Books & Poetry

‘I hope I haven’t fucked up your questions…’ Peter Carey rolls an eye over my notes and pauses. Midway through the London leg of a global press onslaught for his new novel, ‘His Illegal Self’, the double-Bookered Australian novelist is feeling a little jaded. He’s telling me about the hackneyed queries he has been answering day after day. ‘There is a sort of unholy complicity between writer and journalist, where I will be asked about how my life illuminates the book. Almost always. And: “Where did the idea came from?” “What’s it about?” “How does it connect to your life?” ’

Tsk. That’s not me, Mr Carey. No complicity required. I glance at my solid-gold questions about the book’s plot. ‘Then one gets involved in conversations about plot, which is not really…’ He pauses to gather his well-meaning pity for the poor folk who ask such questions, the lowest of the lot. ‘If the plot was all there was, you would just publish the plot.’
Feature continues

Luckily, Carey is able to shine a light towards the ineffable heart of storytelling, the spooky juju that journos and authors tend to skirt around. ‘The truth is that I spent a lot of my life so disdainful of creative mumbo jumbo, I’ve downplayed the fact that if you are a writer, you really are a magician,’ he says. ‘And that there isn’t really a story about the dark of the room when the thing is being done.

'We try and explain it away for our own, not totally honourable reasons, in that we want people to write about us. We play along, talking about the life, and “what it’s about”. But making a book is dark and muddy, and sense is made of it as it is written. In the end it is the river of words, the sentences. But that’s not a story. For me, it’s about language. And how are you going to talk about that?

‘The moment you start talking about your life you start undercutting the very thing that you spend every day doing: inventing,’ he continues. ‘Of course things come from your life. But by the time it gets into a book it has got a totally different reason for being there. When Robert Rauschenberg picks up his sock, it is his sock. But once it is in his painting it has become something totally different, something that was a sock.’

‘His Illegal Self’ is partly set in the world of ’60s and ’70s radical politics, in the milieu of the US new left’s Students for A Democratic Society (SDS), and the direct-action group the Weather Underground. Yet it is hard to pinpoint what the political slant behind this tale of a woman and a child is. ‘I started with two Americans fleeing, and coming to a place that they do not understand,’ explains Carey. ‘They think they have come to the end of the earth, whereas they have come to the centre of someone else’s earth. The politics of that time is something I knew about, so I thought: Okay, that’s why they are there. I didn’t want the woman to be privileged, to come from the world of fantasy politics. I’m sympathetic to the SDS, and many of my American friends were in it, but the bombers generally were a splenetic reaction by rich, privileged people who couldn’t get what they wanted by talking to each other.

‘People have mentioned a satirical edge to the book,’ he says. ‘That’s probably true, I’m a sarcastic person. But for me, I’m just imagining how it would really be. Including silly Phil the lawyer with his zoot suit. I’m pissing myself about it, but I’m serious about it too. I don’t really distinguish, I’m just trying to tell the story.’

Carey has spoken about the prolonged sequences of daydreaming that dragged him back to Australia for ‘His Illegal Self’. In particular, it is a return to the commune that featured in his first novel (‘Bliss’, 1974) and to the actual commune in Yandina, Queensland he lived in while writing it. I wonder about the balance in his writing between this inspired hallucination and the process of research and mapping out story and character. ‘The daydreaming aspect is wishing imaginatively to inhabit an environment and being staggered by what I can remember,’ he says. ‘The community in “His Illegal Self” is not like any that I knew but the landscape is. And, yes, in writing this book I was inhabiting these things from the past. It isn’t going to make the book, and it is really only the territory in which it takes place, but it is pleasant.

‘I had the same place in my mind for “Bliss” and “His Illegal Self”. But let me give you an example of the way in which these books are written and the way in which “His Illegal Self” doesn’t represent my views of that community. There is a scene involving a cat, which is sort of important. Somebody did have a cat at Yandina. So we had the meeting: “We’re not meant to have cats.” In the end nothing is done, the cat stays. And that’s how life went on: benign, kind and hopeless. The point of view of the woman who wants to get rid of the cat, who some American reviewers have called a fascist, is mine. Because I think we were too easy with ourselves about things like that. If you are not going to have a cat, get rid of it.’

For a moment, Carey is back in the commune meeting room, voting on whether to kill a cat. Distracted, he doesn’t even shudder when asked if he has an idea for his next novel, a question that’s a close sibling of ‘Where do you get your stories from?’. Instead he smiles, thinking of the obvious pleasure he derives from the creative process. ‘I have a little idea, but then you’ve got to go out and make things hit you,’ he says. ‘If I’ve got one idea, and I can see a line of inquiry, then I launch into it. It’s thrilling; you are taken beyond yourself to places you never knew before. Sometimes you are almost ill with pleasure and fear. It’s a privilege to move beyond yourself into things you didn’t even dream. And that is the huge pleasure, for me, of writing.’

‘His Illegal Self’ is published by Faber at £16.99.