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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 November 2017
Peter Carey has said of his 2008 novel, His Illegal Self, that it grew from an image he recalled of a hippie mother and her son wandering along the edge of the Bruce Highway near Caboolture, and an American who arrived in his commune near Yandina who turned out to be a drug dealer wanted by the FBI. In typical Carey fashion, the three central characters in His Illegal Self are in the process of escaping from the narratives that have been imposed upon them, and metamorphosing into different and better selves. His Illegal Self is the first of Carey's books in which he reverses the angle of vision on the cross-cultural comparison of Australia and America that has engaged him throughout his career. This reverse comparison is set some thirty-five years in the past, against a background of the protest movements against the Vietnam War in both countries. Unlike several of his earlier novels, His Illegal Self lacks a pronounced sense of self-conscious storytelling, and this increases the direct emotional impact of the novel, intensifying the reader's empathy with the characters’ emergence from their imposed identities.
1 Erica Wagner, ‘Peter Carey talks about prose, politics and his passion for Australia’, The Times, 1 February 2008, http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/fiction/article3288510.ece.
2 See Nicholas Wroe,‘“Between two worlds”’, The Guardian, 19 January 2008, http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/generalfiction/story/0,,2243146,00html. Carey enlarged on the details of this memory at the Australian launch of the book at Writers Week at the Adelaide Festival, 4 March 2008.
3 Wagner, ‘Peter Carey talks’.
4 ‘His illegal self by Peter Carey’, The Sunday Times, 3 February 2008, http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/fiction.article3276707.ece.
5 Carey, Peter, His illegal self (New York: Vintage Books, 2008), p. 262.Google Scholar
6 See, for example, Elizabeth Costello (New York: Penguin, 2003), Slow man (New York: Viking, 2005) and Diary of a bad year (New York: Penguin, 2007).
7 Paris Review Interview, 29 February 2008, http://petercareybooks.com/Paris-Review.
8 Carey, Peter, His illegal self (Sydney: Random House, 2008), p. 224.Google Scholar
9 Carey, His illegal self, p. 118.
10 Carey, His illegal self, p. 49.
11 Gillian Lord, ‘True history of Peter Carey’, Canberra Times Panorama, 26 January 2008, p. 11.
12 Cathleen Schine, ‘The Call of the Wild’, New York Review of Books 55.4, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21132.
13 John Hay, for example, found it ‘frustratingly remote and, at times, inaccessible to the reader’ in ‘Doing it for the movement’, The Australian Literary Review, 6 February 2008, p. 5; and Janette Turner Hospital compared it unfavourably with E.L. Doctorow's The Book of Daniel in ‘Fugitive Days’, The Monthly, February 2008, pp. 46–9.
14 See, for example, Schine, ‘The call of the wild’; James Wood, ‘Notes from underground: Fugitive lives by Peter Carey and Hari Kunzru’, The New Yorker, 3 March 2008, http://newyorker.com/arts/critics.books/2008/03/03/080303crbo_books_wood.
15 James Wood, ‘Notes from underground’, p. 2.
16 Carey, His illegal self, pp. 5–6.
17 Carey, His illegal self, p. 103.
18 Carey, His illegal self, p. 239.
19 Carey, His illegal self, p. 239.
20 Carey, His illegal self, p. 245.
21 Carey, His illegal self, p. 270.
22 Carey, His illegal self, p. 81.
23 Carey, His illegal self, p. 180.
24 Carey, His illegal self, pp. 4–5.
25 Carey, His illegal self, p. 2.
26 Carey, His illegal self, p. 32.
27 Carey, His illegal self, p. 169.
28 Carey, His illegal self, p. 239.
29 For a personal account of the treatment of such migrant children, see Hill, David, The forgotten children: Fairbridge Farm School and its betrayal of Australia's child migrants (Sydney: Random House, 2007)Google Scholar.
30 Carey, His illegal self, p. 169.
31 Carey, His illegal self, p. 171.
32 Carey, His illegal self, p. 175.
33 Carey, His illegal self, p. 159.
34 Elizabeth Lowry, ‘Peter Carey's portrait of a counterculture’, The Times Literary Supplement, 13 February 2008, http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article3363716ece. See also Rachel Cooke, ‘Novels narrated by children are nearly always flawed and tiresome. But Che is as convincing a child as any I have found in the pages of a book: When hippies go back to nature’, The Observer, 20 January 2008, <http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/generalfiction/0,,2243615,00.html.
35 Carey, His illegal self, pp. 180–1.
36 Carey, His illegal self, p. 190.
37 Carey, His illegal self, p. 231.
