His Illegal Self, Peter Carey, Faber, Rs 475
Che in Australia

Even amid the colourful outcasts, rebels and adventurous travellers who fill the pages of Peter Carey’s novels (True History of the Kelly Gang, My Life as a Fake, Theft: A Love Story), Che and Dial, the main characters in Carey’s tenth novel, His Illegal Self, are most unusual. Che Selkirk is a child of the revolution, the son of student activists who disappear underground while Grandmother Selkirk (who calls him Jay) brings him up in affluent isolation in an apartment in New York’s Upper East Side. Dial (short for dialectic), who appears one morning at this apartment, is not Che’s mother (as the boy assumes with mistaken delight), but Anna Xenos, the daughter of a woman who worked for Mrs Selkirk.

It is 1972 when the novel opens. Once committed to the revolution, Anna Xenos is now poised to embark on a teaching career at Vassar — until she gets a message from the Movement. In a moment, she becomes Dial again — Dial holding a little boy’s hand in hers and racing through the subway, in and out of seedy motels, flying across the country, getting further and further away — until suddenly they are in the middle of an Australian rainforest and they couldn’t possibly be further away from it all. Here, deep inside the Australian wilderness, they stumble upon an alternative community where they might find refuge. But Dial finds that even this community is built on some rules — rules that turn out to be so inflexible that she must perform an act of physical violence if she and the little boy are to fit in here.

... contd.