Desperate, disrupted

If you're a Peter Carey fan -- and you should be -- watch what you read about his compulsive new novel. Even the dust jacket risks spoiling the effect of this alternately gripping and disorienting story. "His Illegal Self" is front-loaded with shocks and twists that gradually fade into a contemplative, enriching tale of disrupted lives.

At the center of the story is a precocious 7-year-old boy named Che. The child of '60s radicals and the subject of one of the decade's most sensational news photos, he was placed in the custody of his Park Avenue grandmother at the age of 2 and raised in strict isolation in upstate New York. No television: no chance of seeing images of his infamous parents being escorted away by police. But the boy picks up stray details from a neighbor who regales him with stories about the SDS, the Weathermen and his namesake, Che Guevara.

The plot explodes off the first page with what was supposed to have been a moment of reconciliation. Che's grandmother has agreed to a visit with the boy's mother, the first in five years. But when Dial arrives, she's tense and their reunion is fraught with complications. Che loves his grandmother, but of course no one could compete with the allure of an absent mother: "He had thought about her every day, forever," Carey writes. "She was burnished, angel sunlight."

Almost immediately, everyone's expectations are shattered and reordered by betrayal and fear. In a moment of panic, Dial finds herself on the lam again with the boy, the subject of an international search, dashing through seedy motels and safe houses -- then out of the country, underground in the land Down Under. It's a sudden, irrevocable destruction of the respectable life she had spent years constructing. Only Che thrills to this new adventure: "His real life was just starting," he thinks. "He was going to see his dad."

The whole story bristles with political import -- the Vietnam War, the student uprisings, domestic terrorism -- but Carey keeps all that on the margins. He focuses instead on Dial's conflicted attitude toward motherhood and her faltering efforts to construct a home for this desperately trusting child. "If there was a way out of this, she did not see it," Carey writes, "and she once again regretted not leaving him in that hotel room. That might seem cruel to pet lovers and sentimentalists, but he would be with his grandma now, safe in bed on the other side of the world."

Although Carey has lived in New York since 1990, he was born and raised in Australia and spent time at an alternative community in Queensland. That experience may have informed his rather bitter portrayal of a band of "feral hippies" in the town of Nambour, where Dial and Che settle. Dial considers them "time-warp idiots," self-righteous and naive. The only person who takes an interest in Dial and her boy is a paranoid, illiterate sanitation worker. Dial wonders if she'll be murdered in her sleep or merely bored to death by another communal meeting. Meanwhile, Che keeps wondering which one of these men is his father. The effect is oddly frightening and heartbreaking.

The genius of the novel is Carey's portrayal of this polite boy. The story is not strictly told from Che's point of view, but the narrative subtly reflects the boy's elliptical perception of what's happening. Events are scrambled and impressionistic, coming in and out of focus as Che vacillates between confusion and certainty, fear and delight.

Carey's startling plots are now so well-known that we can't help overanticipating them, but he's still capable of staying two steps ahead of us. And in "His Illegal Self" the most surprising maneuver isn't so much a sudden revelation but his tender portrayal of the desperate love between this accidental mother and the son who she knows deserves better.