“His Illegal Self” by Peter Carey

 Peter Carey is an Australian writer who has won 2 Booker prizes. People on the Goodreads site said that this was definitely not one of his better works and I agree. I hated most of the book because it was vaguely written from the point of view of an 8 year old, and the muddle was increased by the use of Australian idioms. The book was presumably about 1970’s radicals in the US, but quickly became a novel about a kidnapped boy in an Australian hippy colony. I very much enjoyed the few snippets of the boy’s life as an adult, but there were hardly any of these. It’s as if the author used this book to recall the magic of his own childhood, with the attendant cloudiness of memory.

Oriel.