A RICH young boy is raised in isolated privilege by his New York grandmother in 1972. Grandpa is squirreled away with his fancy woman somewhere, and the boy's parents are political outlaws, radical Harvard students on the run.

Young Che dreams of his mother, then a woman fitting his image of her arrives. This woman, who calls herself Dial (from dialectic), whisks him away, kidnaps him more or less, apparently as a favour to the real mother, but for reasons which soon become confused. Here the plot wobbles: why would a successful young academic with a new job to go to act in this way?

Leaving the loving but cloistered isolation of life with his grandmother, Che swaps one form of imprisonment for another. Dial takes him on the run to Australia, where he becomes an outlaw of a kind himself, living in a hostile hippie community in the impenetrable jungle.

If Carey's purpose can seem as thick and difficult as that jungle, His Illegal Self is a beautifully written book, and Che's narration, told from a position of childhood half-understanding, is moving and convincing. This really does read like a book told by a child.

The narrative has suggestions of William Faulkner, and Carey is an admirer of As I Lay Dying.

Not easy, sometimes frustrating, yet the opaque difficulties of this novel somehow make it worth the effort, and fit the subject.