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.

               *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *  

            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.

Something New

We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books

“AMNESIA” by Peter Carey (Penguin / Hamish Hamilton, $NZ40)

In many of his thirteen novels so far, American-resident Peter Carey (now aged 71) has reflected on his native Australia in ways that mix realism with myth (or magical realism) the better to bring out major themes in Australian history. I’m one of those unpatriotic New Zealanders who think that Carey’s Illywhacker (1985) was a much stronger novel than the New Zealand contestant the bone people, which won the Booker Prize in the same year that Illywhacker was short-listed. Carey, however, has subsequently won the Booker twice with novels that have nineteenth century Australian settings, Oscar and Lucinda (1988) and (my favourite Carey to date) True History of the Kelly Gang (2000). The first of them deals, in mythic terms, with the “gamble” that Anglo-Australians took in coming to Australia; the second with the rebellious and “larrikin” Irish contribution.  Then there was another strong Carey, Jack Maggs (1997), which took Dickens’ convict hero Magwich and told his story without the Dickensian euphemisms and in a way that made his Australian experience more central.

Given that Carey has lived in New York for the last two decades (and has dual Australian-American citizenship), I’m surprised that he hasn’t reflected more often on America in his novels. The last Carey I read was Parrot and Olivier in America (2010), which is essentially a fictionalised version of Alexis de Tocqueville’s 19^th century observations of the United States. Otherwise, Australia is Peter Carey’s mental and imaginative home.

In Amnesia, however, Carey puts Australia and America in collision. He takes a big and imaginative swipe at the matter of Australian-American relations in a style that is part satire and part allegory, and relevant to the age of cyber-hacking.

Pardon one of my inevitable part-synopses to set things up.

Rumpled old left-wing Australian journalist Felix Moore has just been dumped on by the courts for libel and has been ordered to have his latest book pulped. Financially ruined, he is ready to accept any project that will pay, so long as it accords with his political beliefs. And he is handed a beaut. His old wide-boy and property-developer chum Woody Townes, who rolls in money, commissions him to write a biography of a young woman called Gaby (Gabrielle) Baillieux. She is charged with releasing a virus, the Angel Worm, into the federal computer system, which controls Australia’s jails. Hence jail doors have sprung open all over the country and prisoners have walked free. But the security systems of Aussie jails depend on American technology, which the computer virus has also affected – so American jail doors also spring open. Gaby is now denounced as a secret-spilling traitor by both Australian and American security services, and has been whisked into hiding by supporters. (Think Australian Julian Assange… or American Edward Snowden).

Woody Townes (a very ambiguous character, because we are never sure if he is really Felix’s friend or foe) says he wants Felix to write a book that will make Gaby look good and swing public opinion her way.

Of himself and his commission, Felix Moore remarks:

“I had not, previously, been thought of as the kind of writer who might make a difficult character loveable… As a journalist it was my talent to be a shit-stirrer, a truffle hound for cheats and liars and crooks among the ruling classes. These pugnacious habits had served me well for a whole career…” (p.134)

Felix has a backstory with Gaby’s mother the actress Celine Baillieux, who is the daughter of an Aussie woman raped by an American soldier during the Second World War. (Historical brawls between Aussie and Yank soldiers are referenced). Here’s a clear symbol of the Australian love-hate for America as the country that saved Australia during war, but that has subsequently sought to dominate its destiny. And there’s a second big symbol. Celine gave birth to Gaby in 1975, on the very day of the “coup” that took Gough Whitlam out of power. Many on the left in Australia (including Carey) believe Gough Whitlam’s removal to have been a CIA-organised plot, for which the Murdoch and Packer press acted as cheerleaders.

“Everything we knew from life suggested that America could do what it liked and Australia would behave like the client state it always was”, remarks Felix Moore (p.50), who also characterises Australia’s security service ASIO as “the CIA’s bum boys”. He knows that the young woman whose life he is researching will as likely, if caught, end up in an American jail as an Australian one.

Amnesia. The very title suggests a reminder not to forget what has happened in the recent past to shape Australia. So, as Felix Moore sets about researching, and as he recalls episodes in his past relationship with Gaby’s mother Celine, and as he is hustled for results by the ambiguous and sinister Woody, we think we are in for a highly political novel satirising Australian-American relations.

And so we are – but not quite in the manner we expect.

Carey is a master of the unexpected switch, after all. The first third Amnesia is narrated in the first person by Felix Moore, ever ready to spout his political views. Thereafter, it switches into a different mode, with an omniscient narrator mingling with the voices of mother Celine and daughter Gaby as they emerge through the documents and recorded interviews that are Felix’s research materials.

Having set up the issue of American cultural colonialism in Australia, Carey warns against a different sort of amnesia – the sort that would forget what political Australia is really made of in the first place. For in Gaby’s parents, radical leftie actress Celine and middle-of-the-road Labor Party hack Sandy Quinn, Carey ruthlessly dramatises the disunity and political impotence of the Australian left (a bit like the New Zealand left at the moment). Celine is almost “radical chic”, resenting the fact that she has to live among real working class people in the Melbourne suburb of Coburg. “She would rather die than have a backyard, or a Hills Hoist or a barbecue or a privet hedge” remarks the omniscient narrator (p.171). She rows endlessly with her husband Sandy; and Sandy in turn is appalled that their daughter Gaby is sucked in by utopian greenies who don’t know the reality of politics. Alienated from both parents much of the time, Gaby draws closer to the guy who teaches her how powerful a tool computer hacking can be.

And as Gaby’s fate unravels (with a couple of powerful twists en route), Carey paints a hard, bitter picture of a hellish life in the poorer Australian suburbs, sometimes mingled with the rage of the daughter who feels both her parents have let her down. Her thoughts turn apocalyptic and destructive as when she observes:

 “The stupid magpies went on carolling and the stupid sky was a cloudless blue and the stupid Sydney Road continued to carry its trucks and cars north across the dreary bluestone plains made in days when volcanoes vomited across the future suburbs, and streams of lava ran like toffee, pooling in the hollows up to sixty metres deep. Liquid basalt spewed from her chest and rolled down the Merri Creek, boiling eels, and sending blazing wallabies to spread fire through bush.” (p.211)

It is characteristic of Carey to start at one point and proceed to take you somewhere quite unexpected. In Amnesia, having registered his protest at Australia’s inability to control its own fate on the world stage, he proceeds to pick apart the weaknesses of Australians themselves.

This is one of his best novels, as funny as it is tragic (especially in the figure of dogged and put-upon Felix Moore), surprising, and hard-nosed in its details even when it is taking the piss.