HIS ILLEGAL SELF PETER CAREY

THE WRITER

Peter Carey was born in Victoria, Australia in 1943. His parents ran a General Motors car dealership. He attended a local State School from 1948 to 1953 and later boarded at Geelong Grammar School between 1954 and 1960. In 1961, Carey began a science degree at Monash University in Melbourne, but soon lost interest and in 1962 he began to work in advertising. He worked at various Melbourne advertising agencies between 1962 and 1967, where he met writers who introduced him to recent European and American fiction. Carey married his first wife, Leigh Weetman in 1964.
During this time, he read widely, particularly the works of James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Franz Kafka and William Faulkner, and began writing himself in 1964. By 1968, he had written novels entitled Contacts, The Futility Machine and Wog, as well as a short story collection. Several of these manuscripts were accepted by a publisher, but later rejected.
In the 60s, Carey travelled through the Middle East and Europe and settled for a while in London before returning to Sydney where he then wrote and published a number of short stories in magazines and newspapers such as Meanjin and Nation Review. Most of these were published in The Fat Man In History (1974). In 1974, he and Weetman divorced and he moved to Balmain in Sydney to work for Grey's Advertising Agency.
In 1976, Carey moved to Queensland and joined an 'alternative community' in Yandina, north of Brisbane. He would write for three weeks, then spend the fourth week working in Sydney. It was during this time that he wrote most of the stories collected in War Crimes, as well as Bliss, his first published novel. During the 1970s and 1980s, he lived with the painter, Margot Hutcheson.
In 1981, he moved to Bellingen in northern New South Wales. He married theatre director Alison Summers in 1985, and moved to New York in 1990/1991 with his wife and his son to teach creative writing at New York University (NYU). Carey and Alison Summers have since divorced and Carey now lives with the British-born publisher Frances Coady.
He has been awarded three honorary degrees and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the Australian Academy of Humanities and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

HIS ILLEGAL SELF


His Illegal Self is set in the radical underground of late-sixties and early-seventies agitation with characters who find themselves politically trapped. In 1972, seven-year-old Che Selkirk, the son of radical parents he has never met, lives in isolated privilege with his well-to-do grandmother. Denied access to television and the news, he picks up scraps of information about his outlaw mother and father from a teenage neighbor who assures Che that his parents will come and "break you out of here."

When a young woman who calls herself Dial walks into Che's apartment one afternoon, he believes his mother has finally come back for him. Permitted to take the boy for an hour, she follows increasingly obscure commands from his mother, Susan, and “the Movement,” and ends up first in Philadelphia and then in California. Within two hours, Dial and Che are on the run as Che's kidnapping hits the news. Unexpected trouble strikes, and soon the boy and Dial, who doesn't know whether or, if so, how, to tell Che that she is only a messenger who was supposed to escort him to meet his mother, land in a hippie commune in the Australian outback.
Carey brilliantly combines vital colloquial language (frequently Australian vernacular), and poetic formality and uses free indirect style, or the bending of third-person narrative around the viewpoint of the character who is being described, to create the compelling voice of a child fugitive.

QUESTIONS TO THINK ABOUT WHILE READING
The novel has met with mixed reviews. Is it true that the narrative sags in the middle?
Carey specialises in oddball characters and those on the wrong side of the law or society in general. How does he make us identify with them so strongly?
What do you make of the voice of the central character?