True History of the Kelly Gang
by Peter Carey
Summary
Ned Kelly, the Irish Australian bushranger hanged in Melbourne in 1880 at the age of twenty five, tells his own story in thirteen parcels of paper addressed to the daughter he will never meet.
Carey builds the voice out of the Jerilderie Letter, the real fifty six page document Kelly dictated in 1879 to explain himself, and the result is one of the great feats of sustained voice in modern fiction: almost no commas, no apostrophes, adjectives that arrive slightly wrong, and the recurring substitution of adjectival for profanity, because Kelly is writing for his child. It takes about ten pages to stop noticing and then you cannot hear anything else.
The story is the familiar one made unfamiliar from the inside: a childhood of police harassment and rural poverty, a mother imprisoned, a slide into outlawry that Kelly presents throughout as a series of things done to him, and the armour and the last stand at Glenrowan.
Carey is careful to leave you unsure. Kelly is persuasive and self serving in the same sentences, and the reader is put in the position Australia has been in for a century, unable to decide whether this is a police victim or a murderer. That ambivalence is the achievement.
Australians tend to arrive already holding an opinion about Kelly, and readers elsewhere need none. Expect the voice to be a barrier for a chapter and a pleasure thereafter. Anyone who has enjoyed Cormac McCarthy's frontier novels will find familiar territory rendered in a completely different accent.
Historical Context & Significance
True History of the Kelly Gang won the Booker Prize in 2001, Peter Carey's second after Oscar and Lucinda in 1988, making him at that point only the second writer to win twice.
It beat a shortlist that included Ian McEwan's Atonement, which remains one of the more discussed near misses in the prize's record, along with David Mitchell's number9dream and Ali Smith's Hotel World.
Carey has said the idea began when he first came upon the Jerilderie Letter as a young man and could not forget the voice. The novel is scrupulous about the documented facts and openly invents where the record is silent, notably in giving Kelly a lover and a daughter, and Australian readers have argued about that licence ever since. Justin Kurzel filmed it in 2019.