Quelques lignes trouvées "par hasard" au sujet de ce que nous avions dit dans la première lettre, sur les persécutions anti-communautés en 1972...

The humour cuts both ways. While the commune members, partly thanks to the mess in Vietnam, harbour an unthinking anti-American prejudice, Dial is equally ignorant of the realities of Australian life. “She had never heard of Cedar Bay, helicopter raids and arson committed by Queensland police. She did not know there was a Queensland Health Act which permitted police to search her house without a warrant.” In fact, she does not even know about the Australian presence in Vietnam itself. It is the sort of mutual cultural incomprehension that Carey has explored before to good effect - most spectacularly, in the tensions between Efica and Voorstand in The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith - but here, as there, the socio-political context exists primarily to give density and shape to a private quest.

Elizabeth Lowry

Peter Carey

HIS ILLEGAL SELF

272pp. Faber. £16.99.

978 0 571 23151 5

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article3363716.ece