Carey, Peter 1943–

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Carey, Peter 1943–

(Peter Philip Carey)

PERSONAL:

Born May 7, 1943, in Bacchus Marsh, Victoria, Australia; son of Percival Stanley (an automobile dealer) and Helen Jean (an automobile dealer) Carey; married Leigh Weetman, 1964 (divorced, 1974); married Alison Margaret Summers (a theater director), March 16, 1985; children: Sam, Charley. Education: Attended Monash University, 1961.

ADDRESSES:

Home—New York, NY. Agent—Amanda Urban, International Creative Management, 40 W. 57th St., New York, NY 10019.

CAREER:

Writer. Worked part-time in advertising in Australia, beginning 1962, and in London, England, 1968-70; Grey's Advertising Agency, Sydney, Australia, beginning 1974; McSpedden Carey Advertising Consultants, Sydney, cofounder, 1980-90; has also worked as a writing instructor at New York University and Princeton University.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Miles Franklin Award, 1979, and New South Wales Premier's Literary Award, 1980, both for War Crimes; Miles Franklin Award, 1981, New South Wales Premier's Literary Award, 1982, National Book Council Banjo Award, 1982, all for Bliss; AWGIE Award and awards for best film and best screenplay from the Australian Film Institute, all 1985, all for Bliss; The Age Book of the Year Award, National Book Council Banjo Award, Barbara Ramsden Award, and Booker Prize shortlist, all 1985, and Vance Palmer Prize for fiction and Victorian Premier's Literary Award, both 1986, all for Illywhacker; Ditmar Award for Best Australian Science Fiction Novel and World Fantasy Award nomination, both 1986, both for Illywhacker; Booker Prize, 1988, Townsville Foundation for Australian Literary Studies Award, 1988, National Book Council Banjo Award, 1989, Miles Franklin Award, 1989, and South Australia Festival Award, 1990, all for Oscar and Lucinda; Litt.D., University of Queensland, Australia, 1989; The Age Book of the Year Award, 1994, for The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith, 1997, for Jack Maggs; Commonwealth Writers Prize and Miles Franklin Award, both 1998, both for Jack Maggs; Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction, Commonwealth Writers Prize, and Booker Prize, all 2001, all for True History of the Kelly Gang.

WRITINGS:

SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS

The Fat Man in History (contains "Crabs," "Peeling," "She Wakes," "Life and Death in the South Side Pavilion," "Room No. 5 (Escribo)," "Happy Story," "A Windmill in the West," "Withdrawal," "Report on the Shadow Industry," "Conversations with Unicorns," "American Dreams," and "The Fat Man in History"; also see below), University of Queensland Press (St. Lucia, Queensland, Australia), 1974.

War Crimes (contains "The Journey of a Lifetime," "Do You Love Me?," "The Uses of Williamson Wood," "The Last Days of a Famous Mime," "A Schoolboy Prank," "The Chance," "Fragrance of Roses," "The Puzzling Nature of Blue," "Ultra-violet Light," "Kristu-Du," "He Found Her in Late Summer," "Exotic Pleasures," and "War Crimes"; also see below), University of Queensland Press (St. Lucia, Queensland, Australia), 1979.

The Fat Man in History, and Other Stories (contains selections from The Fat Man in History and War Crimes), Random House (New York, NY), 1980, published as Exotic Pleasures, Picador Books (London, England), 1981, University of Queensland Press (St. Lucia, Queensland, Australia), 1990.

Collected Stories (contains "Do You Love Me?," "The Last Days of a Famous Mime," "Kristu-Du," "Crabs," "Life and Death in the South Side Pavilion," "Room No. 5," "Happy Story," "A Million Dollars Worth of Amphetamines," "Peeling," "A Windmill in the West," "Concerning the Greek Tyrant," and "Withdrawal"), University of Queensland Press (St. Lucia, Queensland, Australia), 1994.

NOVELS

Bliss, University of Queensland Press (St. Lucia, Queensland, Australia), 1981, Harper (New York, NY), 1982, Vintage Books (New York, NY), 1996.

Illywhacker, Harper (New York, NY), 1985.

Oscar and Lucinda, Harper (New York, NY), 1988.

The Tax Inspector, Faber & Faber (London, England), 1991, Knopf (New York, NY), 1992.

The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith, University of Queensland Press (St. Lucia, Queensland, Australia), 1994, Knopf (New York, NY), 1995.

The Big Bazoohley (for children), Holt (New York, NY), 1995.

Jack Maggs, University of Queensland Press (St. Lucia, Queensland, Australia), 1997, Knopf (New York, NY), 1998.

True History of the Kelly Gang, Knopf (New York, NY), 2000.

My Life as a Fake, Knopf (New York, NY), 2003.

Theft: A Love Story, Knopf (New York, NY), 2006.

His Illegal Self, Knopf (New York, NY), 2008.

OTHER

(With Ray Lawrence) Bliss (screenplay; adapted from Carey's novel of the same title), Faber (London, England), 1986.

A Letter to Our Son (memoir), University of Queensland Press (St. Lucia, Queensland, Australia), 1994.

30 Days in Sydney: A Wildly Distorted Account, Bloomsbury (New York, NY), 2001.

Letter from New York, 2001.

Wrong about Japan: A Father's Journey with His Son (memoir), Knopf (New York, NY), 2005.

Work represented in anthologies, including The Most Beautiful Lies, Angus & Robertson (Sydney, New South Wales, Australia). Contributor to periodicals, including National Review and Meanjin.

ADAPTATIONS:

Dead End Drive-in is a 1986 screenplay by Peter Smalley based on Carey's fiction and directed by Brian Trenchard-Smith; Bliss was adapted as a film directed by Ray Lawrence, screenplay by Carey, 1985; Oscar and Lucinda was adapted as a film directed by Gillian Armstrong and starring Ralph Fiennes and Cate Blanchett, Fox, 1997.

SIDELIGHTS:

Peter Carey "has built a distinguished career out of offbeat, risk-taking novels," according to Time critic Paul Gray. An Australian writer, Carey has earned substantial recognition for his quirky, inventive fiction, including several volumes of short stories and his highly acclaimed novels. In his first short story collection, The Fat Man in History, he presents a matter-of-fact perspective on bizarre and occasionally grotesque subjects. Included in this book are "Conversations with Unicorns," in which the narrator recalls his various encounters with the extraordinary creatures, and "American Dreams," in which a clerk succumbs to madness and isolates himself from his community. Upon his death, townspeople discover that while he was in seclusion he constructed a model of their village. More gruesome are "Peeling," in which a character's quirky obsession results in a surreal mutilation, and "Withdrawal," in which the protagonist is a necrophiliac dealer of corpses and severed limbs. Among the curious figures in this tale is a pig who becomes dependent on narcotics after consuming an addict's excrement.

The publication of The Fat Man in History quickly established Carey as an important figure in Australian literature. Carl Harrison-Ford wrote in Stand that Carey's first work is "the succes d'estime of 1974," and Bruce Bennett declared in World Literature Written in English that "Carey's first collection of stories … stamps him as the major talent among … new writers." Bennett found similarities between Carey's work and that of Kurt Vonnegut and Evelyn Waugh, but he added that "the shaping imagination is Carey's own."

Equally unique is War Crimes, Carey's second collection of stories. The volume includes such vividly bizarre accounts as "The Chance," the tale of a man who vainly attempts to dissuade his lover from entering a lottery in which the major prize is a repulsive body. In the similarly disturbing title piece, a hippie-turned-businessman kills people who are threatening his profits from frozen food sales. Like Carey's first collection, War Crimes became immensely popular in Australia, and it received the New South Wales Premier's Literary Award in 1979.

In 1981, Carey published his first novel, Bliss. In keeping with his short stories, Bliss is fairly surreal, rendering the bizarre as if it were the norm. The novel's protagonist is Harry Joy, an overworked advertising executive who suffers a near-fatal heart attack. After recovering from the heart attack and equally life-threatening open-heart surgery, Joy believes that he is in hell. He discovers that his wife is compromising him with a close friend and that his seemingly lethargic son is actually a freewheeling drug dealer who forces his sister to commit incest in return for drugs. Joy eventually forsakes his family for Honey Barbara, a worldly nature lover who supports herself as a drug dealer and prostitute. Around the time that he befriends the charge-card accommodating prostitute, Joy also discovers that his advertising company maintains a map indicating cancer density for the area, with accountability traced to the company's clients. Aghast, Joy renounces his work and grows more remote from his family. Eventually, his wife has him committed to a mental institution, where he once again meets Honey Barbara, who has also been incarcerated. Together they escape to her home in a rain forest, where Joy finally finds happiness and fulfillment before meeting an unfortunate demise.

With Bliss, Carey gained further acclaim from American and British reviewers. In British Book News, for example, Neil Philip referred to Bliss as "a rich, rewarding novel: crisply written, daringly conceived, brilliantly achieved," while in Washington Post Book World, Judith Chettle wrote that Carey's novel possesses "all the virtues of a modern fable." For Chettle, Carey is "a writer of power and imagination." Even more impressed was Spectator critic Francis King. "In both the breadth of his vision of human life, in all its misery and happiness," wrote King, "and in the profundity of his insight into moral dilemmas, Mr. Carey makes the work of most of our ‘promising’ young and not so young novelists seem tinselly and trivial."

In 1985 Carey published his second novel, Illywhacker, a wide-ranging comic work about Herbert Badgery, a 139-year-old trickster and liar. Badgery's life, which parallels the development of Australia following its independence from England, is full of odd adventures, including stints as a pilot, car salesman, and snake handler. His accounts of his escapades, however, are not entirely reliable, and over the course of the novel's 600 pages Badgery often revels in tomfoolery and good-natured treachery. He is hardly the novel's only unusual figure: Molly MaGrath maintains her sanity by periodically shocking herself with an "invigorator belt"; Emma, Badgery's daughter-in-law, lives in a lizard's cage; and an entire village proves gullible enough to cooperate with Badgery in his hastily organized plan to build an Australian airplane. By the novel's end, Badgery has recounted many more mad schemes and regaled the reader with recollections of seemingly countless eccentrics.

Illywhacker impressed many critics. In Encounter, D.J. Taylor called Illywhacker "a dazzling and hilarious book," describing the narrative as "a vast, diffuse plot chock-full of luminous characters and incidents." Curt Suplee, who reviewed the novel in Washington Post Book World, recommended it as "huge and hugely rewarding" and added that it is a "rare and valuable" work. Howard Jacobson, writing in the New York Times Book Review, considered the book to be "a big, garrulous, funny novel, touching, farcical, and passionately bad-tempered." Jacobson also found Illywhacker a uniquely Australian work and contended that the experience of reading it was nearly the equivalent of visiting Australia.

Carey's third novel, Oscar and Lucinda, is an extraordinary tale of two compulsive gamblers. The work begins in Victorian England, where the child Oscar endures life under the rigid rule of his intimidating preacher father. Later, Oscar breaks from his father and joins the conventional Anglican Church, which he serves as a clergyman. Lucinda, meanwhile, has been raised in Australia by her mother, an intellectual who maintains the farm inherited from her late husband. Upon her mother's death, Lucinda profits from the farm's sale. She also becomes owner of a glassworks and consequently devises the construction of a glass cathedral. Eventually, Oscar and Lucinda meet on a ship, where Lucinda reveals her own obsession with gambling. Together, Oscar and Lucinda commence an extensive gambling excursion through Australia while simultaneously attempting to spread Christianity throughout the still-wild country.

Oscar and Lucinda earned Carey further praise, and it received the 1988 Booker Prize. Beryl Bainbridge, writing in the New York Times Book Review, was particularly impressed with those portions devoted to Oscar's traumatic childhood, though she added that the remaining episodes are "racy with characters, teeming with invention and expressed in superlative language." Bainbridge also declared that Carey shared with Thomas Wolfe "that magnificent vitality, that ebullient delight in character, detail and language that turns a novel into an important book." Even more enthusiastic was Los Angeles Times reviewer Carolyn See, who wrote: "There's so much richness here. The sweetness of the star-crossed lovers. The goodness within the stifled English clergyman. The perfect irrationality of human behavior as it plays itself out in minor characters."

Carey returned to writing about modern-day life with his fourth novel, The Tax Inspector, which describes four apocalyptic days in the life of the Catchprice fam- ily, proprietors of a crumbling auto dealership in a slummy suburb of Sydney, Australia. "Light-years beyond the merely dysfunctional, they're the Beverly Hillbillies on bad acid," stated Francine Prose in the New York Times Book Review. "The Catchprices are the sort of people you'd rather read about than spend time with." Granny Frieda Catchprice is a tough, half-senile widow who carries explosives in her pocketbook; her middle-aged daughter Cathy still dreams of leaving the family business to become a country-western singer; Cathy's brother Mort seems mild-mannered and harmless but has cruelly abused his two sons, as he himself was abused by Granny's late husband. One of Mort's children, sixteen-year-old Benny, listens religiously to "self-actualization" tapes until he comes to believe that he is an angel.

Suspecting that her children are about to put her in a nursing home, Granny reports them to the Australian Taxation Office, which sends Maria Takis—an unmarried, pregnant tax collector—to investigate. Maria's sympathy for Granny draws her into the Catchprices' malevolent vortex. "To summarize the novel's characters or its twisted plot is to risk making the book sound simply cartoonish, quirky and grotesque," warned Prose. "In fact, there's something extremely likable about all this, and especially about the way Mr. Carey gives the combative Catchprices great complexity and depth." Prose asserted that eventually, "the black hole these people call home" is transformed into "a dark mirror for the larger world outside."

Carey's next novel, The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith, is a sprawling tale set in the imaginary country of Efica—a tiny island nation colonized and exploited by Voorstand, a huge world power. Carey supplies a rich background for Efica, including a glossary of Efican dialect. The plot is typically convoluted, involving the Eficans' struggle to retain their own cultural identity. The Voorstanders attack that identity with a high-tech, semi-religious entertainment spectacle known as the Sirkus. The featured players in the Sirkus—Broder Mouse, Oncle Duck, and Hairy Man—bear more than a passing resemblance to three icons of the Walt Disney empire, Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and Goofy. The story is narrated by Tristan Smith, whose mother belongs to a radical theater group determined to resist the influence of the Sirkus. Hideously deformed at birth, Tristan finally finds love and acceptance after disguising himself in an electronic Broder Mouse costume.

Writing in the Chicago Tribune, Douglas Glover found this novel "at once bizarre, comic and nauseating, … a deeply melancholy book about the Australia of the human heart…. Disturbing, wildly original and terribly sad, The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith is a book about the place where nation, myth and the personal intersect." Remarking on the novel's themes and relation to contemporary society, Michael Heyward stated in the New Republic: "If all the world is not a stage now but a themepark, we really are destined to become the residents of Voorstand and Efica. Could there be anything worse, Carey seems to be asking, than a situation in which practically everyone espoused the values of mass culture, especially in societies that did not create them?" The novel's driving force, Heyward continued, is "the savage irony of the provincial who has learned that the metropolis is merely a larger and more powerful province than his own." Washington Post contributor Carolyn See was also enthusiastic, declaring that "Peter Carey has attempted to do about one hundred things in this very ambitious novel and—if I'm correct—has about a ninety percent success rate. This, combined with his always magical, absolutely lovable narrative voice, makes The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith an important contribution to contemporary fiction."

After a foray into children's literature with The Big Bazoohley in 1995, Carey published another major historical novel, Jack Maggs, in 1998. In this work, Carey has the audacity to rework the Dickens classic Great Expectations with a decidedly Australian twist. Carey's protagonist, Jack Maggs, is a variation on Abel Magwitch, the Australian convict from Dickens's novel. Carey narrates the adventures of the exiled man, who has in the meantime become a wealthy landowner in Australia, upon his return to England, where he has come to seek out his long-lost son. In the process he becomes involved with a young writer and mesmerist, Tobias Oates, who is a representation of Dickens himself.

Critics praised Jack Maggs for being a page-turner and a richly documented historical novel, as well as a clever postmodern comment on the Dickensian literary tradition. New York Times Book Review critic Caryn James wrote that the novel's "bright nineteenth-century surface masks a world-weary twentieth-century heart. The novel transforms Dickens's characters and his London into a fable about class, national identity, and art." A Booklist contributor found the novel's melodramatic conclusion "gripping … in the classic Dickens manner," while James described it as surprisingly sentimental, seemingly "rigged by Carey to reinforce Maggs's Australian identity."

Carey won his second Booker Prize in 2001, with his True History of the Kelly Gang, "a dazzling imaginative re-creation of the life of a bushranger and Australian folk hero, Ned Kelly," according to a reviewer for the Economist. "It takes the form of an apologia," the reviewer further commented, "written by Ned for the future benefit of his (wholly fictitious) daughter." The novel "cocks the ear like a pistol with its mesmerizing, dialect-driven narration," wrote a contributor for Library Journal. Recalling the tall tales of Illywhacker and Oscar and Lucinda, as well as the Dickensian overtones of Jack Maggs, Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang is yet "bolder and more challenging than anything he has tried before," according to Anthony Quinn in the New York Times. Quinn felt that Carey's novel is not "merely a historical novel; it's a fully imagined act of historical impersonation."

Ned Kelly confesses all in the pages of the novel, outlining a life every bit as full of adventure as that of America's Jesse James, but one related with verve and edge. It is purportedly drawn from thirteen parcels the outlaw left behind, and in it the territory of northeast Victoria in Australia of the 1860s and 1870s is drawn with precision. Born of immigrant stock, Ned grows up adoring his mother, a hot-tempered woman who has no love for the police. Ned wonders throughout his youth about his father's convict past in Ireland. Mocked at school for his poverty, Ned is soon apprenticed "under duress," according to Quinn, to a bushranger, and essentially kidnapped into a life of crime. When he escapes and returns to his mother, he discovers it is she who sold him into service to begin with. Between spells in prison as a teen, Ned turns his hand to horse stealing and then to bank robbing, founding the Kelly gang with his brother and two friends. Ned plays Robin Hood, as well, and it is for his more selfless deeds that he has gone down in Australian folk history. Quinn noted that once Ned turns rebel, "it becomes impossible for us not to saddle up and ride with him to his terminus as tragic hero," hanged at twenty-five. Quinn concluded that Carey has "transformed sepia legend into brilliant, even violent, color, and turned a distant myth into warm flesh and blood. Packed with incident, alive with comedy and pathos," Carey's book "contains pretty much everything you could ask for of a novel. It is an adjectival wonder."

Other reviewers shared Quinn's glowing appreciation of True History of the Kelly Gang. "Carey has fashioned a prose marvel," wrote Book reviewer Jeff Ousborne, while the critic for the Economist felt that Carey "has found a convincing voice for his hero," and presents a "fully rounded character that we can believe in and—his obvious failings notwithstanding—sympathize with wholeheartedly." Newsweek critic Malcolm Jones noted that it is the "best measure" of Carey's novel that the reader does not worry about the historical veracity of his tale for more than a page of the adventures. "This act of literary ventriloquism is so adroit that you never doubt that it's Kelly's own words you're reading in the headlong, action-packed story," Malcolm further commented. "Thanks to Peter Carey's power and skill as a novelist, Ned Kelly's story now has a chance of being heard, if not believed, by the world," remarked David Coad in World Literature Today. For Coad, "Carey's Kelly is convincing, captivating, and one cannot but be impressed by the author's attention to detail." "Historical fiction doesn't get much better than this," raved Dori DeSpain in School Library Journal.

With his next two novels, My Life as a Fake and Theft: A Love Story, Carey created two twisting tales of the artistic world. In the former, the author adapts a real-life 1944 case of literary fraud to his own purposes. The original facts involved two men named Harold Stewart and James McCauley, who convinced the editor of a Melbourne literary journal to publish the brilliant poems of the previously undiscovered Ern Malley, who never actually existed; the hoax was eventually discovered, but even so the poems of Ern Malley can still be found in respected literary anthologies. Carey's version takes on a more surrealistic form when Christopher Chubb invents the writer Bob McCorkle, a working-class, brilliant poet whose verses somehow outshine Chubb's own. In a bizarre twist, McCorkle takes on human form and kidnaps Chubb's daughter, thus claiming the youth that his creator, Chubb, denied him. Chubb sets out on a desperate search throughout the world to find his daughter, and it is during that search that editor Sarah Wode-Douglas of the magazine Modern Review finds him and tries to convince him to let her publish McCorkle's works. Richard Lacayo, writing for Time, praised the novel as "a nimble revision of the Malley episode." "There's lots in My Life as a Fake for scholars to have fun with—questions about identity and authenticity and the cultural anxieties of a colonial society," commented Michael Gorra in the Atlantic Monthly, who added: "This is a fabulous book in the original sense of the term—and in the other one, too." In a New Yorker assessment, fellow novelist John Updike judged the work to be "so confidently brilliant, so economical yet lively in its writing, so tightly fitted and continuously startling in its plot that something, we feel, must be wrong with it," yet other than sensing that the novel "ends in a bit of a rush," Updike found few flaws in My Life as a Fake.

Theft is set in the art world and is more a complaint against those who profit from artists' work than about art itself. Michael Boone is a has-been artist; once considered a brilliant, rising star as a painter, he feels he still possesses talent but has been rejected by the art world. As the novel opens, he earns money house sitting and takes care of his mentally impaired brother, Hugh, a character who reminded several critics of Lenny in John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men. When Boone meets Marlene, the wife of the son of the famous late artist Jacques Liebovitz, his life takes an interesting turn. Marlene is seen by the art world as an authority on Liebovitz and is consulted to verify the authenticity of the great painter's works. She convinces Boone to take part in an elaborate ruse by promising to help his career, and what ensues, according to an Economist critic, is "a marvellous caper, a wicked little love story and a fine mockery of an industry that probably deserves it." Spectator contributor Sebastian Smee added that Theft "has a swarming, improvised quality which besieges and easily overwhelms objections, including any reluctance to credit his convoluted, sometimes outlandish plots."

Carey returned to his native Australia during the 2000 Olympics after a seventeen-year absence—most of which was spent in New York—in order to write the second volume of Bloomsbury's "The Writer and the City" series. The result is 30 Days in Sydney: A Wildly Distorted Account, a "desultory, impressionistic love letter to the city," according to a reviewer for Publishers Weekly. "While other travelogues may provide more information," the reviewer continued, "this effort will leave more lasting impressions." Similarly, Brad Hooper wrote in Booklist that the "impressions [Carey] imparts are both meaningful and indelible." Gary Krist, reviewing the book in the New York Times, noted that the author unfolds his book in many forms, "through arguments, dreams, anecdotes and tirades." Krist concluded that overall Carey "is remarkably fair to the city he left years ago, acknowledging that the forces that shaped it have produced both monstrosities … and triumphs."

Carey completed another nonfiction work, Wrong about Japan: A Father's Journey with His Son. Here, he relates his efforts to bond with his preteen son, Charley, who is obsessed with anime, manga, and other aspects of Japanese pop culture, by taking him on a trip to Japan. As the title indicates, Carey's many Western notions about what Japanese culture means are taken to task, and he finds it difficult to even define what the Japanese themselves feel about it. Perhaps his problem is in assuming that the Japanese are different from Americans in that he assumes their culture has a homogenous aspect understood by all those who live there. He is also surprised to find that, as with American capitalism, much of the pop culture is designed to sell merchandise; for example, when querying one artist about a cartoon, which Carey thinks contains some symbolism involving World War II, he is told instead that the cartoon was made to sell toy robots. "Wrong about Japan scratches the surface of Japanese history, anime and manga. Experts may find it lacking," commented Susanna Jones in the New Statesman, who also observed: "At its heart is a gentle but constant struggle between father and son." On the other hand, a Kirkus Reviews writer declared the book to be a "thoughtful, sensitive exploration of contemporary Japanese culture."

Carey's novel, His Illegal Self, which was published in 2008, is a politically charged work that appears extremely timely given the issues that are most frequently highlighted in the news and the headlines, but which also addresses more intimate issues as well. Set in 1972 during the height of the Vietnam protests, the book features seven-year-old Che Selkirk, who is being raised by his wealthy grandmother in New York City, as his parents, a pair of radicals, are being sought by the FBI for their association with the Students for a Democratic Society, a group that has grown less verbal and more violent over time. Che has no memory of his father, and the last time he recalls seeing his mother he was just two years old, at which point she gave up custody of him in the wake of an arrest for bank robbery. However, when his mother reappears one day, years later, Che recognizes her and allows her to lure him away from the safety of his home and into a life with her on the run, certain that they are on their way to meet up with his father. At almost eight years old, Che still clings to the idea of the family unit and of his mother as a nurturing figure, two concepts that she slowly disabuses him of despite having returned for him. Instead of Mom, she requests that he call her Dial, maintaining a level of distance between them. They travel across the country, staying in fleabag motels, picking up a stray kitten along the way despite the sense that Dial is barely able to care for herself and Che, as well as a man named Trevor, who adds an additional level of menace to the book. There is also some lingering doubt as to whether she is who she claims to be, strengthened by the question as to whether a true, loving mother would really kidnap her own child out of a safe and loving environment only to put his life and well-being in danger. Is she actually his mother, or just the messenger sent to fetch him on her behalf?

Che and Dial eventually end up at a commune in Queensland, Australia, a harsh, dangerous place where the landscape is filled with endless opportunities for a young boy to get into serious trouble. Nor is the commune itself a collection of loving characters, as constant squabbles over leadership and a certain level of paranoia seem to have infested the group. Yet the relationship between Che and Dial shifts over the course of their travels, with Che's sheer physicality and neediness breaking down some of the emotional barriers that Dial has placed between them. Dial's love for him, though it might be of an unconventional nature not normally associated with the nurturing and protective tendencies of a mother, begins to reveal itself as she appreciates Che's heartfelt hugs and struggles with her own decision to take him from his grandmother and plunge him into this difficult, precarious life that she leads. Che, however, is an intelligent and observant little boy, and as he eventually begins to learn more and more about his situation, his suspicions regarding Dial and her intentions begin to grow. Eventually Dial is revealed to be Anna Xenos, a professor who indulged in activist behavior during her own student days and initially thought it was no more than a lark to take Che for a visit with his mother. In truth, Che's mother is dead, though given what is revealed of her maternal feelings toward her son, or rather the lack thereof, he is better off without her. Yet, at seven, this is not a concept that Che is prepared to absorb.

Reviewers had very mixed opinions about His Illegal Self, in some instances even disagreeing about the basic points of Carey's plot. Donna Seaman, writing for Booklist, praised the novel for its psychological twists and turns, as well as remarking that the duality "between the need to belong and the dream of freedom during the days of rage over the Vietnam War is at once terrifying and mythic." A reviewer for Publishers Weekly commented that "while this novel lacks the boldness of Theft or the sweep of Oscar and Lucinda, it's still a fine addition to the author's oeuvre." Reviewing for New Statesman, Helen Oyeyemi observed that "the writing has a stark, atmospheric economy to it." James Wood, in a contribution for the New Yorker, declared that "Carey's novel is determinedly unpolitical—to a political degree. It may appear to harbor a conservative disdain for the spoiled ambitions of nineteen-seventies radicalism. It is, after all, a novel about not a would-be victor but an absolute victim, and a very young one at that." Despite this, he went on to note, "the novel does not feel like an indictment; it hugs the flanks of its characters and their largely unearned vicissitudes." Spectator reviewer Caroline Moore opined: "Carey engages because he is engaged: as a creator, he is never paring his fingernails, but has, like the boy in this viscerally gripping novel, ‘earth packed in black moons’ beneath them. He wrestles with real questions of authenticity and Australian identity; while his prose bursts with such authentic colloquial energy that it is like the rough drive over a fallen tree described in this novel."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Carey, Peter, Wrong about Japan: A Father's Journey with His Son, Knopf (New York, NY), 2005.

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 40, 1986, pp. 127-135, Volume 55, 1989, pp. 112-119, Volume 96, 1997, pp. 19-85.

Encyclopedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, 3rd edition, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1999.

Huggan, Graham, Peter Carey, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1996.

Lamb, Karen, Peter Carey: The Genesis of Fame, Angus & Robertson (Sydney, New South Wales, Australia), 1992.

PERIODICALS

Atlantic Monthly, November, 2003, Michael Gorra, "Fabulous Forgeries," review of My Life as a Fake, p. 163.

Book, January, 2001, Jeff Ousborne, review of True History of the Kelly Gang, p. 80.

Booklist, January 1, 1998, review of Jack Maggs; August, 2001, Brad Hooper, review of 30 Days in Sydney: A Wildly Distorted Account, p. 2078; November 15, 2007, Donna Seaman, review of His Illegal Self, p. 5.

British Book News, February, 1981, Neil Philip, review of Bliss.

Chicago Tribune, February 19, 1995, Douglas Glover, review of The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith, section 14, p. 5.

Economist, January 20, 2001, "A Wizard from Oz," review of True History of the Kelly Gang, p. 8; January 29, 2005, "True History of the Carey Gang; The Real Japan," p. 82; June 3, 2006, "Art Darts; New Fiction," review of Theft: A Love Story, p. 82.

Encounter, September-October, 1985, D.J. Taylor, review of Illywhacker.

Guardian (London, England), January 22, 2005, Ian Sansom, "Stuffu Happens," review of Wrong about Japan; May 27, 2006, Patrick Ness, "The Sacred in the Profane," review of Theft.

Kirkus Reviews, November 15, 2004, review of Wrong about Japan, p. 1074; April 1, 2006, review of Theft, p. 308.

Lancet, February 3, 2001, Robin Gerster, "The Ned Kelly Myth and Australian Identity," p. 401.

Library Journal, August, 2001, Joseph L. Carlson, review of 30 Days in Sydney, p. 144; January, 2002, review of True History of the Kelly Gang, p. 48.

Los Angeles Times, June 19, 1988, Carolyn See, review of Oscar and Lucinda; November 5, 2001, "Mining a Colonial Past," p. E1.

Maclean's, March 26, 2001, John Bemrose, "Dialogue with a Desperado," p. 48.

Meanjin, September, 2001, Andreas Gaile, review of True History of the Kelly Gang, pp. 214-220; March, 2004, Michael Heyward, "Chinese Boxes," review of My Life as a Fake, p. 103.

New Leader, November-December, 2003, Philip Graham, "A Prankster's Peril," review of My Life as a Fake, p. 39.

New Republic, April 10, 1995, Michael Heyward, review of The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith, pp. 38-41.

New Statesman, January 8, 2001, D.J. Taylor, review of True History of the Kelly Gang, p. 42; January 10, 2005, Susanna Jones, "Culture Shock," review of Wrong about Japan, p. 51; February 11, 2008, Helen Oyeyemi, "Lost and Found," p. 59.

Newsweek, January 29, 2001, Malcolm Jones, "An Outlaw Down Under," p. 64.

New Yorker, January 22, 2001, John Updike, review of True History of the Kelly Gang, pp. 80-83; November 24, 2003, John Updike, "Papery Passions," review of My Life as a Fake, p. 100; March 3, 2008, James Wood, "Notes from Underground," p. 79.

New York Review of Books, March 29, 2001, John Banville, review of True History of the Kelly Gang, pp. 15-16.

New York Times, January 7, 2001, Anthony Quinn, "Robin Hood of the Outback," review of True History of the Kelly Gang, section 7, p. 8; February 15, 2001, Mel Gussow, "Novelist Champions an Australian Rogue," p. B8; September 16, 2001, Gary Krist, "A Month Down Under," section 7, p. 34.

New York Times Book Review, October 4, 1985, Howard Jacobson, review of Illywhacker; May 29, 1988, Beryl Bainbridge, review of Oscar and Lucinda; January 12, 1992, Francine Prose, review of The Tax Inspector, pp. 1, 26; February 8, 1998, Caryn James, review of Jack Maggs.

Observer (London, England), January 2, 2005, Peter Conrad, "It Was Full of Eastern Promise …," review of Wrong about Japan.

Publishers Weekly, August 20, 2001, review of 30 Days in Sydney, p. 73; October 8, 2007, review of His Illegal Self, p. 34.

Review of Contemporary Fiction, spring, 2004, Irving Malin, review of My Life as a Fake, p. 146.

San Francisco Chronicle, October 18, 2001, Oscar Villalon, "‘Kelly Gang’ Author Peter Carey Wins Second Booker Prize," p. B3.

School Library Journal, April, 2001, Dori DeSpain, review of True History of the Kelly Gang, p. 171.

Spectator, December 12, 1981, Francis King, review of Bliss; January 13, 2001, John de Falbe, review of True History of the Kelly Gang, pp. 35-36; August 25, 2001, Peter Porter, review of 30 Days in Sydney, p. 35; June 3, 2006, Sebastian Smee, "The Art of the Matter," review of Theft; February 17, 2008, Caroline Moore, "A Dickensian Tale of a Child of the '70s," p. 11.

Stand, Volume 16, number 3, 1975, Carl Harrison-Ford, review of The Fat Man in History.

Time, January 22, 2001, Paul Gray, "Sympathy for an Outlaw," p. 82; November 24, 2003, Richard Lacayo, "Rhyme and Punishment: In Peter Carey's Ingenious New Novel, a Poet Who Never Existed Takes on a Disturbing Life of His Own," review of My Life as a Fake, 80.

Time International, January 31, 2005, Bryan Walsh, "Land of the Rising Son: In Wrong about Japan, Novelist Peter Carey Explores Pop Tokyo with His Manga-mad 12-year-old," p. 57.

Washington Post, February 17, 1995, Carolyn See, review of The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith, p. F7.

Washington Post Book World, May 2, 1982, Judith Chettle, review of Bliss; August 18, 1985, Curt Suplee, review of Illywhacker.

World and I, June, 2001, Robert Ross, "Heroic Underdog Down Under," p. 251.

World Literature Today, spring, 2001, David Coad, review of True History of the Kelly Gang, p. 314.

World Literature Written in English, November, 1976, Bruce Bennett, review of The Fat Man in History.