True History of the Kelly Gang.

By Peter Carey.

Knopf

ISBN: 0375410848 352 pages. $25.00

Reviewed by Alex Marsh

The narrator of Peter Carey’s moving new novel is Ned Kelly, Australia’s most famous outlaw, whose home-made sentences sound not so much written as hacked into the manuscript we have the pleasure to read. It purports to be thirteen "parcels of stained and dog-eared papers" originally intended for the eyes of a daughter Kelly has never seen and never will see. They tell the story of his life, justify his deeds and recount Ned’s brief courtship of her mother. It is a breathless tale, as Kelly’s life was noble, brutal, and short. His narrative is framed by objective accounts, which help explain the provenance of the documents. These bookends are necessary because Ned Kelly was hanged in Melbourne Gaol in 1880 at the age of 26—the novel ends with an actual newspaper account of Ned Kelly’s execution. Yes, he had killed policemen and robbed some banks. But, if his own writings are to be believed, he had acted in self-defense; he was less an outlaw (or "bushranger’ in Aussie parlance) than a rebel—and a rebel with a just cause.

Surprisingly, the cause is Ireland. That is because in the 19^th century, Ireland under English domination is being reproduced down under, in New South Wales, a former penal colony at the ragged frontier of the bustling British Empire. The colony is full of Irish for the simple reason that it began as Britain’s Siberia for social undesirables. Soon after its discovery by Captain Cook, the new continent of Australia was pressed into service as the British Gulag—a parallel Robert Hughes has stressed in his great work of Australian history, The Fatal Shore. Approximately two hundred thousand people were shipped there against their will between 1780 and 1870. Many were Irish, a few of these were even Irish rebels. Once there, in prisons of positively lunar remoteness, the convicts were subjected to unending brutalities in the worst traditions of British so-called civilization, those of the Royal Navy, which Winston Churchill once epitomized as "rum, bum, and the lash." Carey has told parts of this story before, in Jack Maggs, a lively post-colonial riff on Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, with the heroic Maggs giving the lie to Dickens’s fawning Magwitch. His Booker-prize winning novel Oscar & Lucinda is set in the same period as this book but in a transoceanic world of steamships, plate glass and iron. Unlike these other novels, all the action here takes place on Australian soil. True History is a frontier book, a "western," a world where horses count as much as men, a world of guns and poverty and hardscrabble farming, a world of pregnant women, prison and corrupt police, the ‘traps." Here in the antipodes, the old world will not die and a new one waits to be born.

Carey’s genius is that he is able to slip History with its capital H into Kelly’s narrative without making the putative author seem too knowing. The account of Ned and his kid brother felling "a mighty ironbark it were 8 ft. across as old as history its bark so black and rough it were like the armour of a foreign king" only becomes prophetic on second reading, when it wonderfully reveals Ned’s nation-making problem. To clear this properly pre-historic landscape feels like liberating it from foreign domination. Likewise his little gang of four, younger brother Dan, the odd, dress-wearing, would-be "Lady Claire Boy" Steve Hart, and opium-smoking hard guy Joe Byrne only dimly sense their destiny. Greatness steals upon them, unwanted. They are driven to a kind of politics, as they are driven to outlawry and to their deaths, by an imperial giant wanting to grind their bones to make its bread.

Insofar as Carey’s life-long literary project is the true story of his country, the true invention of Australia by Australians, this True History picks up the story with the children of the convicts trying to carve a place for themselves in the bush. Ned Kelly’s father has survived untold years in Van Dieman’s Land (now Tasmania), by all accounts one of the worst places on earth in the 19^th century. "Your grandfather were a quiet and secret man he had been ripped from his home in Tipperary and transported to the prisons of Van Dieman’s Land I do not know what was done to him he never spoke of it," Ned writes to his daughter, " When they had finished with their tortures they set him free and he crossed the sea to Victoria. He were by this time 30yr. of age red headed and freckled with his eyes always slitted against the sun…" Determined to evade the attention of the law, but unable, it seems, to avoid it, Red Kelly fights a losing battle between the police and the bottle. His spirited wife Ellen seems not to have been party to his political secrets and his strange habit of riding off in women’s clothing alienates him from his son. The Kellys’ main opponents are neither the decimated aboriginal Australians, nor the alien climate. Their enemies are the large landowners, Britons all, who seek to engross the land, with the help of the criminal justice system and it’s minions, the police, many of them Irish and Protestant. To just about everyone, it really is Ireland all over again. For Ned, writing his daughter so that she can "comprehend the injustice we poor Irish suffered in this present age, " the parallel is clear; he imbibed the Irish heroic stories with his mother’s milk: "She knew the stories of Conchobor and Dedriu and Mebd the tale of Cuchulainn I still see him stepping into his war chariot it bristles with points of iron and narrow blades with hooks and hard prongs and straps and loops and cords."

This vision is important for more that its political weight; it prefigures Ned’s own interest in military technology, specifically the suits of armor made from ploughshares that Kelly and his men will wear in their final battle even though the true inspiration for the armor in this account are not European knights but the ironclad ships Monitor and Virginia of our own Civil War. Ned Kelly was a modernizing man—a man who would prefer to look towards the future, if the past would only let him.

The True History of the Kelly Gang is mostly the coming-of-age story of Ned Kelly himself. That story and the rich and strange language Carey has evolved to tell it with, will remind more than one American reader of Huck Finn—another wild colonial boy of Irish descent who finds himself in the middle of history. But Huck is different than Ned in one respect. He has no mother. Motherless, he is free to "light out for the territories" at the end of Twain’s great, tormented novel. Ned Kelly, on the other hand, has a mother and he loves her deeply, and Oedipally; she is the love of his life, a charge leveled at him even by his friends. When Ned, now twenty, returns from a three year prison term he finds his mother shacked up with a young American of his own age, a flash young horse-thief: "It disgusted me to see he were young enough to be myself." He can only watch, sickened, as his mother nurses his rival’s child. Nonetheless, when the police can’t catch Ned and his three companions, they arrest his mother on a trumped up charge. Forcibly separated from her nursing baby, she is used as a hostage to compel Ned Kelly to turn himself in, and as insurance against his escape to America.

Ned’s first memory is of his mother baking a cake for her younger brother, Ned’s Uncle James, a fifteen-year-old delinquent who is being held in a local lock-up for "duffing a heifer." The four year old Ned trails his mother through the pouring rain, sees her humiliation by "a huge red jowled creature the Englishman…who could destroy my mother if he so desired" and follows her as she kneels in the mud to shove the broken cake under the door of the hut that serves as James’s jail.

That is young Ned Kelly’s world and a fair sample of his rough but somehow lyrical language. Always seeking his mother’s attention and love, Ned’s attitude is ever one of somewhat apologetic admiration. It has to be apologetic because after his father’s death, Ned’s mother operates an illegal shebeen and is forced to trade on her considerable physical charms to support her ever-growing family. She is so desperate she even farms out her oldest son to an uncertain apprenticeship in bushranging under the tutelage of one of her lovers, Harry Power. From Power, a classic old-style highwayman, the essentially good Ned learns more than he ever wanted to know about outlawry—especially how unprofitable it can be. And Ned learns about betrayal when he is falsely blamed for Harry Power’s arrest. His life path seems set in stone. He can drift into chronic criminality and prison, or he can stand up for himself. He chooses to die on his feet rather than to live on his knees.

Do you remember a movie about Ned Kelly that appeared about 30 years ago with Mick Jagger as the ironclad Ned? After reading Carey’s novel nothing could seem to perversely misguided as casting the foppish Englishman in this role—its like Hugh Grant playing Daniel Boone. True History of the Kelly Gang sets the record straight—and then some--about Ned Kelly. Through this gripping tale the real-life outlaw becomes a national hero. What Carey has accomplished here is probably only fully fathomable by an Australian, but from our American perspective, which shares some if not all of the Irish/English antagonism that this novel evokes, we can see that Carey has written the true history of his community. He has also, almost certainly, penned one of the best novels ever written by an Australian, and in his uncanny Aussie rendering of Ned Kelly’s speech, he has permanently extended the range of the English language.

Alec Marsh (marsh@hal.muhlberg.edu) teaches poetry at Muhlenberg College.