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.
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).
Narrative tricks minted in the 19th century are still working in contemporary fiction by authors from Margaret Atwood to Sarah Waters
Paraic O’Donnell Wed 7 Nov 2018 10.00 GMT
I
n historical fiction, as in all things, fashions come and go. As we near the end of Hilary Mantel’s glorious Tudor revival, the ancient world is again getting a look in, with writers such as Madeline Miller and Pat Barker refashioning the Homeric epics to glittering effect. But these trends mask more durable patterns, at least from a crudely chronological point of view.
For one thing, the 19th century – the Regency and Victorian eras, in other words – remains vastly overrepresented. In an informal 2013 survey by the Historical Novel Society, it accounted for almost 30% of that year’s titles, second only to the 20th in popularity, and with almost as large a share as all other eras put together. What accounts for this enduring fascination? Proximity plays a part, naturally, and the richness of the documentary record probably doesn’t hurt either. Empires need prodigious bureaucracies, and if there’s one thing the Victorians were spectacularly good at, it was writing things down.
For my part – well, I won’t lie. Some of it comes down to aesthetics. In The House on Vesper Sands, I wanted to dramatise wickedness and secrecy. For that you need darkness, snow and plenty of orphans. More high-mindedly, I wanted to rehabilitate the Victorian sensation novel, in which – long before the modernists thought of it – the author’s own trickery is playfully advertised. In other words – and each of the books I’ve chosen reflects this in one way or another – the Victorians didn’t just perfect the English novel. They made it self-aware.
While literary critics have occasionally embraced historical fiction, academic literary theorists have taken a harder line. They take a dim view of representing things generally, but especially of representing the past. This novel isn’t just aware of all this; it gleefully writes it into the plot. Its intricate parallel narratives involve a pair of fusty academics who discover both a secret affair between two Victorian poets and a hesitant passion of their own. The resulting novel (or rather, “romance”, both in the literary sense and the usual one) manages to be both extravagantly learned and utterly charming.
2. Bodies of Light by Sarah Moss (2014)
Since this novel’s appearance in 2014, Moss’s star has rightfully risen. Bodies of Light deserves consideration alongside her finest work, and exhibits her peculiar gift for slipping among disparate settings (from Greenland to the Outer Hebrides) while maintaining unusual strands of continuity. Here again she is preoccupied with motherhood and the fragility of the self, and while her Victorian foray begins with the unearthing of infant bones, she is always digging into the human soul, including – or so it can often seem – the reader’s own.
3. The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber (2002)
This justly celebrated reinvention of the Dickensian novel is not so much a reboot as a kick in the arse. Unlike Dickens, Faber has no time for the sanctified waif or the virtuous simpleton. As in Bleak House, we are introduced first to the city itself, with a warning that we must start at the very bottom. In Faber’s London, the fog hides nothing and the veils are all drawn back. Here a prostitute squats unceremoniously over her bowl to scour herself, while outside the blood runs among the cobbles “like a winding crimson weed”.
Lesbian love story primer ... Elaine Cassidy (left) and Sally Hawkins in the 2005 TV adaptation of Sarah Waters’ Fingersmith. Photograph: BBC/Sally Head Productions
4. Fingersmith by Sarah Waters (2002)
A landmark of lesbian fiction, this suffered the unusual fate of becoming famous for the wrong reasons. The novel’s central love story should never be whitewashed, but it spawned a cottage industry of softcore Victoriana that overshadowed its author’s virtuosity. With its loveable rogues and dastardly schemes, Fingersmith has all the elements of the worst kind of knockabout pastiche, yet what Waters fashions from them is almost miraculous. From intricate plotting to exquisitely subtle observation, she is that rare prodigy: an author who is good at everything. Like her heroine, Sue, we see as a small child does “what I had never seen before – how the world was made up”.
Ralph Fiennes and Cate Blanchett in the title roles of the film version of Oscar and Lucinda.
5. Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey (1988)
The unlikely love story that begins when Lucinda Leplastrier encounters Oscar Hopkins on a ship bound for Australia has become one of the most cherished of recent times. Yet it is a love story, Carey has confessed, that he ended up writing almost by mistake. Instead, the novel’s glittering and unforgettable central motif, a glass church floating on a river, had struck Carey as crystallising (if you will) Pascal’s notion of religious belief as a grand gamble. Oscar is an inveterate gambler, of course, but if he accepts Lucinda’s bet out of compulsion, agreeing to transport her fragile edifice into the remote outback, his persistence in this harebrained undertaking has given us one of literature’s most monumental acts of love.
6. Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood (1996)
Atwood has always given us big ideas, but she hasn’t always shown as much interest in people. Alias Grace is as much a novel of ideas as any she has written, but is centred for once on a transfixing study of character. Grace Marks was a real (and notorious) historical character, an Irish maid convicted in 1843 of a brutal double murder. While brilliantly dramatising the Victorian urge to medicalise femininity, this novel dignifies its central character even as it wrings from the question of her guilt a merciless degree of suspense.
Michael Caine and Hugh Jackman in The Prestige. Photograph: Stephen Vaughan/AP
7. The Prestige by Christopher Priest (1995)
Christopher Nolan’s darkly glamorous film version made this the best known of Priest’s books. While it did justice to the novel’s duelling Victorian stage magicians, it jettisoned its contemporary framing and, in doing so, much of its psychological subtlety. In Priest’s original telling, the historical rivals are discovered by a down-on-his-luck writer named Andrew Westley. As the magicians stalk one another, each maddened by the mystery of the other’s “prestige” (or trick), Westley is haunted by a phantom twin, and it is the reader who must discover the true nature of the illusion.
8. The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton (2013)
Set in the New Zealand of the 1860s, this novel transports us not to the midst of Victoria’s reign but to the very periphery of her possessions, a disparity that Catton’s immense novel ingeniously exploits. Taking on the guise of a genteel pastiche, its customs seem familiar at first, but we soon find ourselves in unmapped territory. The intricate plot (involving a vanished prospector, a missing fortune and an ailing prostitute) is absorbing but becomes almost incidental, with Catton’s fiendish use of omniscient perspective purporting to show us everything while keeping us artfully in the dark.
9. Master Georgie by Beryl Bainbridge (1998)
Shortlisted for the Booker prize five times, it was not until after her death in 2010 thatBainbridge was finally honoured with a specially created award. Although it was chosen from among her novels by a popular vote, Master Georgie is one of Bainbridge’s most challenging and austere works. Indeed, she herself remarked that most people needed to read it three times before they understood it. She may have been right. With its carefully modulated perspectives and slyly observed details, this refracted Bildungsroman follows a young surgeon’s almost helpless progress towards the muck and depravity of the Crimean war, and it reveals new and brilliant facets no matter how often you come back to it.
10. The Quickening Maze by Adam Foulds (2009)
Set in Epping Forest in 1840, The Quickening Maze examines the unlikely circumstances that brought the poets John Clare and Alfred Tennyson into brief conjunction. Clare’s alcoholism and declining artistic fortunes have brought him to High Beach Asylum, while the young and untested Tennyson, a guest of the asylum-keeper, is so self-absorbed that he scarcely notices the amorous attentions of his host’s young daughter. Animating such looming and disparate figures could have made for heavy going, but Foulds gives them human scale and careful shading, illuminating all he touches with his swift and shimmering prose.
