Review: True History of the Kelly Gang

True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I expected I would love this one – I mean, it’s a Booker Prize winner and it deals with a gang of Australian outlaws – so it’s mildly disappointing to say I merely liked it very much.

On the one hand, I admire what Carey is doing with this novel. He’s taking what we know of the historical Ned Kelly and wrapping a story around it. We get an individual whose frustrations and passions lead him to quasi-insurrection, and we get a sense of the larger social and ethnic tensions roiling late 19th Century Australia. After all, this is an Aussie-Irish under-class dealing with the same global oppression as the victims of the Famine and the Thomas Nast-caricaturing of the United States.

And, above all, Carey finds a remarkable voice in which to tell the story. I looked up a bit of the original writings of Kelly, and it’s amazing to hear him on the page. In an interview appended to the novel, Carey talks of discovering Kelly’s voice and imagining the outlaw as a kind of proto-Joyce or proto-Beckett, someone tearing familiar language into strips and then weaving them back into a fresh whole.

So, yes, I did love all that, and I can mostly see how this won the Booker.

At the same time, though, I suspect much of the power of this novel turns on an awareness of how Carey is manipulating the known fragments of Kelly’s history into a whole. I’ve done a little digging, but I can’t “know” Kelly in the way of an Australian who sees him as perhaps the country’s most famous individual. That is, Kelly represents something in Australian culture, something crucial as a point of contrast with what Carey is doing with him, but that doesn’t come through within the novel. It takes a familiarity with the Australian experience.

I am certain this happens in reverse all the time. There must be elements of Gatsby that don’t translate because the touchstones are so tied into distinctly U.S. culture – don’t get me started, but I remain convinced that only a handful of Gatsby readers recognize the cultural significance of the Jewish gangster Meyer Wolfsheim against the backdrop of the East and West Egg socialites we meet.

As a bottom line, then, part of the very success of Carey’s novel diminishes my pleasure in it. His story is so compelling, it seems so whole, that it’s easy to lose sight of the full way in which he has woven the different known chapters into his larger imagined history. In his interview, he even says as much; he was disappointed with some of the early, positive reviews that didn’t seem to realize the depth of his authorial project. It took later reviewers to point out the extent to which he’d added depth to the source material, to note how dramatically he was consciously reshaping a foundational myth of Aussie culture.

Even as I recognize the scope of that ambition, I find I’m like the first-wave of those reviewers. I enjoy the story and characterizations here – though I’m mildly frustrated that Carey condenses the best-known incidents (because his Aussie readership would already know them) into newspaper-style re-retellings – but I am aware that perhaps the highest ambition of the work falls outside what I can see of it.

I’m loosely working my way through significant contemporary Australian literature, with my current favorite being Richard Flanagan. I’d heard Carey was the current heavyweight champ in that field. Good as this is, I have to score this round for my man Flanagan.


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