True History of the Kelly Gang

In True History of the Kelly Gang Peter Carey returns to the harsh, brutal world of Australian history, so brilliantly evoked in earlier novels such as Illywhacker and Oscar and Lucinda. Set in the desolate settler communities north of Melbourne in the late 19th century, the novel is told in the form of a journal, written by the famous outlaw and "bushranger" Ned Kelly, to a daughter he will never see. As Kelly explains, "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 lies may I burn in hell if I speak false".

The salty, colloquial, unpunctuated style of Kelly's journal is reproduced with great skill, as Carey recounts the outlaw's early life with a cross-dressing, Irish immigrant sheep worker, and a beautiful but headstrong mother, always on the wrong side of the law. Inadvertently causing the arrest and death of his father, Ned realises that "there were a drought and nothing flourishing there but misery I were the oldest son I thought it time to earn my place", a decision that ultimately leads him into conflict with the law, and to form the notorious Kelly Gang.

The novel contains some wonderfully lyrical and deeply moving moments, as Ned struggles to articulate the harsh injustice of the world around him, but some readers might find Carey's epistolary style rather restrictive and colourless after the first 100 pages, and lacking in the imaginative excitement of Carey's earlier novels. --Jerry Brotton

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Masterful portrayal of the social conditions of the time - Rated
I don't know enough about the history of Ned Kelly to comment on the historical accuracy of the events, though I gather that the novel is quite well researched. What makes the book such an enjoyable read though is the remarkable portrayal of life in colonial Australia. You get a visceral sense of how it might have felt to be poor in the dog-eat-dog world of Ned Kelly's time, of the desperate struggle to conquer the Australian bush, of the constant oppression by authorities for whom laws rarely provide an effective check on power, of the solidarity of human beings brought together by their shared trials and tribulations. Carey has managed to convey a sense of this era in a way that few writers are able to. It is a portrait of social conditions that can be compared to the novels of Charles Dickens.

work of genius - Rated
This is a truly wonderful book. The sense of place and the evocation of the era are fabulous. It's an adventure story and a love story. Above all, the absolutely incredible narrative voice make this a hilarious and also moving read.

An engaging style that brings Kelly to life - Rated
This is an absorbing book, written as a sequence of letters supposedly penned by Kelly himself - his attempt to explain his life and death to a daughter he will not live to see. Carey has written the book without punctuation in a conversational style. I quickly got used to this and found that the technique gave weight and realism to the story. Carey tells us about the paper used for each set of letters and we can imagine Kelly coming across some scraps on which he can continue his story - it is a charming touch.

Although this is a fictional work, it is so well-written and Carey's mode of writing is so persuasive that it seems entirely plausible that Ned Kelly is speaking to us from beyond the grave. I enjoyed it enormously - it is imaginative, clever and very entertaining.

The song of Australia - Rated
Mr Carey's novel relates the epic life of Ned Kelly in Australia in the second half of the 19th century. The text comes in the form of 13 parcels of varying length (from 7 to 50 pages). Sometimes they are sheets of National Bank or Bank of New South Wales letterhead, a cloth booklet, octavo pages, open envelopes providing space for text, a pocket diary or the reverse side of advertising fliers. They cover Ned's adventurous life until the manuscript abruptly terminates when he was 26 years old and it is told in a tone so wild and passionate that the reader often believes that the bushranger is speaking to him from the grave! It is a breathtaking account of an existence marked by a cascade of events where Ned is in turn a reformer, a criminal, a horse thief, a farmer, a bushranger and an orphan. Ned's voice is very convincing, continually creating new surprises on every page despite the plainness of his language, or rather perhaps because of it. Actually his uneducated voice is very much part of the originality of Mr Carey's novel.
The critics have ranked Mr Carey next to Charles Dickens and Lawrence Sterne - very rightly so, in my opinion.

Peter Carey's novel attempts to find Ned Kelly's voice - Rated
I suspect for many Americans their first introduction to the legend of Ned Kelly was when the Australian icon of his helmet was incorporated into the opening ceremonies of the 2000 Sydney Olympics. Of course there are those who knew of Kelly from Tony Richardson's 1970 film "Ned Kelly," where Mick Jagger played the title role, or even the 1993 film "Reckless Kelly" with Yahoo, which updated the Kelly legend, for lack of a better word, to the present. That idea that Kelly is the Robin Hood of Australia is enough of a touchstone for most to understand Kelly's importance to the Australian psyche, but there are those who consider him to be nothing more than a glorified outlaw, more like Jesse James than Robin Hood. Significantly, those views break down all ethnic lines, with Irish-Australians seeing the hero and Anglo-Australians insisting on the villain. Gregor Jordan's 2003 film "Ned Kelly," based on Robert Drewe's "Our Sunshine" and starring well known Australian actors Heath Ledger, Geoffrey Rush and Naomi Watts will renew interest in the true story and may well lead viewers to this volume.

Peter Carey's "True History of the Kelly Gang" is, despite the title a fictional novel which won the Booker Prize in 2001. The novel is inspired in part by Sidney Nolan's famous series of paintings of Ned Kelly and is told in a first person narrative style that is based on Kelly's own "Jerilderie Letter," which provided his version of the events that led to him being an outlaw with a 8,000 pound reward on his head, the largest in the world up to that time. The conceit is that Kelly has written these words, intended them to be read by a daughter who was born and raised in California, trying to explain his life.

Carey's book is not a substitute for the true history it purports to be, including people and events that are not part of the historical record (to wit, Mary and the baby), as he attempts to connect the dots of Ned Kelly's life. Ultimately this is a character study wherein Carey emphasizes Kelly's strong Irish-Australian identity, his fierce loyalty to family and friends, and his native wit and inherent shrewdness. We know from the letters he dictated and the transcript of his trial that Kelly was intelligent and Carey plays that up throughout the book, because essentially what is happening here is that he is justifying the icon image of Kelly that exists in the popular mind of Australia. At the same time there is humanizing, for Kelly has a strong attachment to his mother and forges a new relationship with his brother Dan as the Kelly Gang heads towards its fate. He also hates the English as much as they hate them, which is no mean feat. In the end what you get out of this book is not Ned Kelly's story but rather his voice, although its authenticity is, of course, open to debate.

Ultimately "True History of the Kelly Gang" is not meant as an introduction to the story of Ned Kelly. Jordan's film is out on DVD now so it can serve that function as others as it did for me. Carey will give us more of a notion of what Kelly might have been thinking and certainly a more complete picture of the world in which Kelly lived and died. The climax of this book is not the battle at Glenrowan but a conversation with a school teacher named Curnow, who is able to raise questions that go beyond the legal points on which Kelly's trial, convinction, and execution turned. This is a discussion held through the prism of history and needs to be read in that light and reaffirms once again the cultural axiom "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."