A life underground

Peter CAREY won his two Booker Prizes for “Oscar and Lucinda” and “True History of the Kelly Gang,” epic novels steeped in the history of his native Australia. But he’s a thoroughly modern writer, smashing genre boundaries, ranging in tone from wild comedy to grim tragedy, viewing the past with a decidedly contemporary eye and firmly placing late 20th century adventures like “My Life as a Fake” and “Theft: A Love Story” in social and cultural context.

This breadth of experience and abilities enriches Carey’s latest novel, “His Illegal Self.” Che David Selkirk is 7 in the fall of 1972 when his wealthy Manhattan grandmother and guardian, Phoebe Selkirk, hands him over to a woman named Dial, whom Che decides must be his long-lost mother. It’s supposed to be a brief visit, but the bewildered boy winds up on a bus to Philadelphia, where he sees a picture of himself on TV and knows that “something very bad had happened.” Soon they are on a flight to Australia, where the pair land in Sydney before embarking on a bus ride to Brisbane. They are hitchhiking north in the blistering heat when a battered station wagon pulls up, and a man named Trevor offers them a lift. Lucky for them, because a cyclone is about to hit.

In these opening chapters, Carey skillfully conveys the confused perceptions of a child entangled in adult machinations. Che hasn’t seen “his illegal mother” since he was a baby and has never known his father. His vague notion of them as heroic revolutionaries, gleaned from a teenage neighbor in his grandmother’s East Side apartment building, is bluntly clarified when the narrative point of view shifts to Dial. Her real name is Anna Xenos; she was Che’s baby-sitter in 1966 while attending Radcliffe on scholarship with golden girl Susan Selkirk. The two were both sleeping with Students for a Democratic Society star David Rubbo, Che’s father. Susan, his true mother, threw herself into the movement, lost custody of the baby to her mother and went underground; Anna stayed in school, working nights and weekends making sausages with her father: “She hated being a good girl, but that was what she had always been.”

Just before she picked up Che, Anna had been hired as an assistant professor at Vassar. But then Susan made contact, playing on old loyalties to cajole Anna into bringing Che to see her. Resuming her movement name, Dial is lured into unwitting complicity with former comrades. In Philadelphia, where Che sees himself on TV, she sees a photo of Susan with the caption “Bomb Blast: 2 Dead.” Now, Dial’s being pursued as a kidnapper and the movement wants nothing to do with her. David, who won’t even identify himself to his own son when Dial and Che flee to his hide-out in Seattle, just wants the two of them far away; he persuades her “that they would be safe and cared for in Australia” -- which might as well be the moon.

Relating these developments from the alternating perspectives of a perplexed child and a terrified adult who has been betrayed, Carey captures the jittery, paranoid atmosphere of early 1970s, when those in the counterculture (with considerable justification) saw a cop behind every tree. His dense narrative doles out information in discrete parcels, gradually unfolding the sequence of events as Dial blunderingly attempts to create a refuge for herself and Che on a remote commune in Queensland.

The commune is squalid and filthy; its residents cloak their hostility to the American intruders in self-righteous hippie blather. Trevor, illiterate, reeking of marijuana and quietly menacing, takes the money the movement gave Dial in America and stashes it in “the bank” in a tree. He tells Che horrifying stories about his own brutal upbringing in an orphanage, stories “the boy knew he was not old enough to hear.” Through those stories, readers come to understand that Trevor is more than a scary dope dealer; like Che and Dial, he lives with the scars of childhood injuries. Just as the interplay between Dial’s and Che’s viewpoints gives us a story that neither could tell alone, the addition of Trevor’s perspective throws a spotlight on the tentative bond they forge. He sees that Dial loves Che, even as she grieves for the comfortable American existence steadily receding from her grasp.

It’s not easy to let go of the past, or your illusions. Carey subtly shows Che allowing himself to acknowledge what he’s known ever since he saw the television news back in Philadelphia: Dial is not his mother, and his mother is dead. Truth may be liberating, but it’s also agonizing; in the book’s most upsetting scene, Che lashes out at Dial, locating her most vulnerable spots with a child’s unerring emotional radar. She retaliates with the ugliest revelation within her reach: His father doesn’t want him. Che flees into the bush, and Carey easily could have provided a tragic climax, but he chooses to give the advantage to unruly, disordered hope, embodied in a landscape both threatening and enticing.

We don’t know precisely what will happen to Che. Carey’s fiction doesn’t offer definite answers or easy consolations but something much richer; a complex, nuanced understanding of the “littered path” that constitutes each human being’s “comic and occasionally disastrous life.” *