fiction

DEFT NARRATIVE DEVICES

Morag Fraser

Peter Carey
True History of the Kelly Gang
UQP, $50.00hb, $30.00pb, 401pp
0 7022 3167 3 hb 0 7022 3188 6 pb

YOU CAN'T ESCAPE THE black square with the ominous slit: it's about as familiar and inevitable in Australia as the icon for male or female. Ned's iron mask now directs you to the National Library's website of Australian images. There it is, black on red ochre, an importunate camera, staring back as we look through it. It's modernist, postmodernist, merged into desert art just as surely as Ned has been incorporated into the Dreaming of the Yarralin people of north-western Australia. The black imp of myth and Sidney Nolan's depiction is now wild and out of control -- as unpredictable as a Mimi spirit and about as omnipresent.
      I don't believe Peter Carey set out to tame the mythic Ned Kelly in his True History of the Kelly Gang.True, he gives him a black face, real feet that need real boots, a memorable voice and a familial context. Carey is an unabashed apologist -- a romantic apologist what's more -- for Kelly and his clan, but he is also too much the ironist not to be alive to the density and contradictions of the historical record. He seems almost as interested in why Ned Kelly matters to Australia, what he says about what we have been and what we want to believe about ourselves, as he is in revising or revisiting the old story. Or at least that's the subterranean pulse. The wherefore. But novelists transmute wherefores into story, and Peter Carey, whatever else you might say about him , is a master at telling a tale, and a slave to the imperative. Give him mouldy underfelt and he'll have you flying to Samarkand.
      The tale he tells in True History of the Kelly Gang has a dramatic logic and a necessary economy of means. Carey shapes the story, neatens many (not all) of the ragged edges of the conflicted Kelly history. He explains rather more perhaps than can be explained, even by the now immense historical archive. Carey's Ned is a boy too attached to his mother. 'Hubba hubba Mamma is your girl' is his brother Dan's drunken taunt. The Oedipal bond is a deft narrative device -- it explains some of Ned's moves. With his mother still imprisoned, Carey's Ned knows his duty -- to get money (the bank robberies), see his mother free, and assume responsibility for the family -- to stick around rather than lighting out for the territory.
      Carey's Ned also has a woman/wife and a child. The wife is dispensable. Carey ships her off to California so she is not around to complicate the determined tragedy of the last stand at Glenrowan. But the child is the destined recipient of the first person narrative of the novel, the thirteen bundles, variously manufactured, bound and scrawled, of 'true history'. She is also their rationale.

Parcel 1...National Bank letterhead...my daughter you are presently too young to understand a word I write but this history is for you and will contain no single lie may I burn in Hell if I speak false.
     The 'True' of the title is a multi-layered, serious tease. Carey's story keeps intersecting with historical and traditional material. He magpies as and when it suits his imaginitive purpose and structural intent. He quotes, often to prefigure. His Ned at age fifteen concludes that 'such is life', when he witnesses the fate of a sniphorse, an accidental casualty of one of bush-ranger Harry Power's exploits.
She had taken the bullet high in her shoulder and when she cooled would certainly be lame for good. [Ned is shot in the right leg at Glenrowan.] Thence only death a sledgehammer between her blindfolded eyes such is life.
There is a little too much of such flagging in the novel. It reads like rigging fate. But that, I think, is the way Carey builds his figure of Ned: as a man destined, by extraordinary capacity and circumstance, to a kind of monomaniacal martyrdom.Carey twists the record. His Ned kills Mr Murray's heifer and the father, John 'Red' Kelly takes the blame -- and the fatal jail term -- for it. It was actually John Kelly who killed and butchered the heifer. But the incident in Carey gives substance to Ned's sense of responsibility and of doom.

Incomplete:

Morag Fraser is the editor of Eureka Street.

Your comments are invited: email them in a letter toAustralian Book Review
Return to Australian Book Review /November 2000