Siomething Old

 Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.

“TRUE HISTORY OF THE KELLY GANG” by Peter Carey (first published in 2000)

            Five years back, while reviewing Peter Carey’s novel Amnesia on this blog, I remarked that I was unpatriotic enough to think that in 1985, Carey’s novel Illywhacker should have won the Booker Prize rather than the New Zealander Keri Hulme’s the bone people. In his overlong memoir JosephAnton (2012), Salman Rushdie claims that the bone people won only “in a compromise decision” (Pg.119) when the Booker judges couldn’t decide between Illywhacker and Doris Lessing’s The Good Terrorist. I can well believe this. Illywhacker is so clearly the greater novel.

Peter Carey (born 1943) was, however, later honoured by the Booker people, being one of only three writers so far who have won the award twice – in his case for Oscar and Lucinda in 1988 and for True History of the Kelly Gang in 2001.

I find that over the years, I have read about half of Carey’s literary output, from Illywhacker to Parrot and Olivier in America (2010) and Amnesia (2014). I have never been bored by a Carey novel, although some of them have puzzled me and his relationship with America (where he now resides) is a bit of an enigma. Love-hate? Not exactly, but somewhere in that ballpark. Parrot and Olivier in America is the novel where this is most evident as Carey revisits the nineteenth-century observations on America of Alexis de Toqueville and contrasts them with English views on the same subject.

I enjoyed also Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang, but remembering it always draws to my mind an odd experience. Back in the early 2000s, I attended a history conference on Australian and New Zealand topics, which was held in Galway in Ireland. One of the advertised speakers was the veteran Aussie feminist Germaine Greer, who was going to give a presentation on Ned Kelly. Naïvely, I thought Greer would launch a feminist attack upon the macho myths that have gathered around Kelly. I imagined her ironically decontructing the Kelly myth. Not a bit of it! When she spoke, Greer positively chortled with approval over Kelly’s exploits, seeing him as the ingenious underdog who fought against the colonial possessing class. She even chortled over Kelly’s stunt of sending a bull’s testicles to a woman whose husband was apparently unable to give her children. (This particular story – and Kelly’s role in it – is much disputed). I was forced to recall that Greer herself has much of the Aussie larrikin in her – and she claimed a personal kinship with Ned Kelly by saying that he had been much misreported in the press, just as she said she had been.

I will not linger long over Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang, save to say that when I read it and reviewed it, it had not yet been honoured with a Booker.

            Unaltered from its first appearance, and being brief as all newspaper reviews are, here is my review of the novel as it was published in the old Dominion on 7 October 2000.

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            As Australia’s best-known living novelist, Peter Carey clearly has a taste for 19^th century myths. His Oscar and Lucinda suggested how fragile were some English immigrant hopes when brought Down Under. His Jack Maggs more or less re-worked Dickens’ Great Expectations – except from the transported convict’s point of view. With immigrants and convicts taken care of, it was somewhat inevitable that Carey should now get around to Ned Kelly.

            The achetypal wild colonial boy is firmly embedded in the Aussie national psyche. Film reference books tell me the first ever Australian feature film was a silent epic of the outlaw’s exploits, and mere weeks ago [remember this review was written in 2000], we saw hordes of dancers opening the Olympics by jumping about in Ned Kelly costumes copied from the famous Sidney Nolan paintings.

Think Aussie Larrikin and you think of Kelly in his homemade armour, going down under police gunfire. Carey opens with this dramatic scene, but then switches to his chief narrative conceit. In Carey’s version, Kelly leaves a bundle of manuscripts telling his whole life’s history. So, for most of its 400 pages, True History of the Kelly Gang (apparently the title doesn’t merit a definite article) is a first-person narrative wherein Kelly unburdens his soul to his infant daughter.

Much of the traditional and historical tale is here. How his widowed Irish mother runs a shebeen. How, from his early teenage years, he had to defend his mother’s honour from a series of suitors (parts of the tale go quite Oedipal about this). His apprenticeship to the bushranger Harry Power and his deteriorating relationship with the police. And so to the hold-ups of squatter and magistrate, the shoot-outs with pursuing posses, the fording of the Murray River in full flood.

But most distinctive is that narrative voice. Half-literate Kelly stumbles over sentences and runs them together. He follows the 19^th century convention of writing “adjectival” instead of “bloody” when his characters are cussing, and he is full of self-justifications. Yet his social perspective is utterly convincing. His gang are sons of dirt-poor deracinated Irish Catholic peasants, constantly feeling victimised by the wealthy Anglo squatters who have bagged the best farming land, frequently harrassed by a police force that is basically there to protect the squirearchy’s interests.

Carey never falls into the trap of seeing these circumstances alone as justifications for murder. But he does show the processes by which the alienated Irish became, in the second generation, alienated Australians. Kelly looks at his gang and remarks “They were Australians. They knew full well the terror of the unyielding law. The historical memory of UNFAIRNESS was in their blood.”

No wonder the larrikin has become a national icon.