Peter Carey

“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.

The novel is set in the early 1980s. Michael is a burnt-out Australian painter who “had once been as famous as a painter could expect to be in his own backyard.” A bad divorce and the shifting styles of the art world have cast him onto hard times. Plus, there’s the little matter of the prison stint he did after being caught trying to steal back the paintings his ex-wife won in the divorce settlement. And the restraining order. Now he’s reduced to serving as unpaid caretaker in a borrowed cabin outside a small, swampy, buggy Australian town.

Michael doesn’t have much, but he does have Hugh, either his burden (if you ask Michael) or his invaluable dogsbody (if you ask Hugh). What’s wrong with Hugh isn’t quite clear — at times he seems almost autistic, at others merely simple-minded — but he can’t take care of himself, and he has an unfortunate tendency to get violent when enraged or overwhelmed. This is a very unfortunate tendency, considering that Hugh is 6-foot-3 and 225 pounds. His specialty is snapping people’s little fingers. The novel is told in alternating first-person chapters by each brother, Michael’s full of fury and ravings against “the other team, the market, the rich guys, the ones who decided what was art and what was not” and Hugh’s a milange of stray memories, obsessive fears, shrewd insights and Joycean fancies (“He was a licky dog”).

Into the brothers’ lives and through the country mud, balanced on a pair of Manolo Blahniks, walks Marlene Leibovitz, the wife of the son of the late Jacques Leibovitz, a great modernist painter. Since Marlene’s husband can’t stand the sight of his father’s work, she has assumed his droit moral, the legally inherited right to authenticate the works of Jacques. The task is a tricky one, since after Jacques’ death, his wife made off with dozens of unfinished and abandoned works, “completed” them in her own mediocre hand, and tried to pass them off as the real thing. The world of “Theft” is full of bogus Leibovitzes.

Marlene seems to genuinely care for Michael and to believe that his current work is important, but like a lot of the Leibovitz paintings out there, she’s not what she seems to be. Michael, who — like Marlene, he will eventually discover — grew up in the middle of the Australian nowhere, can’t help admiring and identifying with the way that she’s completely re-created herself as an art world player. Hugh likes the fact that she’s read his favorite book, “The Magic Pudding,” twice. Newly inspired, Michael has just completed a series of paintings, crowned by a “beautiful seven-foot-high monster” painted in “greens so fucking dark, satanic, black holes that could suck your heart out of your chest.” Marlene resolves to revive his career and the results take them to Sydney, Tokyo and, finally, New York.

The particular treasures offered by “Theft” are the novel’s window into the crass, Byzantine workings of the art market and Michael’s semidemonic, but palpably authentic, artistic passion. There are lots of novels that rhapsodize about great paintings, but this one makes you feel the tactile, unprettyfied glory of painting. Michael’s patron offers him the use of a riverside studio complete with ample natural light and a luxe coachwood floor, and as soon as the man is out the door, Michael puts down a floor of sheetrock and strings banks of incandescent floodlights from the expensively arched roof; these are the conditions a real painter (as opposed to a lifestyle painter, like the patron) needs to work.

Novelists with crushes on Vermeer might squander their precious lyricism on descriptions of pictures, but Carey knows that what drives painters mad with lust is the paint itself. When Michael gets his hands on the good stuff, the prose almost throbs. He takes these elemental substances and makes canvasses “layered like licorice allsorts, sedimentary rocks, green, black, gorgeous yellow, sparkling mica, fool’s gold they call it … Then I invaded ultramarine blue with a force of sweet burnt umber, thus giving birth to a new black as warm as a winter blanket for a twenty-thousand-dollar horse, and then I stained my cotton duck with a very fucking diluted dioxane purple, so watered-down it was a pearly grey, a secret skin.”

Is Michael a “great” painter? That’s the real mystery at the center of “Theft.” In the end, the novel leaves us unsure if Marlene has stolen away the possibility that he’ll ever know the truth about this, or freed him from the corrosive desire to know it. Still, I came away thinking that he was, if only because his creator does this very hard thing — conveying the genius of one art form in another — so masterfully.