SALON

Thursday, Jan 11, 2001 7:18 PM UTC

“True History of the Kelly Gang” by Peter Carey

A legendary Australian outlaw relates his adventures in this rousing tale of injustice and defiance from the prizewinning author of "Oscar and Lucinda."

By

Topics: Peter Carey, Books,

Few novelists are more artistically protean than the Australian-born Peter Carey, who has written fantasy (“The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith”), domestic realism (“Bliss”), picaresque adventure (“Illywacker”) and suburban gothic (“The Tax Inspector”), as well as the more or less uncategorizable Booker Prize-winning “Oscar and Lucinda.” So anyone who fell in love with his last novel, the Dickensian “Jack Maggs,” shouldn’t reach for the new one, “True History of the Kelly Gang,” expecting more of the same. This time around, Carey has written a western, although one thing “True History” does share with all his other books is its Australian heart.

“True History” presents itself as a collection of autobiographical documents, mostly written by Ned Kelly, a legendary outlaw who, with his brother and two friends, briefly had the run of northeast Victoria and a chunk of New South Wales at the end of the 19th century. Ned addresses his story to his daughter, whom he was never to meet, so that she will not have to know “what it is to be raised on lies and silences.” The peculiar style Carey uses to re-create Ned’s voice is crude without the sacrifice of eloquence; it comes across as the heartfelt expression of an intelligent, reflective but indifferently educated man. A sample: “Your grandfather were a quiet and secret man he had been ripped from his home in Tipperary and transported to the prisons of Van Diemen’s Land I do not know what was done to him he never spoke of it.” It takes a page or two to adjust to the way the sentences run together, but only that long, and there’s something organic to the way they’re compounded, as if they were measured in ideas and breath, not the more pedestrian notion of “complete thoughts.”

“I wished only to be a citizen,” writes Ned, and the bulk of the book consists of how circumstances drove him inexorably toward bushranging despite his preference for the quiet life of a farmer. As the son of a former convict and — just as bad, it seems in the eyes of the local police — of Irish descent, Ned occupied a social stratum so low only the Aborigines were worse off. (“True History of the Kelly Gang” serves as yet another reminder of why so many of the world’s people hate the British.) He wasn’t so much born to lose as forced to, and conspired against by one malevolent constable, “squatter” (slang for landlord) and magistrate after another (not to mention a few no-good relatives), he finds his best-laid plans to earn a quiet, modest living on a piece of creek land with his widowed mother and siblings going awry again and again.

Life in the colony makes failings out of Ned’s virtues: his devotion to his proud but romantically unwise ma; his refusal to become that creature the Irish despise most, an informer; his willingness to believe, despite a life of betrayals, that people can be trusted. He finds a few spots of ferocious loyalty and love in his life, but not as many as he so clearly deserves, and eventually he winds up on the lam, shooting a policeman and becoming, for a few glorious months, the hero of the people. They hide and feed and otherwise support Ned and his “gang” because “we was them and they was us and we had showed the world what convict blood could do. We proved there were no taint we was of true bone blood and beauty born,” and because “they was Australians they knew full well the terror of the unyielding law the historic memory of UNFAIRNESS were in their blood.”

Australians haven’t forgotten him either; in his homeland the real Ned Kelly became a legend who is, as the novel’s publisher puts it, “part Jesse James, part Nat Turner” (although he was also slandered as thuggish brute). But there’s nothing particularly revisionist about Carey’s “western,” at least not in the way of so many contemporary American novels that try to pry the romantic facade from the history of our frontier. “True History” feels raw, passionate and unqualified, and yet it’s also surprisingly free of romanticism. Perhaps that’s because Carey’s describing a man who tried to be a rugged individualist, only to find his final glory in the embrace of the class that he ultimately found inescapable. This novel is a cry out against a history of crushing injustice.

So for all that it resembles an American western, “True History” is actually the opposite, for revisionist or not, a western is always the story of a man or men, while this is the story of a people. With his endlessly interesting and unpredictable ingenuity, Carey continues to show readers that there’s an Australian way to tell every story, and by the time he’s done telling it, we see even the most familiar tales in a whole new light.

Laura Miller

Laura Miller is a senior writer for Salon. She is the author of "The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia" and has a Web site, magiciansbook.com. More Laura Miller.

Next Article

Related Stories

More Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

The week in 10 pics

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11
  • Lisa Montgomery embraces her nephew Thursday after a tornado tore apart her home in Cleburne, Texas. The twister killed six people and destroyed entire swaths of the North Texas town.
    Credit: AP/LM Otero

  • Jack McMahon, the defense attorney for abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, speaks outside the Criminal Justice Center in Philadelphia Tuesday. His client was convicted of killing three babies in his clinic, and will serve multiple life sentences.
    Credit: AP/Matt Rourke

  • A photo taken Monday captures Vice President Joe Biden's response to a Milwaukee second-grader's innovative proposal to end America's epidemic of gun violence. This guy!
    Credit: AP/Jenny Aicher

  • Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., flanked by a grouper-eyed Michele Bachmann, addresses the IRS' admission that it targeted Tea Party groups in advance of the 2012 election. In an op-ed for CNN Thursday, the Kentucky senator slammed the president for his faux outrage.
    Credit: AP/Molly Riley

  • Ousted IRS chief Steven Miller is sworn in on Capitol Hill Friday. Miller testified before the House Ways and Means Committee on the extra scrutiny the agency gave conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.
    Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite

  • Attorney General Eric Holder pauses as he testifies on Capitol Hill before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday. Holder is under fire, among other things, for the Justice Department's gathering of phone records at the Associated Press.
    Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster

  • O.J. Simpson sits during an evidentiary hearing at Clark County District Court in Las Vegas, Nev., Thursday. Simpson, who is currently serving a nine-to-33-year sentence in state prison for armed robbery and kidnapping, is using a writ of habeas corpus to seek a new trial.
    Credit: AP/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Jeff Scheid

  • Major Tom to ground control: On Sunday astronaut Chris Hadfield recorded the first music video from space, a cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity."
    Credit: AP/NASA/Chris Hadfield

  • When it rains it pours. President Barack Obama speaks during a news conference Thursday with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, inexplicably inspiring an #umbrellagate Twitter meme.
    Credit: AP/Jacquelyn Martin

  • A smoke plume rises high above a road block at the intersection of County A and Ross Road east of Solon Springs, Wis., Tuesday. No injuries were reported, but the the wildfire caused evacuations across northwestern Wisconsin.
    Credit: AP/The Duluth News-Tribune/Clint Austin

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11

Related Videos

Comments

 0 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

follow salon

Most Read

Popular on Reddit

links from salon.com

From Around the Web

Presented by Scribol
listener_new_rect The Listener: So long, Sookie Stackhouse

Recommendations