His Illegal Self

Rating All Ages Genre fiction Publisher Knopf Publishing Group External Links Official Peter Carey Website

by Peter Carey

Some little boys will have the occasional slip up of pooping their pants for really no good reason. Seven-year-old Che (think Jay with an ‘Sh’) had an excusable accident in my book: it took him by surprise when a group of men came to brutally beat up on the mom while leaving the boy to watch.

Okay, I’m getting ahead of myself. Taking place during the Vietnam era, Che was raised by his grandmother in a privileged childhood in the upper east side of Manhattan. He was completely sheltered and never was able to watch a second’s worth of television for fear he would see his radical, out-law parents on the news. One day his grandma takes him to Bloomingdale’s for more than a Chanel perfume exchange…the boy was also exchanged to the mom. Now, I’m not an ignorant writer when I reference “the boy” and “the mom,” - this is how Carey refers to these characters throughout the book.

“The mom,” a young Vassar professor Che believes to be his mother is a radical hippie. This odd match travels from New York, to Seattle and finally to Australia where they’ll settle down to avoid an international police hunt. There are many questions to be answered. Why does the mom insist Che call her Dial and never mom? Why do they never have a moment’s peace in one place? Why is Che still not allowed to watch tv? And why is Dial lying and hiding who his dad is?

I was at first confused with Carey’s use of “the boy” and “the mom.” As I understand it now, he used that in order to demonstrate identity issues towards these characters. The boy’s real mother named him Che, his grandmother thinking that was an asinine name renamed him Jay. The boy never knew what to call himself. Another theme that relates to this is descriptions, metaphors and similes about fish. I really liked this because it made me think about the connection to all these fish images to the characters. Fish have a false sense of security. They swim around in a school, and then all of a sudden they can be hooked, speared, grabbed or swept up from a net at any given moment. Che was plucked from the only life he knew having no control of the things that happened to him.

Carey’s characters, relationships and unexpected and brilliant images make His Illegal Self definitely worthwhile.