True History Of The Kelly Gang (2001) - Plot & Excerpts
Ever since my high school boyfriend outed me to my youthful music idol as a slavering fangirl, I resolved to be moderate in my attitudes towards artists whose work I admire. Not that I want to downplay my enjoyment of their art, or affect a "too cool for enthusiasm" attitude. But I realized that day at the indie-rock festival how wrong it was that I was uncomfortable speaking face-to-face with this personable, modest woman, all because I had elevated her onto an unreasonable pedestal. I was unable to relate to her as a person, because my veneration of her got in the way, and I was unable to take myself seriously as a fellow musician, because of my veneration for her art. And that, it seemed to me, was a situation worth avoiding in the future.All of which is to say: my long-time resolution is being put to a severe test by the novels of Peter Carey.On the plane back from New Hampshire in October, I was practically hyperventilating over the final pages of Carey's Oscar and Lucinda, having to stop after every chapter and decompress for ten minutes before moving on. On the way back from (appropriately enough) Australia, I devoured the entirety of his My Life as a Fake. And now, having just burned through True History of the Kelly Gang, I have to admit to a certain amount of giddy adulation. Carey's consistent ability to create a strong, vital narrative voice; the sheer creative exuberance of his language; the crippling pathos of his storylines and the way his characters grip your heart and won't let go: reading his work is artistically, mentally and emotionally an utter joy. One of my favorite qualities in a novel is a narrative voice so distinctive that I carry it around with me in my head while going about my business, and Ned Kelly's is a beautiful example. The language and character development here are intimately linked, in a way much more sophisticated than the over-used equation of "writing in dialect" with "uneducated" and/or "stupid." Kelly's unorthodox grammar and punctuation do point, of course, to his lack of formal education, but his style as a whole does so much more, immersing the reader in a wild, hybrid, semi-Biblical landscape that flexes and reels through the narrative, at times becoming so taut that it approaches poetry, yet never seeming unnatural. From his first sentence, Carey had me: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.Even in these scant lines, so much of Kelly is present: his anger and his tenderness, his self-justification and his inescapable ties to past and family. And, of course, his religion, for being poor Irish Catholic "currency" (the nominally free offspring of convicts forcibly settled on Australian soil) is at the heart of Kelly's identity and his actions.One of the many things I love about Carey's novels is how thought-provoking and ambiguous their morality tends to be. From a self-sacrificing love expressed by a gambling addict as a suicidal bet, to a mysterious manuscript whose ownership is so murky that an obsessed collector is left wandering in a morass of half-truth, his characters operate within moral frameworks that are engaged with tradition, yet strikingly unique. Kelly Gang is somewhat less unexpected in its morality than either Oscar & Lucinda or My Life as a Fake - after all, the rise and inevitable fall of the folk-hero outlaw has a well-established canon behind it, from Robin Hood to Jesse James to Don Vito Corleone - but Carey creates a typically nuanced version of the stock character. Rather than taking to crime to alleviate the suffering of the peasantry, or out of dreams of glory, Kelly is born, like all currency, on the edge of the law, and slides gradually over the line under the pressure of poverty, police harassment and family loyalty. At the same time, he is far from a helpless victim of circumstance. Kelly is passionately engaged with his world and his system of honor; the tragedy lies in the radical difference between his understanding of what is honorable, and the definition held by the colonizing English police. As an interesting take on the outlaw archetype, I particularly liked the scene in which Kelly resolves to start robbing banks. Railroaded into hiding after a police-killing that was two-thirds self-defence and one-third accident, Kelly comes to the realization that the only thing capable of protecting him and his brother from the police are the poor inhabitants of the bush, and resolves to win their sympathies by stealing from the relatively rich and giving to the dirt poor. This is a much more practical, yet still sympathetic, picture of the thought process leading to the Robin Hood mode of operation, than the standard assumption of selfless outrage on behalf of the peasantry. I liked it, and I liked Kelly. I also liked the way in which Kelly's genuine affection for, and identification with, the poor folks he wins over with his bank proceeds grows over time, until we get a passage like this one, a last celebratory hurrah on the evening he learns he is a father:These was your own people girl I mean the good people of Greta & Moyhu & Euroa & Benalla who come drifting down the track all through the morn & afternoon & night. How was they told of your birth did the bush telegraph alert them I do not know only that they come the men the women with babies at their breast shivering kiddies with cotton coats their eyes slitted against the wind. They arrived in broken cart & drays they was of that type THE BENALLA ENSIGN named the most frightful class of people they couldnt afford to leave their cows & pigs but they done so 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.Through the dusk & icy starbright night them visitors continued to rise from the earth like winter oats their cold faces was soon pressed through doorway and window and even when the grog wore out they wd. not leave they come to touch my sleeve or clap my back they hitched great logs to their horses' tails to drag them out beside the track. 6 fires these was your birthday candles shining in 200 eyes.The real star of the show here is Kelly's language, and I admired the way Carey escalates the final tragedy by yanking the narrative out of his anti-hero's hands, to be finished by an antagonist - although, in typical Carey fashion, even that antagonism is tinged with ambiguity. From first to last, a truly excellent novel, exhilarating and lovely. If we ever go together to meet Peter Carey, you can tell him I said so...just please don't tell him I have Ned Kelly posters all over my walls.
In an interview with the Guardian newspaper in 2001, Peter Carey stated that the idea for writing a history of Ned Kelly started when he read the so-called Jerilderie Letter in a museum in the 1960s. This 8,000 word, 56-page letter was dictated to fellow gang member Joe Byrne by Ned following the robbery of the Jerilderie bank in 1879. In it Ned explains why he has been driven to lead a life as a bushranger following persecution of his family by a corrupt police force and victimisation of poor Irish families by the wealthy English squatters.In the letter, Ned gives his version of events and gives his account of the killing of three police officers at Stringybark Creek in 1978 saying "... this cannot be called wilful murder for I was compelled to shoot them, or lie down and let them shoot me". Carey describes the letter as uneducated but intelligent, humorous but also angry and says that "His language came in a great, furious rush that could not but remind you of far more literary Irish writers."In this novel, Carey has recreated Ned's voice as he heard it in the letter and used it to tell the story of the Kelly Gang. The novel is written in the first person using a stream of rich, almost poetic Irish-Australian vernacular from the 1880s. The cast of characters including his mother Ellen, brother Dan and sister Kate, his best friend Joe Byrne,opium-eater Aaron,and the cross-dressing Steve Hart are all colorfully described so that we have a sympathy and understanding of their natures. Wonderfully re-imagined, the novel is as much a comment on the politics of the time and the struggle between the families of poor convicts eking out a living and the wealthier settlers as it is the story of a bushranger.
What do You think about True History Of The Kelly Gang (2001)?
Another Booker Prize winner under my belt. Liked this a fair bit, but didn't love it. It's historical fiction, a retelling of the Ned Kelly tale. Ned Kelly was evidently a real-life Australian outlaw in the late 19th century, held up in legend as both a murderer and a folk hero. This novel seeks to humanize him and paint him as a sympathetic figure, presenting the narrative as if it were told by Kelly himself in a series of documents written while running from the law. Since Kelly was only semi-literate, the prose is choppy and difficult (not a single comma in the entire book!), but it really adds to the realism of the tale. There is much of Dickens in the telling of Kelly's upbringing, and definitely tons of Cormac McCarthy in the descriptions of the Australian wilderness, the characters' relationships with horses, and the frequently violent conflicts with the police. There is no doubt that this is a well-written and masterful novel, but I didn't love it because I never really felt emotionally involved with the fate of the characters. Glad to check it off my list, but not sure I would go out of my way to recommend it to others.
—Becky
Well here I am being a bad person again, I try to be good and I really do like to like things but you all are probably by now getting the strong idea that really I like to dislike things, such as Booker Prize winners and movies with Scarlet Johanssssssen in them. They call me Mr Grumpy, baby, cause baby, that’s my name. No, Otis Redding did not sing that song, I did. Well I did not make it even to the middle of this Kelly Gang saga and the reasons are disturbing – for me, that is, not for you.Peter Cary can write well, he’s lyrical, and salty, and all that- mmmm, smell that kangaroo, taste that kookaburra. Ned Kelly, whose unlikely autobiography this is, is sweet and pungent and naïve and knowing and really beautiful, everybody says so and everybody is right. You can’t get past Peter Carey’s front door without shoving aside all the awards which have spilled off his shelves, lots of them for this very novel. But when I put this novel down to read a nonfiction zinger about obscure 78 records, and then another nonfiction zinger about the publication history of Ulysses, and then, today, I thought I’d better pick Ned Kelly up again & finish it, I found a new thought lying around in my brain, and the thought was – nah, let’s not.It wasn’t the fact that this man Ned has perfect recall of every single solitary moment of his life, because that kind of annoying unlikeliness is something I guess you have to go along with because every long first person narrative has a bit of that about it, although it does grate here; it was more the whole illiteratish working class no-good-Irish bushranger-type turns out to be sensitive yet strong courageous yet nice, tough yet tasty, mean yet poetic.... my God the human admirableness of Ned was laid on with a trowel, I could not tell if Ned was totally in love with himself or if Peter Carey was totally in love with Ned his creature. But fatally for me, this whole cool-Ned thing became cute. He was cute. He was romantic. He was like the guy in the Shangri-Las song – “Oh yeah? Well I hear he’s bad” “Mmmm- he’s good-bad, but he’s not evil”. So this was shaping up to be a claustrophobically told cowboy yarn (think The Outlaw Josey Wales or High Plains Drifter with a dash of Unforgiven) and with another 237 pages to go I got off of my roan mare with the splash of silver over its left eye and stuffed a jumbuck in my tucker bag and scrambled over the billabong back to the 21st century.
—Paul Bryant
Carey masterfully created an journal-type depiction of Ned Kelly that truly helps the reader become involved with this book. Upon beginning the book, I had a hard time getting used to the writing style, modeled upon what an uneducated Ned Kelly would have written like. However, upon finishing the book, I cannot imagine reading the book in any other way. It is incredible how well written this book was, given that it is written with horrible grammar and awkward sentence structure. But it does make this book the wonderful experience it is. My only complaint is that the writing style does make the book harder to work through. But it also makes it that much more fulfilling. The only reason this book was not 5 stars is because something felt missing. Even upon completing the book, I want something more. Maybe the writing style failed to fill in some gaps. Maybe I missed it. Ultimately, the book seemed just a little too disjointed to warrant 5 stars. Nevertheless, a fascinating read that everyone should pick up.
—Zach Underwood
