"...No: if I convinced myself of something then I certainly existed. But there is a deceiver of supreme power and cunning who is deliberately and constantly deceiving me. In that case I too undoubtedly exist, if he is deceiving me; and let him deceive me as much as he can, he will never bring it about that I am nothing so long as I think that I am something. So after considering everything very thoroughly, I must finally conclude that this proposition, I am, I exist, is necessarily true whenever it is put forward by me or conceived in my mind...Thinking? At last I have discovered it - thought; this alone is inseparable from me. I am, I exist - that is certain. But for how long? For as long as I am thinking. For it could be that were I totally to cease from thinking, I should totally cease to exist...I am a thinking thing."
René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy -
Second Meditation
The NYLS Book Review - Fiction
Title: His Illegal Self
Author: Peter Carey
ISBN: 978-0-307-26372-8
Format: Hardcover, 271pp
Pub. Date: February 2008
Publisher: Knopf Publishing; $24.95
Review:
There’s a saying that if you remember the 1960’s, you weren’t there. To this maxim I’ll append – if you weren’t there, you haven’t lived.
Carey’s His Illegal Self opens with the unwitting kidnapping of wealthy eight-year-old Ché from his grandmother’s care by a self-disdaining, Harvard University hippie named Dial. Ché s mother, another Ivy League graduate, orchestrates and initiates the caper prior to blowing herself up while handling explosives for “the movement”. Dial subsequently flees the country for Australia with Ché in tow, joining a band of hippies there whose main concern is not government sanctioned abuses of the people by corporations, but the adherence of all parties within the commune to a “no cat” rule. Dial and Ché have a cat.
Okay, if the summary portion of this review of Carey’s work seems glib, remember we’re talking about the 1960’s – a time when the serious and the comical frequently collided; sometimes with devastating consequences; other times only seemingly so. I fair estimation, Carey does an unimpeachable job of capturing the wantonly way in which consequential decisions were made and lives created, altered, and destroyed during this period. This attitude of the 60’s reflects glaringly in the work’s subtext and should be the backdrop upon which the events in the summary are viewed.
That said, it’s worthy of note the lengths the elite would go, in this work, to destroy themselves. Is this Carey’s tacitly delivered social commentary? Or, is it more simply what remains of his memories of the 1960’s? Either way it’s fine, since the former is what good literature is all about, and the latter gives him “street cred”. In the end, it is Ché readers will ultimately identify with and the frail innocence he represents in an aggravating, obscene, and tumultuous time in world history. If Ché is to be the representative character for the countless, young, unheard, and innocent voices of the era, then Carey is to be lauded. Why? It would mean he was there, he remembered, and he lived.
© Joel Glenn, Book Critic –The NYLS Book Review, Ltd. All Rights Reserved.