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More reviews by Peter Gordon
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The True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey
As everyone must surely know by now, PETER CAREY's THE TRUE HISTORY OF THE KELLY GANG has won the 2001 Booker Prize. That presumably says all that needs to be said, so why review it?
Simply, because in spite of the highbrow award it has just won, THE TRUE HISTORY OF THE KELLY GANG -- like many of Carey's books -- is a rippin' good yarn populated with interesting and eccentric Australian characters. Yes, it's stimulating, but you can read it down by the pool as well. (If you don't believe me, consider the rumour that THE TRUE HISTORY OF THE KELLY GANG will be a movie with Brad Pitt and Nicole Kidman.)
Ned Kelly, for those of you who are not -- as I wasn't -- quite up on your Australian cultural iconography, is an Australian folk-hero, often compared with Jesse James. This is not quite a "Western", though: there is far too much ethnic and class consciousness for that. Ned Kelly becomes an outlaw because of the oppression and injustice of his social betters.
THE TRUE HISTORY OF THE KELLY GANG lies on the boundary of fiction and history. This is, in general, pretty dangerous territory. This is not "historical fiction" where people who might have existed interact with historical figures; this is more like a "novelization" of history.
Carey pulls it off, however, as least for those of us who didn't really know the story of Ned Kelly prior to reading the book; if there were historical fabrications, they passed me by.A 'True History' after all
I was intrigued enough by the story to do some research -- and for those interested, there is an excellent Ned Kelly Website.
One of the most remarkable achievements of the book is the language, written in a robust, if highly ungrammatical and colloquial style, characterized by a certain lack of punctuation, leaving one rather breathless at the end of each paragraph.
I lost my own father at 12 yr. of age, the book starts out, and know what it is to be raised on lies and silences my dear daughter you are presently too young to understand you're 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."Cute," was my first reaction, followed by a recognition of how effectively this set the tone and finally by admiration that the author could keep it up with no apparent inconsistencies for nigh on 350 pages.
What floored me was finding actual writing of Kelly's in an almost identical style: the 56-page Jerilderie Letter which apparently served as the inspiration for the book.
"I was compelled to shoot them, or lie down and let them shoot me it would be wilful murder if they packed our remains in, shattered into a mass of gore to Mansfield, they would have got great praise and credit as well as promotion but I am reconed a horrid brute because I had not been cowardly enough to lie down for them under such trying insults to my people certainly their wives and children are to be pitied but they must remember those men came into the bush with the intention of scattering of me and my brother all over the bush..." from Kelly's Jerilderie Letter (quoted in www.ironoutlaw.com)
The author as actor
Carey doesn't so much write about Ned Kelley as interpret him, much as an as actor might. Carey does it through prose rather than speech, but the prose is almost audible.
Whatever one may think about THE TRUE HISTORY OF THE KELLY GANG as a work of literature, or indeed whether it is fiction at all, Carey has succeeded in performing the literary equivalent of cloning a dead human of the 19th century from a piece of DNA.
One man's freedom fighter
Good fiction should illuminate, if not explicitly educate, and so after one has enjoyed the story and marvelled at the technical mastery of the writing, one must also stop and ask whether this book is more than just a page-turning tale of Australian desperadoes.
Ned Kelly was and still is a controversial character. Needless to say, he comes off rather well here: sympathetic, honorable and loyal. Carey himself has called Ned Kelley not so much a Jesse james, but "Australia's Thomas Jefferson" (a claim which, to an American, seems rather far off the mark), and many Australians consider him a hero for battling colonial oppression and bigotry.
Maybe he was, but I found it hard, in light of the current "War on Terrorism", to read THE TRUE HISTORY OF THE KELLY GANG, and not recall the oft-repeated statement that "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter" ... and vice-versa.
Which was Ned Kelley? I don't know. Does it matter? Sure, because the world looks awfully confusing right now, and it can be hard to know which are the good guys and which are the bad guys in several of the world's conflicts.
I personally find it curious to have an outlaw quite so high up in the national pantheon of heroes. He was certainly exciting and charismatic for people that didn't get much of either. But the truth is that he was at most only fighting for kith and kin -- he made no serious attempt to root out injustice in general.
I don't know what PETER CAREY had in mind. But Ned Kelley does not emerge from this book larger than life; on the contrary, one is left with a sense of a waste.
THE TRUE HISTORY OF THE KELLY GANG helps remind us how fine the line between good and evil can be, and how it can be difficult to know when one has crossed over.
Peter Gordon
22/10/2001
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Peter Gordon is editor of The Asian Review of Books. |
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