Books

The magnificent, luminous fictions of Peter Carey draw much of their exhilarating power and particularity from his Australian roots.

Themes of displacement, wildness and a reckless disregard for authority gleam like golden threads through the heart of his work, culminating in the superb True History of the Kelly Gang, which won him his second Booker Prize. Kelly Gang combined a tour de force of narrative ventriloquism with a vivid Australian landscape and remains, in the eyes of many, his finest work. His last novel, the excellent Theft, coupled another fractured narrative voice with lush depictions of the Queensland countryside.

All of these trademarks remain in evidence, to considerably lesser effect, in His Illegal Self, in which he returns to Queensland to take readers on a tour of the hippie-populated outback of 1972, drawing on his personal experiences of life in a commune.

When we meet the 7-year-old Che, the son of a pair of fugitive radicals, he is living in Manhattan splendor with his grandmother. Within pages, however, he is spirited away by a woman whom he takes to be his mother but is, in fact, an emissary whose assignment is simply to deliver the boy.

Naturally, things go grievously awry, and the pair goes on the lam, hiding out in a remote corner of Australia, where the local hippies generally mistrust outsiders, especially Americans.

As expected, Mr. Carey's depictions of the Queensland wilderness brim with vitality: "All around them were what are called cabbage moths, their wings catching the last of the day's sunshine, and above the moths were the bananas, their ripped-up leaves moving like fingers, and below was the inky green of rain forest where arm-thick vines wound around trees with skins like elephants."

At the sentence-by-sentence level, Mr. Carey is a master of the craft. And, as in his previous novels, Mr. Carey is fearless with point of view, often risking intelligibility for effect.

But unlike Kelly Gang or Theft, in which fantastically stylized voice is key to understanding some remarkable characters, in His Illegal Self the effect is merely disorienting. Events are fitfully played and replayed from multiple perspectives, and clarifying details are withheld, resulting in an uneasy, unclear view of the landscape.

This is surely Mr. Carey's purpose, the depiction of the unmoored uncertainty of a lost child. But it results in a journey that can be as unpleasant and tiresome for readers as it is for his characters, a journey redeemed only by beautiful language and glimmers of nascent familial love.

Mark Sarvas' debut novel, Harry, Revised, will be published by Bloomsbury in May. He is the host of the Elegant Variation blog (www.elegvar.com).

Peter Carey

(Knopf, $25)

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