True History of the Kelly Gang: A Novel
by Peter Carey
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Book Summary Information
Author: Peter CareyEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2001-12-04
ISBN: 0375724672
Number of pages: 384
Publisher: Vintage
Book Reviews of True History of the Kelly Gang: A Novel
Book Review: In His Own Words
Summary: 5 Stars
This is an astounding book, one of those Booker Prize winners that do not leave you wondering about the sanity of the judges. Peter Carey tells the story of Ned Kelly, a nineteenth-century Australian outlaw and folk-hero, ostensibly in his own words. And what words those are! Carey sets up the voice in the opening sentence: "I lost my own father at 12 yr. of age and know what it is to be raised on lies and silences my dear daughter you are presently too young to understand a word I write but this history is for you and will contain no single lie may I burn in Hell if I speak false."
This punctuation-free run-on style is splendidly vigorous, but it is not entirely Carey's invention. We have one example of Kelly's own voice from the famous "Jerilderie Letter" that he dictated in 1879 in an attempt to justify himself. The first sentence after the salutation establishes the tone for the rest: "In or about the spring of 1870 the ground was very soft a hawker named Mr Gould got his waggon bogged between Greta and my mother's house on the eleven mile creek, the ground was that rotten it would bog a duck in places so Mr. Gould had abandon his waggon for fear of loosing his horses in the spewy ground." So Carey's achievement is less in inventing this style than in extending it for 360 pages, including passages of racy ribaldry that go way beyond the original, such as when Ned as a boy describes his mother's anger: "She cried I would kill the b-----ds if I were a man God help me. She used many rough expressions I will not write them here. It were eff this and ess that and she would blow their adjectival brains out." The initial difficulty of this writing soon passes off, making one's reading something like an exhilarating ride on a wild horse. [It is interesting that fellow-Australian Roger McDonald used a very similar archaic language two years previously for parts of his wonderful MR. DARWIN'S SHOOTER.]
Ned is a very sympathetic character, partly on account of his humor, honesty, and moral scruples, partly because the cards are so clearly stacked against him. Carey presents Queensland in the 1870s as an oligarchy in which a few rich settlers manipulate the laws with the aid of a corrupt police force in order to squeeze the former convicts off the poor plots of land that have been allotted to them. There is one especially egregious scene in which Ned, on his second run-in with the police, is brought to the Commissioner's mansion in Melbourne as a kind of after-dinner entertainment. Approve or not of his means (which eventually involved the killing of policemen), it is hard to question Kelly's fight for equality and easy to see how he could have become a folk hero to an underclass population.
Although I am giving this novel five stars for its brilliance, empathy, and sense of character and place, I must admit to not enjoying it quite as much as I thought I would at the beginning. I think this is because a mere string of events eventually wears thin as the organizing principle of a novel, whether it be Carey's Ned Kelly or Fielding's Tom Jones. I think Carey intended to tie it together with an overarching moral paradox: that as Ned's fight against authority becomes less for himself alone, his means of achieving it escalate in criminality. But this only comes into focus in the last third of the book, but which time it has become a little hard to keep up with all the characters involved, and their often changing allegiances. This slight let-down at the end of the book is something I also felt with Carey's previous Booker winner, OSCAR AND LUCINDA. It is a pity, because he really is a remarkable author.
Summary of True History of the Kelly Gang: A Novel
?I lost my own father at 12 yr. of age and know what it is to be raised on lies and silences my dear daughter you are presently too young to understand a word I write but this history is for you and will contain no single lie may I burn in Hell if I speak false.?In True History of the Kelly Gang, the legendary Ned Kelly speaks for himself, scribbling his narrative on errant scraps of paper in semiliterate but magically descriptive prose as he flees from the police. To his pursuers, Kelly is nothing but a monstrous criminal, a thief and a murderer. To his own people, the lowly class of ordinary Australians, the bushranger is a hero, defying the authority of the English to direct their lives. Indentured by his bootlegger mother to a famous horse thief (who was also her lover), Ned saw his first prison cell at 15 and by the age of 26 had become the most wanted man in the wild colony of Victoria, taking over whole towns and defying the law until he was finally captured and hanged. Here is a classic outlaw tale, made alive by the skill of a great novelist.
"What is it about we Australians, eh?" demands a schoolteacher near the end of Peter Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang. "Do we not have a Jefferson? A Disraeli? Might not we find someone better to admire than a horse-thief and a murderer?" It's the author's sole nod to the contradictory feelings Ned Kelly continues to evoke today, more than a century after his death. A psychopathic killer to some, a crusading folk hero to others, Kelly was a sharpshooting outlaw who eluded a brutal police manhunt for nearly two years. For better or worse, he's now a part of the Australian national myth. Indeed, the opening ceremonies for the Sydney Olympics featured an army of Ned Kellys dancing about to Irish music, which puts him in the symbolic company of both kangaroos and Olivia Newton-John.
What's to be gained from telling this illiterate bushranger's story yet again? Quite a lot, as it turns out. For starters, there is the remarkable vernacular poetry of Carey's narrative voice. Fierce, funny, ungrammatical, steeped in Irish legends and the frontier's moral code, this voice is the novel's great achievement--and perhaps the greatest in Carey's distinguished career. It paints a vivid picture of an Australia where English landowners skim off the country's best territory while government land grants allow the settlers just enough acreage to starve. Cheated, lied to, and persecuted by the authorities at every opportunity, young Kelly retains no faith in his colonial masters. What he does trust, oddly, is the power of words:
And here is the thing about them men they was Australians they knew full well the terror of the unyielding law the historic memory of UNFAIRNESS were in their blood and a man might be a bank clerk or an overseer he might never have been lagged for nothing but still he knew in his heart what it were to be forced to wear the white hood in prison he knew what it were to be lashed for looking a warder in the eye ... so the knowledge of unfairness were deep in his bone and in his marrow.Ned Kelly as literary hero? Strangely enough, that's what he becomes, at least in Carey's rendering. Pouring his heart out in a series of letters to the country at large, Kelly wants nothing more than to be heard--and for the dirt-poor son of an Irish convict, that's an audacious ambition indeed. It's not so surprising, then, that his story continues to speak to Australians. Like all colonial countries, Australia was built at a steep human price, and the memory of all those silenced voices lives on. True History of the Kelly Gang takes its epigraph from Faulkner: "The past is not dead. It is not even past." And like Faulkner's own vast chronicle of dispossession, it's haunted by tragedies as large as history itself. --Mary Park
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