True History of the Kelly Gang: A Novel

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.

Initially unaware that both books were short-listed for the Booker in 2001, I read True History of the Kelly Gang shortly after finishing McEwan's Atonement. I find it interesting that the role of the author is at such issue in both books. Thankfully, the two authors take markedly different approaches.Carey's novel is apparently a fictional enlargement of something actually written by Ned Kelly, a notorious nineteenth century Australian outlaw. For those whose first encounter with Ned Kelly, like my own, is through this book, it appears that Ned Kelly is an historical figure whose particular story is deeply embedded in the frontier foundation mythology of Australia. For Americans, a parallel would be Jesse James.Like many myths that gain traction, Kelly's story is great; Carey chose wonderful material to work with. Much of this (quasi-epistolary) novel is written in the first person, so Carey takes great pains with the vernacular. I can't vouch for the authenticity but it certainly rings true. And Carey clearly sympathizes with his subject, making the outlaw's youthful mistreatment at the hands of the local authorities look like easy justification for what follows. But the real strength of the myth stems from the fact that Kelly was always doomed. And, indeed, he was hung.As it pertains to my initial comparison, we have the Jerilderie Letter which was actually written by Ned Kelly but will certainly have been subjective. Then we have Thomas Curnow, a character in the book who makes off with Kelly's fictional manuscript. That it appears at all (fictionally, of course) indicates that he "published" it, which suggests he could have edited it. And, of course, we have Peter Carey with the pen. So, at least three layers lie between the events of this novel and the actual events of Kelly's life.There is plenty else at work here but, like Atonement, Carey's novel seems to imply that the search for "fact" in the historical record is a quixotic endeavor.

I think this book was superb storytelling at its finest. The reader enters the world of Ned Kelly and gains an understanding of the conditions that made him into an outlaw legend. Kelly's mother was very young when he was born and thus they almost grew up together and are extremely close, as the story demonstrates. However it is the cultural social structure of Australia that is fascinating and helps the reader understand the creation of such an outlaw. Australia was a prison colony at a time when England was constantly suppressing the Irish people. Thus many poor rebellious Irishmen and their families came to Australia where English protestant wardens oversaw the pioneer areas, taking sides with the powerful landowning English protestant squatters and suppressing the Irish. Poverty and suppression create certain mental and social conditions that were seen in Australia, in Ireland, and among African Americans in the Southern states. Justice is so elusive when it lies in the hands of the powerful that those without power have to create their own local home-grown justice. Such is the case with Ned Kelly and his family. The narrative shows the development of Ned Kelly's character step by step as he encounters a world where the cards are stacked against him and his people. Carey uses a sentence structure that takes two minutes to master and reflects the way that thoughts cascade from the human mind in clusters of sentences. In this regard he reminded me somewhat of William Faulkner, however Carey is far more easy to read than Faulkner. The characters and events are vivid, the plot moves at a reasonable pace considering the number of years that the story covers. I highly recommend the book. It is full of action but also thoughtful reflection as Kelly is fully cognizant of what he is becoming and the ways he might exploit this notoriety.

I enjoyed this book. Overall it was an interesting idea and well executed, however the style of writing as Ned did start to wear me out by 3/4 of the way through. The reader is asked to believe we're reading authentic accounts and I'm sure the style is representative of how Ned may have written, but to aid the reader it wouldn't have spoiled the prose for me to include commas and speach marks, it became a bit wearing towards the end, but maybe that's just me!

This was not a long or particularly difficult read IMHO but perhaps my expectations were too great. I had hoped to find a more elaborate and sweeping tale of rural Victoria with the transported, displaced Irish at odds with their new surroundings and new world wardens.Instead the author has constructed a stylised autobiographical narrative recounting the well known tale from the limited perspective of the main protagonist. This the author achieves skillfully but at what cost? Charles Dickens this not. It reads like any number of stories found in old Irish "history" books... Perhaps the book will be of greater interest to those who are not already familiar with the Ned Kelly story?...

I bought this book on the strength of its inclusion on the Guardian's best books of all time list. It's very unusual for me to give up on a book but I did not finish this one. I just found that I didn't care about any of the people depicted in the story. There was almost no effort made to flesh out any of the characters. Also, whoever made the decision to replace expletives with the word 'adjectival' turned an unengaging read into a repeatedly irritating one. Just not for me this one.

This is, as Peter Carey so carefully informs us, the True History of the Ned Kelly Gang.And why should it not be? For after all,all we can really know of Ned is that his life, in the telling and retelling, escaped all the confines and fetters that other sought to place on it and became one of Australia's most potent myths.So just who is the Ned Kelly we find in these pages?He is the son of John Kelly, formerly of County Tipperary, Ireland. A man who as Ned puts it.. 'was ripped from the mouth of his own history' , and transported to the living hell of Van Diemen's land. We never know exactly what he suffered there but it is clear that even once free and settled onthe mainland John is a broken man. Resigned to his lot of remaining an Irishman in a vast open-air English prison, contained, controlled and degraded by the traps. Yet, Ned is still and always John's son- in all that John taught him- in the tying of proper knots,in the use of a plane, in the trick of using bush fly and greenhide strips to fish- he remains in Ned like ' .....the dark marks made in the rings of great trees locked forever my daily self.He is also Ellen Kelly's son. Australia has not broken Elllen. For bold reckless defiant Ellen Australia is there for the taking- and the making. And make it she does- with John then Bill then George- in the most concrete and literal of ways. From Ellen emerges a generation of free-born defiant Kelly's - a generation just waiting to make Australia its own.But most of all Ned is Harry Power's apprentice, as Ned always knew. Harry Power the bushranger, the man who teaches Ned that the power ofthe old state, and all its prejudices, hatreds, controls and,divisions, ends where the bush begins. Harry teaches Ned Australia - its gullies, ranges rivers, creeks. This Australia nourishes, cherishes, protects and above all, shelters Ned. It is this unique knowledge of Australia, this new Australian knowledge, that empowers Ned, sets him free to dream up his own destiny. Ned lives the Australian landscape; it makes him and he makes it.The alien land becomes the place of shelter- home.Peter Carey lets the new, unmediated, raw, urgent, defiant voice of this new Australia speak out through Ned Kelly, the bushrangers apprentice.

This book has been frequently reviewed so here are just a few quick thoughts.I was alarmed at the sight of sentences with no grammar but adapted to it after a few pages. The use of 'adjectival' does grate but it just shows how often the 'f' word gets used in literature so coped with it in the end.Vivid description of the outback and the precariousness of life in the face of the weather, illness, childbirth and hunger. Kelly was at the bottom of this food chain but is sympathetically portrayed; this is somewhat inevitable as 'he' is writing it. As Mr Carey puts it, 'It is history Mr Kelly it should always be a little rough that way we know it is the truth'. A splendid read.