MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2001
Booker club: True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey
Remaking Ned
Robert Edric salutes an outlaw imagination in Peter Carey's new book, True History of the Kelly Gang
True History of the Kelly Gang
Peter Carey
349pp, Faber
Robert Edric
Saturday 6 January 2001
Pushed centre stage with neither a definite nor an indefinite article for moral or theatrical support, True History of the Kelly Gang signals the first of its many deceits. Peter Carey's skills, passions and obsessions are all fully on display in this long-awaited take on colonial Australia's most enduring myth. Ned Kelly, cattle thief, bank robber and folk hero, was hanged at the age of 25 in Melbourne jail in 1880. Carey tells his story in the first person, in a narrative - recalling Ondaatje's Billy the Kid, Hanson's Jesse James and perhaps even Burroughs's Dutch Schultz - that his publishers refer to as a dazzling act of ventriloquism.
But this is not the short-lived gimmickry of ventriloquism; it is writing, and though the voice it renders is loud, distinctive and beguiling, the concessions made by Carey to the modern reader create several potential flaws in the construction that, to begin with at least, threaten to undermine the otherwise carefully woven illusion. Happily, Carey is far too accomplished and adventurous a writer to expect anything so simple or so obvious as the suspension of disbelief in the reader. Rather, he makes a valid and sustained plea for accommodation, for readers to bring all they think they know about Ned Kelly - all those half-remembered childhood memories of a man in the heat of an outback summer with a bucket on his head - and then to allow Carey himself to fill in the empty spaces that remain. We are not seriously expected to believe that this is a transcript of Kelly's own work; we are not so easily fooled by the archive sources cited; we are not so swiftly seduced by the atrocious punctuation in a narrative otherwise so finely tuned, plotted and controlled.
What Carey demands of us is what he has been demanding for 20 years: that we trust the narrator of the tale as much as the tale being told, and that we don't unduly concern ourselves as readers with the mode of its telling. Ever since the playful, shape-changing stories of The Fat Man in History, Oscar and Lucinda, Jack Maggs and - supremely - Illywhacker, Carey has been talking out of the side of his mouth and behind his hand. He mumbles and whispers and then turns to face his reader with a look of mock surprise saying: "What? What don't you believe?"
This Ned Kelly is a convincing and intriguing individual; Carey has indulged his appetite for language and imaginative construction in making him so. It does not matter that we are unable to pin Kelly to the facts of his life, only that we are willing and prepared to accept him as Carey reveals him to us, and to trust the kaleidoscopic array of characters and situations and the often startling images employed by Carey to create them. There is wonder here, and awe.
Carey's narrators have always been storytellers in the truest sense. We have always been asked to believe what they are telling us while guessing or half-knowing that it is a well-turned pack of lies. Throughout his career, Carey has concerned himself above all with the image and the identity of his fellow Australians - from the earliest settlers struggling to understand the strangeness and precariousness of their lives and surroundings, to the disappointment and emptiness of contemporary urban man, detached from the vast and legend-filled spaces around him. This is nowhere more evident or more poignant than in those places and lives where only one or two generations might separate these extremes. These are the human spaces Carey inhabits, and at times he seems to have far more in common with his Victorian and Edwardian forbears - with Marcus Clark and Henry Handel Richardson, say - than with any of his more obvious contemporaries.
There is little doubt that Carey the storyteller, Kelly the narrator and the tale being told are uniquely well matched. There is little doubt, either, where Carey's sympathies lie. He cannot be faulted for the shape and colour of the portrait he is painting when Kelly himself - the original Wild Colonial Boy - is telling the tale. History, Carey insists, is just as cruel to those figures it remembers (whether well, badly or indifferently) as to those it decently forgets.
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Kelly himself undoubtedly considered his reckless and ignorant bravery wholly justified, and understood as well as any of his later apologists and worshippers that he was the victim of the casually brutal wilderness and times he inhabited. Carey does little to alter this account. What he does achieve is a picture of a fuller, living man, about whom the reader need know nothing before he starts speaking. It is to Carey's great credit that, as the story progresses, the writer of the novel and the narrator of the tale it tells become indivisible. It is equally to his credit that Kelly's trademark ridiculous bucket headgear - my own abiding childhood memory - is not mentioned until 25 pages from the end of his account.
Intriguingly, 10 years ago Robert Drewe published Our Sunshine, a fractured, unsentimental, "poetic" and compassionate first-person account of Kelly, of which Carey himself said: "An important writer meets an important myth and reinvents it in the most sensual, visceral language he has yet produced." I anticipate that Robert Drewe will say exactly the same of Carey's Ned Kelly.
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