His Illegal Self by Peter Carey

Ever since Illywhacker, published in 1985, which told the history of his home nation through tall tales — the title means a con man — Carey has been, in his own words, "trying to come to grips with what it means to be an Australian, and what Australia is".

The author, who has won the Booker Prize twice, most recently for True History of the Kelly Gang, now lives in New York, where he wrote My Life as a Fake and Theft.

His new novel sees Carey returning to the hippy commune near Yandina, Queensland, where he lived in the early Seventies. However, he does so in the form of a seven-year-old boy called Che (as in Guevara).

We first meet Che in New York, where he lives in a Park Avenue apartment with his grandmother, who calls him Jay. It is 1972. The little angel with blond hair and "a gorgeous sly shy smile" stands to inherit $1 billion. In the meantime, though, Che is far more interested in the whereabouts of his parents.

A bundle of papers which he carries round with him — newspaper cuttings, a cherished photo of his father taken from Life magazine — represents the sum total of his knowledge. As Carey leapfrogs back and forth in time, the reader, like Che, is forced to piece together the story of what turns out to be a "comic and occasionally disastrous life".

One day he sees a woman and knows immediately that she is his mother: except she isn't. Anna Xenos is his former babysitter, a friend of his mother, who, when asked by her to abduct her son from New York, cannot refuse.

However, before she can deliver him, his real mother blows herself up. Che's parents are, you see, student revolutionaries and, after a bank robbery, two of America's Most Wanted.

Underground connections of his father get Che and Anna out of the country. The two of them soon find themselves marooned in the Australian bush. Having survived a terrifying cyclone, they are picked up by a pair of dropouts — one of whom, Trevor, becomes a surrogate father to the disorientated, disappointed Che.

Carey depicts the gradual development of this triangular relationship with honesty and humour. Anna, an academic, tells Che to call her Dial — not because she is laid-back but from the dialectics of Zeno. Trevor, a former Barnardo's Boy abused by priests, believes Che has "a right to know the truth".

The grown-ups are both fugitives from the law and all three of them are, one way or another, deceiving themselves. There is no going back. Or is there? We know virtually from the start that at some point Che returns to New York and undergoes hypnotism as an adult. This cunning bit of information sets up a superb twist in the final paragraph. Even so there are times when it seems that the young hero will perish.

The rainforest — lovingly depicted in all its glory — is almost a character in itself, sometimes threatening, sometimes sustaining.

The hippies in a neighbouring commune, a constant menace, are scathingly described, as are the amateur terrorists.

It is not the world that needs to change but the misguided idealists who live within it. Carey's conclusion, recalling the spirit of the age, appears to be "all you need is love". If this sounds sentimental, His Illegal Self is not. It is a wonderful novel, full of hard-won truths, which nevertheless leaves you with a warm and fuzzy feeling of immense satisfaction..

Synopsis by Foyles.co.uk

Che is raised in isolated privilege by his New York grandmother, precocious son of radical Harvard students in the sixties. Yearning for his famous outlaw parents, denied all access to television and the news, he takes hope from his long haired teenage neighbour who predicts they will come for you, man. They'll break you out of here. Soon Che too is an outlaw, fleeing down subways, abandoning seedy motels at night, as he is pitched into a journey that leads him to a hippy commune in the jungle of tropical Queensland. Here he slowly, bravely, confronts his life, learning that nothing is what it seems. "His Illegal Self" is an achingly beautiful and emotional story of the love between a young woman and a little boy, and a wonderful journey of self-discovery.