True History of the Kelly Gang

Rating:
Summary: A Voice For The Reader...
Review: I didn't like this book at all!!! There is rarely a sentence where the author did not quote the main players as saying such nonsense as "We got the adjectival horse out of the barn..." For heavens sakes!!! Also, he uses this commonly, "Let's just shoot the b____g". So what? If your senses are offended by swearing, leave it out. I think this book was written while the author was asleep. It is jerky and hard to read and relatively uninteresting (which is a feat considering the setting of old Australia). Don't waste your time. This is an adjectival book.

Rating:
Summary: Check out the audio
Review: Like many books written in the vernacular, this one is absolutely wonderful on audio, in this case read by Gianfranco Negroponte. As one reviewer said, the voice Carey creates for Australian outlaw Ned Kelly is the novel's singular achievement. Listening to Negroponte's skillful reading, you literally hear that voice, plus you're relieved of struggling with the lack of punctuation. Highly recommended. Riveting throughout, and in the end, very touching.

Rating:
Summary: The song of Australia
Review: Mr Carey's novel relates the epic life of Ned Kelly in Australia in the second half of the 19th century. The text comes in the form of 13 parcels of varying length (from 7 to 50 pages). Sometimes they are sheets of National Bank or Bank of New South Wales letterhead, a cloth booklet, octavo pages, open envelopes providing space for text, a pocket diary or the reverse side of advertising fliers. They cover Ned's adventurous life until the manuscript abruptly terminates when he was 26 years old and it is told in a tone so wild and passionate that the reader often believes that the bushranger is speaking to him from the grave! It is a breathtaking account of an existence marked by a cascade of events where Ned is in turn a reformer, a criminal, a horse thief, a farmer, a bushranger and an orphan. Ned's voice is very convincing, continually creating new surprises on every page despite the plainness of his language, or rather perhaps because of it. Actually his uneducated voice is very much part of the originality of Mr Carey's novel.
The critics have ranked Mr Carey next to Charles Dickens and Lawrence Sterne - very rightly so, in my opinion.

Rating:
Summary: Peter Carey's novel attempts to find Ned Kelly's voice
Review: I suspect for many Americans their first introduction to the legend of Ned Kelly was when the Australian icon of his helmet was incorporated into the opening ceremonies of the 2000 Sydney Olympics. Of course there are those who knew of Kelly from Tony Richardson's 1970 film "Ned Kelly," where Mick Jagger played the title role, or even the 1993 film "Reckless Kelly" with Yahoo, which updated the Kelly legend, for lack of a better word, to the present. That idea that Kelly is the Robin Hood of Australia is enough of a touchstone for most to understand Kelly's importance to the Australian psyche, but there are those who consider him to be nothing more than a glorified outlaw, more like Jesse James than Robin Hood. Significantly, those views break down all ethnic lines, with Irish-Australians seeing the hero and Anglo-Australians insisting on the villain. Gregor Jordan's 2003 film "Ned Kelly," based on Robert Drewe's "Our Sunshine" and starring well known Australian actors Heath Ledger, Geoffrey Rush and Naomi Watts will renew interest in the true story and may well lead viewers to this volume.

Peter Carey's "True History of the Kelly Gang" is, despite the title a fictional novel which won the Booker Prize in 2001. The novel is inspired in part by Sidney Nolan's famous series of paintings of Ned Kelly and is told in a first person narrative style that is based on Kelly's own "Jerilderie Letter," which provided his version of the events that led to him being an outlaw with a 8,000 pound reward on his head, the largest in the world up to that time. The conceit is that Kelly has written these words, intended them to be read by a daughter who was born and raised in California, trying to explain his life.

Carey's book is not a substitute for the true history it purports to be, including people and events that are not part of the historical record (to wit, Mary and the baby), as he attempts to connect the dots of Ned Kelly's life. Ultimately this is a character study wherein Carey emphasizes Kelly's strong Irish-Australian identity, his fierce loyalty to family and friends, and his native wit and inherent shrewdness. We know from the letters he dictated and the transcript of his trial that Kelly was intelligent and Carey plays that up throughout the book, because essentially what is happening here is that he is justifying the icon image of Kelly that exists in the popular mind of Australia. At the same time there is humanizing, for Kelly has a strong attachment to his mother and forges a new relationship with his brother Dan as the Kelly Gang heads towards its fate. He also hates the English as much as they hate them, which is no mean feat. In the end what you get out of this book is not Ned Kelly's story but rather his voice, although its authenticity is, of course, open to debate.

Ultimately "True History of the Kelly Gang" is not meant as an introduction to the story of Ned Kelly. Jordan's film is out on DVD now so it can serve that function as others as it did for me. Carey will give us more of a notion of what Kelly might have been thinking and certainly a more complete picture of the world in which Kelly lived and died. The climax of this book is not the battle at Glenrowan but a conversation with a school teacher named Curnow, who is able to raise questions that go beyond the legal points on which Kelly's trial, convinction, and execution turned. This is a discussion held through the prism of history and needs to be read in that light and reaffirms once again the cultural axiom "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."






Rating:
Summary: I usually don't get that excited about fiction, but...
Review: This book really blew me away. It is hard for me to believe that there are people out there who wouldn't like this thing. In a way, I can't really even think of it as fiction.

I found myself thinking again and again, I bet this really IS the true history of the Kelly gang..., and I got the sense that Peter Carey himself is absolutely convinced it is. In a way, I guess I am convinced of it myself.

What I found most moving about this modern classic is how Carey explores what it means to be a boy and a man through Ned Kelly. The discussion of Kelly's feelings for his mother - that desire to protect her, while sensing that she doesn't really ultimately want his protection, and that she doesn't entirely reciprocate those feelings of protection - is really touching, bittersweet as it is.

The discussion of Kelly's first true love, as well as how his sense of justice, and his longing to be a hero, motivated him, all made for a really touching and compelling read. I ended up feeling really enriched by this, kind of like when I read Anna Karenina. It seems a lot more than mere entertainment.

I keep trying to get people to read this, so I hope this review spurs someone to do so.

Rating:
Summary: A Voice For The Reader...
Review: I didn't like this book at all!!! There is rarely a sentence where the author did not quote the main players as saying such nonsense as "We got the adjectival horse out of the barn..." For heavens sakes!!! Also, he uses this commonly, "Let's just shoot the b____g". So what? If your senses are offended by swearing, leave it out. I think this book was written while the author was asleep. It is jerky and hard to read and relatively uninteresting (which is a feat considering the setting of old Australia). Don't waste your time. This is an adjectival book.