Peter Carey, who has a new novel titled His Illegal Self out next month, is profiled in "The Guardian" by Nicolas Wroe.
In His Illegal Self there are mentions of both Jack London's White Fang and Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, but he "didn't officially get" Huck Finn until he heard Garrison Keillor read it on tape. "It can come over quite corny on the page, but Keillor's is a lovely performance that gets through all that and actually unlocked something for me, which is a real gift. It would have been a shame to go through life not getting Huck Finn."And this ad-hoc negotiation between cultures seems to have been the guiding spirit of his career. Although he set out on this latest novel with the new approach of his vision of the woman and a boy, he says that, in hindsight, "all my books somehow come back to the colonial situation of one country and another country. It is true of Illywhacker, of Oscar and Lucinda and Jack Maggs. Tristan Smith is absolutely about that and so is The Kelly Gang, which throws in Ireland as well."
