Robin Hood of the Outback
By ANTHONY QUINN
TRUE HISTORY OF THE KELLY GANG By Peter Carey. 352 pp. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. $25.
PETER CAREY, digging away at the past, is one of fiction's great treasure hunters. His best work combines Victorian grandeur and Australian earthiness, from the tall tales of a 139-year-old con man in ''Illywhacker'' through the tragicomedy of gamblers and glass churches in ''Oscar and Lucinda'' to the Dickensian sweep of London high and low life in ''Jack Maggs.'' These books are notable for a deft manipulation of mood, swaying between the fantastical and the realistic, the grotesque and the matter-of-fact, the serious and the playful, a medley that seems of a piece with Carey's satirical yet forgiving overview. They are also, despite their period settings, intellectually modern novels; reading them, one never loses the sense of a late-20th-century affability and insight beneath the 19th-century furnishings.
Carey's latest book is bolder and more challenging than anything he has attempted before. ''True History of the Kelly Gang'' isn't merely a historical novel; it's a fully imagined act of historical impersonation. It purports to be the confession of the outlaw Ned Kelly, whose name in his native Australia carries the sort of thrilling resonances that his contemporary Jesse James enjoys in the United States. (James and Kelly died within two years of each other.) Practically the only thing non-Australians know about Kelly is that he went about his business with his head encased in an iron helmet. (And perhaps a few others recall that Tony Richardson directed Mick Jagger in an unremarkable biopic of the outlaw in 1970.) Carey's novel is a thoroughly researched portrait, but it's also a corrective to the popular conception -- even among some Australians -- of Kelly as a thug, thief and murderer. The Ned Kelly of this account is nothing less than a folk hero and freedom fighter, a defiant exemplar of Irish-Australian cussedness in the face of colonial oppression.
The form and style of the novel could hardly be more striking. Couched as a rough-hewn apologia drawn from 13 parcels of dogeared papers Kelly has written while on the run, ''True History'' is dedicated to the infant daughter he has yet to see and, he promises, contains ''no single lie may I burn in Hell if I speak false.'' He hopes that he will live ''to see you read these words to witness your astonishment and see your dark eyes widen and your jaw drop when you finally comprehend the injustice we poor Irish suffered in this present age.''
One's own eyes widen a little as this strange narrative unfolds in a prose that seems initially to be as untidy and agrammatical as subway graffiti. As we adjust to the raggedly punctuated flow, however, Kelly's voice develops into an expansive and malleable instrument, bristling with shafts of wit and poetic grace notes. And because this story is intended for the innocent eyes of his daughter, its prose maintains an odd, disarming chasteness even in moments of stress, as when Ned's mother rails against her harsh treatment at the hands of the authorities: ''She used many rough expressions I will not write them here. . . . She would blow their adjectival brains out.'' (''Adjectival'' is Ned's delicate substitute for something more explicit, and thus perhaps the most frequently used word in the whole book.)
Carey presents the territory of northeast Victoria in the 1860's and 70's as scourged by outrageous poverty and harshness. Ned, born of immigrant Irish stock, grows up adoring his fiery-tempered mother, Ellen, whose life is a continual war of provocation with her feckless husband and the ''traps'' (police constables) who persecute her kinfolk. Ned's early years are haunted by dreadful suspicions about his convict father's shadowy past in Ireland, centering upon the discovery of a dress whose significance is only explained some 250 pages later. ''I lost my own father from a secret he might as well been snatched by a roiling river fallen from a ravine I lost him from my heart so long I cannot even now properly make the place for him that he deserves.'' There is something of Dickens in the pathos of Ned's school days. Mocked behind his back for being barefoot and rated by his own schoolmaster as ''a notch beneath the cattle,'' as were all ''micks,'' he is nevertheless desperate to be appointed the class ink monitor. Indeed, Dickens might have created Ned himself, such is the heroic force of his character: he is resourceful, sensitive, loyal and brave, never more so than when he rescues a schoolmate from drowning. The father of the boy presents him with a ''peacock green'' sash in gratitude: ''The Protestants of Avenel had seen the goodness in an Irish boy it were a mighty moment in my early life.''
Ned's courage and nobility of spirit become the rocks on which this story is founded, a circumstance that occasionally prompts the reader to wonder if Carey, in trying to redress received opinion, has to some degree idealized his subject. While Ned himself never protests as much, his life for the most part seems entirely blameless. Apprenticed under duress to the bush ranger Harry Power, he is virtually kidnapped into a life of crime: ''The boy never knew he were being taught the path of his life.'' Having escaped, he receives a less than heartfelt welcome from his mother, who, it turns out, has sold him into Power's service. He is then made a scapegoat among his own kin on the false charge of betraying Power.
In and out of prison for most of his teenage years, Ned turns to horse stealing and, later, bank robbing, but only because his family has been continually hounded and traduced by the authorities. Be it a perfidious constable or a vindictive magistrate, the whole force of colonial rule seems to have conspired against the Kelly clan. Carey wants us to feel that Ned becomes who he is on compulsion, that he is driven to live outside the law by the malign servants of a corrupt system. Our sympathy is put to its ultimate test when a police task force is dispatched to kill Ned, his brother Dan and their two friends -- to wit, the Kelly gang -- and instead finds itself caught in a bloody ambush at Stringybark Creek, a ''day of horror,'' as Ned describes it, by the end of which ''my skin were sour with death.''
Again, Carey weights Ned's words with such remorse that one feels a kind of saintliness is being bestowed upon him: we have seen him as devoted son, loyal friend, passionate husband, proud Irishman -- now, he's a tender killer. Once he turns Robin Hood and raises a rebel band of farmers (''The British Empire had supplied me with no shortage of candidates these was men who had had their leases denied for no other crime than being our friends . . . men with sons in gaol men who witnessed their hard won land taken up by squatters''), it becomes impossible for us not to saddle up and ride with him to his terminus as tragic martyr.
And we do so very willingly. Whatever one's (slight) misgivings about its status as a ''true history,'' the book's power as a narrative is nearly overwhelming. The twang of Ned's untutored but vibrant prose would be hypnotic in itself, yet Carey adapts it to a series of set pieces -- Ned's rescue of the drowning boy, a boxing match, his first meeting with the woman who will become his wife, the ambush, even the small drama of felling a tree -- that are as gripping as any you could wish to read. His control of dialogue is similarly impressive, whether it be droll or deadpan or just plain laconic. Nor is it simply that Carey has immersed himself in the texture and language of late-19th-century rural Australia. More than this, he has transformed sepia legend into brilliant, even violent, color, and turned a distant myth into warm flesh and blood. Packed with incident, alive with comedy and pathos, ''True History of the Kelly Gang'' contains pretty much everything you could ask of a novel. It is an adjectival wonder.
Anthony Quinn is film critic for The Independent in London.
Link:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F0DE1DF1F38F934A35752C0A9679C8B63&sec=&pagewanted=print
