A life underground

Peter CAREY won his two Booker Prizes for "Oscar and Lucinda" and "True History of the Kelly Gang," epic novels steeped in the history of his native Australia. But he's a thoroughly modern writer, smashing genre boundaries, ranging in tone from wild comedy to grim tragedy, viewing the past with a decidedly contemporary eye and firmly placing late 20th century adventures like "My Life as a Fake" and "Theft: A Love Story" in social and cultural context.

This breadth of experience and abilities enriches Carey's latest novel, "His Illegal Self." Che David Selkirk is 7 in the fall of 1972 when his wealthy Manhattan grandmother and guardian, Phoebe Selkirk, hands him over to a woman named Dial, whom Che decides must be his long-lost mother. It's supposed to be a brief visit, but the bewildered boy winds up on a bus to Philadelphia, where he sees a picture of himself on TV and knows that "something very bad had happened." Soon they are on a flight to Australia, where the pair land in Sydney before embarking on a bus ride to Brisbane. They are hitchhiking north in the blistering heat when a battered station wagon pulls up, and a man named Trevor offers them a lift. Lucky for them, because a cyclone is about to hit.

In these opening chapters, Carey skillfully conveys the confused perceptions of a child entangled in adult machinations. Che hasn't seen "his illegal mother" since he was a baby and has never known his father. His vague notion of them as heroic revolutionaries, gleaned from a teenage neighbor in his grandmother's East Side apartment building, is bluntly clarified when the narrative point of view shifts to Dial. Her real name is Anna Xenos; she was Che's baby-sitter in 1966 while attending Radcliffe on scholarship with golden girl Susan Selkirk. The two were both sleeping with Students for a Democratic Society star David Rubbo, Che's father. Susan, his true mother, threw herself into the movement, lost custody of the baby to her mother and went underground; Anna stayed in school, working nights and weekends making sausages with her father: "She hated being a good girl, but that was what she had always been."