His Illegal Self

His Illegal Self by Peter Carey. It’s becoming almost a cliche how Carey uses characters outside the law as a way of writing about Australia (just think of recent titles: True History of the Kelly Gang, My Life as a Fake, Theft), he also seems to look for a different voice to tell at least part of the story of each book (the uneducated Irishman in Kelly Gang, the sub-normal brother in Theft). So this time around we have a young woman on the fringes of the US underground in the early 70s who is charged with taking a seven-year-old boy she once babysat to visit his mother who is a leader of a Weathermen-type group, but the mother is killed in a bomb incident and the woman finds herself accused of kidnapping: hence the illegal part of the story. As for the voice, somewhat over half the chapters are narrated by the boy. The two end up fleeing to a hippy commune in Queensland, so we get a story of urban sophisticates meet rural Australia. If this makes it sound Carey by numbers, there is a sense of the book being underdeveloped, particularly in the early part, though as it goes on and the character particularly of the woman grows, it becomes a better book. Still it is not one of his best.

First published at LiveJournal, 3 May 2008.

Do reviewers read?

Throughout this moderately intensive workshop I’ve been working my way through Peter Carey’s wonderful new novel, Theft: A Love Story. Now, I’m a Carey fan, so naturally when the book came out I read every review I came across, in the daily and Sunday papers, the literary journals, and so on. One of the common complaints about the book, which surfaced in several of the reviews I read, was that though it is subtitled ‘A Love Story’, the love interest doesn’t enter the novel until about a quarter of the way through. Well, it is true that Marlene, the manipulative criminal with whom our central character, jailbird and artist ‘Butcher’ Bones, becomes infatuated does not enter the story until several chapters in, and does not become a strong central character until about a quarter of the way through. But to imagine that Marlene is the love interest is such a superficial reading of the novel that you have to wonder whether any of those reviewers got any further than the jacket blurb.