True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey
St. Lucia, Qld: University of Queensland Press, 2001 (first published 2000) ISBN 0702232637
I've never been a great Peter Carey fan (prior to this book I had only read Oscar and Lucinda, and found it only vaguely enjoyable), but I do remember when True History of the Kelly Gang came out primarily because an acquaintance of mine began to talk about Ned Kelly's wife - when I pulled them up on that, they protested that indeed he did have a wife as it was in Carey's book!..... beware anything that's title mentions it's true...
I can see now, after reading the book, why my acquaintance might have been fooled if they had approached the book with no context. Carey has set out the novel as if it was a transcription of various manuscript papers held in the State Library of Victoria, written by Kelly himself to explain his life to his daughter, interspersed with newspaper clippings and other material.
Kelly did famously dictate a self-justifying treatise when he held the town of Jerilderie to ransom during his bushranging days, known as the Jerilderie Letter. Carey has studied this letter and has tried to replicate the style of Kelly's voice, as well as trying to get into his mindset via what he had written in that missive, so that he can create a fiction that re-creates not only Kelly, but his milieu.
That milieu is one of poor Irish selectors. I won't get into a history lesson here, but Carey evokes well the absolute poverty that many people of convict origins had to suffer on their poor parcels of land, constantly walking the line between starvation and criminality in their quest to survive. He very much paints Ned Kelly as not only someone who suffered, but someone who was of the opinion that it was the system that made him suffer, rather than anything else. Carey's Kelly feels very Irish, but also very Australian in the sense that he will not take a backward step and will fight what he sees as injustice.
It's a truism in Australia that depending on your view of our society, you see Kelly as either a vicious murderer, or a champion of the little people against the toffs who run the joint. Carey views Kelly as a complex character, but definitely veers towards the champion of the people narrative. His crimes, as described in the novel, were all committed for noble reasons, with the murders at Stringybark Creek very much portrayed as self-defence.
Which is not to imply that Carey has written a hagiography: Carey develops Kelly's unmistakeable megalomania, which increases as the story moves along. In the novel Kelly is ruled by his mother, who is also portrayed as a strong woman who took what she wanted from the world. His relationship with her is portrayed as complex: Kelly constantly seeks affirmation from her, and is gutted at the moments when she seems to reject him (Ellen is psychologically wounded by her experiences with men and poverty, and periodically lashes out at her children).
The climax of the novel is when Kelly has to choose between his pregnant wife and his mother - choosing the latter will doom him, but that is the decision he makes, and his (fictional) writings are all to try to explain why he did so.
It's a brave decision for an Australian author (Carey was born not far from my hometown, but was living in New York when he wrote this book) to write about perhaps the most famous Australian story. He has done so with considerable verve and narrative flair, but I think the message behind the story (the repression of the masses by the system and the English) is perhaps overdone - Ned is portrayed as nobler than he was, and the police and the "squattocracy" perhaps more villainous than they were.
That stated, True History of the Kelly Gang is a good read as a story, and as an insight into early settlement of Australia. It won the Booker Prize in 2001, which is accolade enough. Recommended.
Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell
