Notes from Underground.('His Illegal Self' and 'My Revolutions')(Book review)

Ever since the attack on the World Trade Center, we have all heard a lot about "the Professor," the chilling anarchist in Conrad's "The Secret Agent," who walks around with a bomb strapped to himself and one hand on the detonator. Far more attention has been paid to this ruthless fanatic--unsuggestively reprised by Cormac McCarthy as Anton Chigurh, in "No Country for Old Men"--than to Verloc, the harried, soft, pithless entity who is the novel's actual protagonist. But Verloc is more interesting than the Professor because he is so much less confident. The Professor is an arrow; Verloc is a target, helplessly bearing the gouges of the various assaults made on him. He works for the anarchists, but he also works against them, as a double agent; he is despised by his handler at the embassy, and feels bullied into following the diplomat's order to blow up the Greenwich Observatory, a job that he fatally bungles; he is a minor London shopkeeper, who sells pornography under the table; he moves through his shabby domestic existence sluggishly, as if under water.

Verloc is vivid because he is trapped--"with his features swollen and an air of being drugged." The sticky web of accident has caught him. But recent American fiction dealing with Islamic terrorists has shown more interest in the fanatic than in the failure, in resolution than in irresolution, and a certain human complexity has been sacrificed. Two new novels, Peter Carey's "His Illegal Self" (Knopf; $24.95) and Hari Kunzru's "My Revolutions" (Dutton; $25.95), both set in the radical underground of late-sixties and early-seventies agitation, have at their centers characters who find themselves politically trapped. Neither is by an American--Carey is Australian and Kunzru British--and neither is about Islamic terrorists, though both can perhaps be understood as necessary novelistic transferences, displacements from contemporary ideological radicalism. The novels share an interest in the slow rotting of the ideological harvest, and in the way that eventual political failure was birthed by the very exaggeration of political success. "What would freedom look like?" is the recurrent question of Kunzru's book, and the author seems to half enjoy, half lament the inability of any of the agitators and terrorists in the novel to provide a convincing answer.

Carey's often beautiful novel, one of his best recent works, has the bruising tang of all his fiction, in which crooked colloquialism (frequently Australian vernacular), and poetic formality combine. The result is brilliantly vital: the world bulges out of the sentences. A man is described as "not hurrying, but prancy in bare feet." A boy feels "squiffy in the stomach." A beat-up car has a "busted sunken boneless backseat."An Upper East Side matron brings back to her apartment her "powdery friends from the English-Speaking Union." An Australian shack has a veranda "where bats hung like broken rags." When the novel's heroine is unhappy, her mouth turns down: "She didn't know he saw that, the way the whole of her lower face could lose its bones."

One of the secrets of Carey's capabilities as a storyteller is a serious commitment to what is known as free indirect style, or the bending of third-person narrative around the viewpoint of the character who is being described. The sentences above are written in the implied voice of a little boy: it is he who feels squiffy, he who finds his grandmother's friends powdery, he who thinks that a downturned mouth looks as if it had lost its bones. A child is here decoding the universe, and the novelist expects the reader to decode that child's inventive solutions. It is characteristic of Carey to throw us into the depths of his sentences and let us swim for ourselves. On the second page of his novel, we encounter this:

Grandma Selkirk was what they call an Upper East Side woman--cheekbones, tailored gray hair--but that was not what she called herself. I am the last bohemian, she liked to say, to the boy, particularly, meaning that no one told her what to do, at least not since Pa Selkirk had thrown the Buddha out the window and gone to live with the Poison Dwarf.

We know next to nothing about the boy or his grandmother, and absolutely nothing about why a Buddha was thrown out the window or who the Poison Dwarf is--but we are caught by a voice, and held for the next two hundred pages.

The boy is Che Selkirk, given his provoking first name by his privileged, radical parents, members of S.D.S., who have disappeared into the underground and are among America's most wanted domestic terrorists. He is almost eight in 1972, when the novel opens, has never known his father, and has not seen his mother, Susan Selkirk, since he was two. The formidable Grandma Selkirk, who insists on calling him Jay, has been raising him, and has secured for her grandson the "Victorian" consolations of bourgeois comfort in Manhattan and a summer house in upstate New York, on Kenoza Lake: "It would always be summer, in his memory, the roadsides dense with goldenrod and the women from the village coming to steal the white hydrangeas just like their mothers stole before them. The geese would be heading up to Canada and the Boeings spinning their white contrails across the cold blue sky--loneliness and hope, expanding like paper flowers in water."