Kim Byungkwan / Women

Kim Byungkwan

WOMEN

Henrik Aarrestad Uldalen / Women

Henrik Uldalen

Henrik Aarrestad Uldalen

(1986)

WOMEN

The 100 best novels / No 100 / True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey (2000)

The 100 best novels

written in English

No 100

True History of Kelly Gang

by Peter Carey 

(2000) 

Peter Carey rounds off our list of literary milestones with a Booker prize-winning tour-de-force examining the life and times of Australia’s infamous antihero, Ned Kelly 

Robert McCrum
Sunday 16 August 2015 09.00 BST

Peter Carey arrived exuberantly on the international literary scene as the dominant Australian writer of his generation with Illywhacker, his second novel, in 1985. He went on to win the Booker prize with Oscar and Lucinda (1988), but it was not until the publication of True History of the Kelly Gang in 2000 that his lifelong fascination with the antipodean predicament and his own impish love of narrative innovation met in the voice of the bushranger Ned Kelly, an archetypal Australian hero.

This tour-de-force of storytelling, Carey’s great gift, is a postmodern historical novel, a quasi-autobiography, narrated in the Australian vernacular with primitive grammar and scant punctuation, a dazzling act of ventriloquism, in a style inspired by an extraordinary fragment of Kelly’s prose known as the Jerilderie letter.

Kelly’s life as an outlaw, after a childhood dominated by his family’s run-ins with the law, culminated in his leadership of the Kelly Gang, who terrorised but also thrilled the inhabitants of north-east Victoria, a moment of Australian folklore that reached a bloody climax in a shootout in the country town of Glenrowan. Kelly survived wearing a homemade suit of steel-plate armour, but would die soon after on the gallows, a local hero.

This series began with the English dissenter, John Bunyan, in Bedford prison, imagining the progress to redemption of a humble pilgrim. At the turn of the millennium, it ends with an expat Australian novelist exploring the nature of storytelling through the short, violent life of a colonial outlaw on a fierce, mad, doomed quest for freedom. From these, and countless other examples, I would argue that fiction flourishes in extremis.

In conclusion, 100 Novels has deliberately excluded all kinds of translation, but there is one writer, as great as any listed here, who died in 2001, whose work deserves to be remembered. WG (“Max”) Sebald still towers over the global literary landscape with four inimitable titles: The Emigrants, Vertigo, The Rings of Saturn, Austerlitz. Sebald wrote in his native German, but his translated texts add up to a profound masterpiece of contemporary English. Ave atque vale.

A note on the text

For Peter Carey, an expat novelist settled in New York, True History of the Kelly Gang, which is set in north-east Victoria, in and around small towns like Mansfield, Benalla, Wangaratta and Bendigo, is both an exploration of his cultural heritage and a strange act of nostalgia. As an adolescent, Carey was sent to Geelong Grammar, one of Australia’s top boarding schools. For the son of a motor car salesman from Bacchus Marsh, this was a dislocating experience. In his Paris Review interview, he describes his parent’s sacrifice to send him to a top school.

“Why Geelong Grammar? Because it was the best. It cost £600 a year in 1954, which was an unbelievable amount of money – and they really weren’t that well-off – and they did it. I suppose it did solve a few childcare problems. I never felt I was being exiled or sent away, but I was only 11 years old. No one could have guessed that the experience would finally produce an endless string of orphan characters in my books.

“It took me ages to figure that out. I thought the orphans were there because it’s just easier – you don’t have to invent a complicated family history. But I think in retrospect that it’s not a failure of imagination… it’s also the story of Australia, which is a country of orphans. I have the good fortune that my own personal trauma matches my country’s great historical trauma. Our first fleet was cast out from ‘home’. Nobody really wanted to be there. Convicts, soldiers were all going to starve or survive together.

“Later, the state created orphans among the aboriginal population through racial policies, stealing indigenous kids from their communities and trying to breed out their blackness. Then there were all these kids sent from England to Dr Barnardo’s homes, which were institutions for homeless and destitute children, some of them run in the most abusive, horrible circumstances. There was one near us in Bacchus Marsh called Northcote Farm.”

However, this elite education did contain one memorable year, much closer to ordinary Australian experience, when the 14- and 15-year-old Geelong grammarians were sent upstate to live in the bush at an outward bound school in the foothills of Mount Buller, a place called Timbertop. This is the landscape of Carey’s novel, and Kelly’s obsession with horses and the bush takes inspiration from his own teenage years.

Ned Kelly’s voice, like so many in colonial Australia, is Irish. In his Paris Reviewinterview, Carey addresses this explicitly: “When I got to True History of the Kelly Gang, I let myself do something that goes back to the beginning of my reading. I was 19 and just discovering literature. I was reading Joyce, and at the same time I read the Jerilderie letter, a letter written by Ned Kelly in a town where he was robbing a bank. It’s a very Irish voice. I know it’s not Joyce, but it does suggest even to a 19-year-old the possibility of creating a poetic voice that grows out of Australian soil, that is true to its place and hasn’t existed before. I had that in my mind from very, very early. It was astonishing to me that I could finally do it.”

The critics agreed. For the Guardian, “Carey is without question the pre-eminent literary voice of post-colonial Australia.” John Updike, writing in the New Yorker, declared that “the ingenuity, empathy, and poetic ear that Carey brings to his feat of imposture cannot be rated too high.”

True History of the Kelly Gang won the Booker prize in 2001, only the second time a writer had won it twice. Hilary Mantel joined the two wins club (along with Carey and JM Coetzee) in 2012.

Three more from Peter Carey

Illywhacker (1985); Oscar and Lucinda (1988); Jack Maggs (1997).

THE GUARDIAN

000 The 100 best novels: an introduction by Robert McCrum

001 The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan (1678)

002 Robinson Crusoe by Danie Defoe (1719)

003 Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift (1726)

004 Clarissa by Samuel Richardson  (1748)

005 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding  (1749)

006 The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne (1759)

007 Emma by Jane Austen (1816)

008 Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1818)

009 Nightmare Abbey by Thomas Love Peacock(1818)

010 The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket by Edgar Allan Poe (1833)

011 Sybil by Benjamin Disraeli  (1845)

012 Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (1847)

013 Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (1847) 

014 Fair by William Thackeray (1848)  

015 David Copperfield by Charles Dickens (1850)

016 The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1850)

017  Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (1851) 

018 Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll (1865)

019 The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins (1868)

020 Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (1868-9)

021 Middlemarch by George Eliot (1871-2)

022 The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope (1875)

023 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (1884/5)

024 Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson (1886)

025 Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K Jerome  (1889)

026  The Sign of Four by Arthur Conan Doyle (1890)

027  The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (1891)

028  New Grub Street by George Gissing (1891)

029 Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy (1895)

030 The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane (1895)

031 Dracula by Bram Stoker  (1897)

032 Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (1899)

033 Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser (1900)

034 Kim by Rudyard Kipling (1901)

035 The Call of the Wild by Jack London (1903)
036 The Golden Bowl by Henry James (1904)

037 Hadrian the Seventh by Frederick Rolfe (1904)

038 The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame (1908) 

039 The History of Mr Polly by HG Wells (1910)
040 Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm (1915)

041 The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford (1915)
042 The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan (1915)
043 The Rainbow by DH Lawrence (1915)
044 Of Human Bondage by W Somerset Waugham (1915)
045 The Age of Innocence by Edith Warthon (1920)
046 Ulysses by James Joyce (1922)
047 Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis (1922)
048 A Pasage to India by EM Forster (1922)
049 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loss ( 1925)
050 Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925)

051 The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
052 Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner (1926)

053 The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway (1926)

054 The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett (1929)

055 As I Lay Dying  by William Faulkner  (1930)

056 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932)

057 Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons (1932)

058 Nineteen Nineteen by John Dos Passos (1932)

059 Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller (1934)

060 Scoop by Evelyn Waugh (1938)

061 Murphy by Samuel Beckett ( 1938)
062 The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler (1939)
063 Party Going by Henry Green (1939)
064 At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien (1939)
065 The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (1939)
066 Joy in the Morning by PG Wodehouse (1946)
067 All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren (1946)
068 Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry (1947)
069 The Heat of the Day by Elizabeth Bowen (1948)

070 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell  (1949)

071 The End of the Affair by Graham Greene  (1951) 

072 The Catcher in the Rye by Salinger (1951)

073 The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow (1953)

074 Lord of the Flies by William Golding (1954)

075 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (1955)

076 On the Road by Jack Kerouac (1957)

077 Voss by Patrick White (1957)

078 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960)

079 The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark (1960)

080 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (1961)

081 The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing (1962) 

082 A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess (1962)

083 A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood (1964) 

084 In Cold Blood by Truman Capote (1966)
085 The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (1966) 

086 Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth (1969)

087 Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont by Elizabeth Taylor (1971)

088 Rabbit Redux by John Updike (1971)

089 Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison (1977)

090 A Bend in the River by VS Naipaul (1979) 

091 Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie (1981)

092 Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson (1981)

093  Money: A Suicide Note by Martin Amis (1984)

094 An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro (1986)

095 The Beginning of Spring by Penelope Fitzgerald (1988)
096 Breathing Lesson by Anne Tyler (1988)
097 Amongst Women by John McGahem (1990)
098 Underwold by Don DeLillo (1997)
099 Disgrace by JM Coetzee (1999)

100 True Story of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey (2000)

No Orchids for Miss Blandish by James Hadley Chase / Review

James Hadley Chase

NO ORCHIDS FOR MISS BLANDISH 

(1939) 

by James Hadley Chase

Cavershamrag
1 April 2014

What can you say about this infamous crime story – that as a book and again as a film it was once the most notorious title in the UK? That it was critically lambasted by George Orwell? That it sold millions of copies and was adapted several times for television, stage and the cinema? That more people have heard of it than actually read it? What was the fuss all about? Well, this twisted beauty and the beast story starts with a roadside stick up in Kansas City …

I submit this review for Katie’s 2014 Book to Movie Challenge at Doing Dewey; Bev’s 2014 Golden Age Vintage Mystery Challenge; and Todd Mason’s Tuesday’s Overlooked Film meme at Sweet Freedom.

“There was something so repulsive and terrifying about this creature that she had a mad urge to scream and keep on screaming”

George Orwell / Raffles and Miss Blandish

George Orwell

Raffles and Miss Blandish

Nearly half a century after his first appearance, Raffles, ‘the amateur cracksman’, is still one of the best-known characters in English fiction. Very few people would need telling that he played cricket for England, had bachelor chambers in the Albany and burgled the Mayfair houses which he also entered as a guest. Just for that reason he and his exploits make a suitable background against which to examine a more modern crime story such as No Orchids for Miss Blandish. Any such choice is necessarily arbitrary — I might equally well have chosen Arsène Lupin for instance — but at any rate No Orchids and the Raffles books have the common quality of being crime stories which play the limelight on the criminal rather than the policeman. For sociological purposes they can be compared. No Orchids is the 1939 version of glamorized crime, Raffles the 1900 version. What I am concerned with here is the immense difference in moral atmosphere between the two books, and the change in the popular attitude that this probably implies.

At this date, the charm of Raffles is partly in the period atmosphere and partly in the technical excellence of the stories. Hornung was a very conscientious and on his level a very able writer. Anyone who cares for sheer efficiency must admire his work. However, the truly dramatic thing, about Raffles, the thing that makes him a sort of byword even to this day (only a few weeks ago, in a burglary case, a magistrate referred to the prisoner as ‘a Raffles in real life’), is the fact that he is a gentleman. Raffles is presented to us and this is rubbed home in countless scraps of dialogue and casual remarks — not as an honest man who has gone astray, but as a public-school man who has gone astray. His remorse, when he feels any, is almost purely social; he has disgraced ‘the old school’, he has lost his right to enter ‘decent society’, he has forfeited his amateur status and become a cad. Neither Raffles nor Bunny appears to feel at all strongly that stealing is wrong in itself, though Raffles does once justify himself by the casual remark that ‘the distribution of property is all wrong anyway’. They think of themselves not as sinners but as renegades, or simply as outcasts. And the moral code of most of us is still so close to Raffles' own that we do feel his situation to be an especially ironical one. A West End club man who is really a burglar! That is almost a story in itself, is it not? But how if it were a plumber or a greengrocer who was really a burglar? Would there be anything inherently dramatic in that? No although the theme of the ‘double life’, of respectability covering crime, is still there. Even Charles Peace in his clergyman's dog-collar, seems somewhat less of a hypocrite than Raffles in his Zingari blazer.

James Hadley Chase / No Orchids for Miss Blandish

No Orchids for Miss Blandish

by 

James Hadley Chase

No Orchids For Miss Blandish is a 1939 crime novel by the British writer James Hadley Chase. The novel was influenced by the American crime writer James M. Cain and the stories in the pulp magazine Black Mask. Chase reportedly wrote the book as a bet to out-do The Postman Always Rings Twice. The 1948 novel The Flesh of the Orchid by the same author is a sequel to this novel.

Artists in Conversation / Cristina Peri Rossi by Carmen Boullosa

Cristina Peri Rossi

Cristina Peri Rossi

by Carmen Boullosa

BOMB 106

Winter 2009

Cristina Peri Rossi is the only woman associated with the Latin American Boom, which gained prominence in the 1970s. Peri Rossi, a first-rate author from Uruguay, had everything to be on par with the Boom authors: she was actively involved in the causes they supported during the ’60s and ’70s, was exiled for her political militancy twice, and was a close friend of Julio Cortázar’s. Her association with the Boom, though, is partial. It’s not that she didn’t share the penchant for fantastic literature that characterized a few of the Boom generation’s more prominent members—García Márquez and Cortázar, for instance. Mario Vargas Llosa never dabbled in this genre either and he has always been one of the Boom’s key writers. Peri Rossi’s writing—she has published over 37 novels, short-story collections, and poetry books, and is a journalist and political commentator for the public radio station Catalunya Ràdio—is as great as theirs. It’s that she either lacked or manifested (depending on who’s keeping score) something in excess: she is a woman.

Spike Jonze / Her - review

Her – review | Mark Kermode

Spike Jonze enters the world of cybersex with a curiously detached satire

Mark Kermode
Sunday 16 February 2014 00.05 GMT

A

s far as sci-fi cinema is concerned, there's nothing unusual about falling in love with a computer or conjuring your perfect partner from a keyboard. In the Frankenstein-inspired 80s teen comedy Weird Science, two teenagers brought dream girl Kelly LeBrock to life by wiring a Barbie doll to a computer, while Electric Dreams placed an operating system named Edgar in the middle of a love triangle with a musical twist. Harrison Ford's Deckard didn't seem to know whether he was human or robotic as he fell in love with a replicant in Ridley Scott's Blade Runner. And in Andrew Niccol's S1m0ne, a film director creates a supposedly compliant virtual movie star with whom the whole world promptly becomes infatuated, forcing him into a lifelong relationship that begets digital children. Meanwhile, over in the real world, plenty of people have engaged in flirty interactions with everything from their satnav (popular voice options include a Frenchman who tells you that you look fabulous as you take the next left) to their Siri (as per The Big Bang Theory), with both marriages and divorces resulting from the intimate interactions and infidelities of online avatars.

 

John Steinbeck

Reading group

John Steinbeck

'My nerves are going fast': The Grapes of Wrath’s hard road to publication

Famously written in 100 days, John Steinbeck’s novel drew on years of other work and an agonised sense of duty to migrant farm workers

Sam Jordison
Tuesday 13 August 2019

In March 1938, shortly before he began working on The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck wrote to his agent Elizabeth Otis to turn down a commission to write about migrant workers.

“The suffering is too great for me to cash in on it … it is the most heartbreaking thing in the world,” he wrote. “I break myself every time I go out because the argument that one person’s effort can’t really do anything doesn’t seem to apply when you come on a bunch of starving children and you have a little money. I can’t rationalise it for myself anyway. So don’t get me a job for a slick.”

Johnny Bear by John Steinbeck

Johnny Bear 

by

John Steinbeck

John Steinbeck / Johnny "El Oso"

The village of Loma is built, as its name implies, on a low round hill that rises like an island out of the flat mouth of the Salinas Valley in central California. To the north and east of the town a black tule swamp stretches for miles, but to the south the marsh has been drained. Rich vegetable land has been the result of the draining, land so black with wealth that the lettuce and cauliflowers grow to giants.