His Illegal Self, by Peter Carey

In 1966 Che's father burned his draft card. His mother, a Harvard undergraduate, went underground after taking part in a bank robbery. Che hasn't seen his radical parents since he was a baby. Now eight and renamed Jay, he lives with his wealthy grandmother in Park Avenue.

Once he had another mother, a scholarship girl nicknamed "Dial" for the dialectic which becomes her life, who was paid to take care of him and collude in the lies his grandmother used to keep his real mother at university. "Harvard was not ready for the first nursing mother to attend classes." Years later Dial, though tangled up herself with the illegal activities of the Left, thinks she escaped her working-class and hippie past by securing a position as professor. Then she's asked to bring Che to see his mother. This favour leads her and the boy from New York to Philadelphia to Seattle and, finally, the Australian bush.

Peter Carey tears away the romance and ridicule which clouds our vision of Sixties and Seventies counter-culture in a novel which begins as a bitter thriller, with drug addicts in Greyhound bus stations, then turns into a version of Eden when Dial is accepted by hippies living on the edge of a rainforest in Queensland. These stories are told and retold through Che and Dial. Each has two names and several identities – straight and hippie, iconic and real – to match the worlds they journey through.

If this seems a story from our time, not 40 years ago, it is because Carey writes with beauty, audacity and wit about this lost generation of idealists and ideologues. Carey's vision of the protesters and dropouts seems to change as the book goes on. At the beginning he portrays American radicals as humourless, naive and even cruel; only occasionally does he mention the Vietnam War and the draft. But the Queensland hippies, for all their chaos, have humanity and community.

Carey takes risks with credibility. Given Dial's intelligence, her knowledge of the left and her prospects, it is hard to believe she would be tricked into kidnapping the boy and incriminate herself so completely that she has to go into hiding.

Yet, in the end, this isn't about the movement or Vietnam or hippies, but the odd love between Dial and the boy she nurtured and stole, a relationship more radical and life-changing than any of the startling events of this novel. Dial loses her job, her money and her freedom. Even the barriers she has built against intimacy come down when she gives herself to the boy. Che must abandon his fantasy of real parents in favour of a flawed goddess and a feral hippie who love him "not in a temperate adult way but in a good way, nonetheless".