkable self-control, Carey leaves the story open, suggesting a long and complex history which the reader isn't privy to. This last sentence so changes the story that this reader at least went back and re-read it in its entirety, taking in the rich linguistic power which Carey has become famous for. Che is believable, both as the 8 year old boy struggling to find himself, and as the older, wiser narrator he becomes by the end of the book. One can imagine many other landscapes, or books growing out of this boy. But for now, there's only the reader's imagination, which Carey has kickstarted with this moving novel.
Magdalena Ball is the author of the award winning novel Sleep Before Evening
His Magician Self February 16, 2008
H. F. Corbin (ATLANTA, GA USA)
5 out of 11 found this review helpful
Much of the world in Peter Carey's latest novel HIS ILLEGAL SELF is seen through the eyes of Che Selkirk, a bright seven-year-old who one day in 1972 meets the woman he recognizes immediately and goes from the arms of his wealthy grandmother, an Upper East Side woman with "tailored gray hair," on a journey that ultimately takes him to Queensland. There he learns to survive hippie-like in the Australian outback far away from his earlier coddled existence. He and the woman nicknamed Dial, a six-feet tall amazon, as outlaws, make a life for themselves, aided and abetted by the strange character Trevor, an Australian, who can neither read nor write, listens to the Book of Revelation on tape and prefers to go naked in the bush as often as he can.
HIS ILLEGAL SELF is first and foremost an extraordinary story that takes on a life of its own and will hold you in its grip. Your only task is to keep turning the pages of this 272 page novel although it seems much shorter. It left me wanting more. Although you will be hard put to find a stranger love story, Dial and Trevor's affection for this sometimes lonely lad-- he loves his cat Buck-- eager to know his parents, radical student activists of the 1960's, seep through on practically every page of this all too short story. Mr. Carey's love for his homeland comes through as well.
Mr. Carey is a magician when it comes to language and reminds us over and over that he is a master of the Queen's English. Che's warm Hershey bar is "soft and bendy." After having been given a full-page photograph of his outlaw father from LIFE magazine, he looked at it, then "folded up his father very carefully and kept him in his pocket." He cannot understand why Australians speak, "words like ground beef in their mouths." Che on Dial: "She was nice to him, but careful now, and sometimes playing cards he felt a cloud of sadness settle on them both, like bugs around a lamp." Finally "the boy saw how the moonlight was caught in the gauze of many little wings, white ants, mosquitoes, moths with black jeweled bodies.
Peter Carey has the ability-- not often found in writers-- to create one novel after another without repeating himself. Certainly one of the finest living novelists, he is a joy to read.
Hippies Down Under February 27, 2008
Kevin A. Freeman (MA)
5 out of 7 found this review helpful
Anna Xenos, a.k.a. Dial, was supposed to perform a simple task -- deliver a 7-year-old boy named Che (but called Jay by his guardian/grandmother) to her old friend in hiding, his mother. Why is Che's mum hiding, you ask? A Weatherman. SDS, you see. Think 60's. Think hippies. Think things going terribly wrong on the way to Che's Mommy, Susan Selkirk. And the next thing you know, a simple escorting favor for an old friend turns into a full-blown kidnapping, landing the hapless Dial and the excitedly bewildered Che in the Land Down Under (Carey's home turf).
The book contained some beautiful excerpts and turns of phrase. At times, in fact, I stopped and reread odd but compelling lines like "Trevor turned and saw Dial running at him, her yellow hair rising in snaky waves, her titties like puppies fighting inside her shirt." It's clear you are in the hands of a real "writer's writer," a man whose poetic license will never expire.
But alas, there were problems, too. For one, Carey hitched his star to that scourge of modern writers', dialogue without quotation marks. Ignoring this convention means readers often have to reread NOT because they want to savor a beautiful expression, but because they are unsure about who is talking. Also, once the book hits the badlands of Oz, it mucks down a bit. Carey's staccato sentences and short, punchy paragraphs go on and on, deep as the verdant landscape he describes. We see how a 60's-style commune operates in Australia, we meet some organic consumers unlike the kind you find pushing carts in Whole Foods, and -- like it or no -- you get to know Trevor, the feral grown-up orphan who both attracts and repels Dial and Che. Meantime, the game is up on Dial playing Mom. The boy learns more and more. Trevor gardens. Dial mopes. The boy wanders. The hippie neighbors look on distrustfully at the Ugly American. After starting out a plot book, the narrative evolves into a character-driven one. Not all readers will handle the transformation well.
Ultimately, Carey carries the day and in the end, Dial sets the tone with a dramatic denouement featuring a most surprising twist. Well, not totally surprising, but more unexpected than not. Yes, you may lose threads of dialogue along the way, and yes, you may not like a lot of the sad sacks you meet in the Land of Oz, but you must acknowledge that Carey is a talented writer. My Ambivalent Self gives Carey 3.5 stars, but I'm certain that fans of previous Carey novels, as well as readers who find desultory narratives dwelling on character fascinating, will find it a 4 or 5. If, on the other hand, you're convinced you would object to a fast start that stops to mosey around a bit, you might do better with the next book in your to-be-read pile. Know thyself, then, before considering this book.
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