Given sufficient time for a man and his life to pass into legend, to become the stuff of heros and villains, love and tragedy, the truth of a thing becomes virtually impossible to grasp. For too much first-hand knowledge of legends, and the world they unfolded within, have been lost to the rigors of time. Robbed, then, of context and neutrality, we impose our own wishful narrative upon these important, cultural events, viewing them through our own biased lenses and judging them by the standards of our times, not those that birthed them. But what if there were compelling, contemporary accounts of these events, accounts that survived time's erosion to inform our present? Would they change our view? Would they add flesh to bloodless myth? Mr. Carey speculates and demonstrates in his sweeping, epistolary novel.
A key figure in the early history of Australia, Ned Kelly (1854-1880) was a legendary robber of banks and a thief of horses, a lover of women and a giver to the poor. The son of Irish immigrants, his father a convict and his mother a landholder's daughter, he came of age in a brutal period of colonial history in which the unforgiving law listened obsequiously to the rich while deeply ignoring the poor. This pervasive sense of injustice, along with the difficulty of making it in the hard-scrabble world of frontier Australia, combined to limit Ned Kelly's options and set him upon the path of crime that would earn him so much fame.
In boyhood, he was tasked with providing for his family. Having lost his father early, he spent his youth laboring to clear his family's uncultivated land while his mother managed his half-dozen siblings, earning coin for the table through the selling of spirits. Apprenticed, in adolescence, to a bushranger, the young Kelly learned the skills that would one day make him famous. However, in the process, he also earned himself the enmity of the police whose watchful eyes would never long stray from him. Consequently, the authorities would not be far afield when a combination of family disputes and police corruption exposed Kelly, now an adult, as an outlaw. Their subsequent pursuit of him would force Kelly deeper and deeper into banditry and crime until, pushed to his limits, he made one last stand against the men who had hassled, harangued and hobbled his him, his wife, and his family for the whole of his short life.
The winner of the 2000 Man Booker Prize, True History of The Kelly Gang is an engrossing tale of life in the face of corruption. Narratively driven by a fictionalized, 12-part autobiography of Ned Kelly's life from boyhood to demise, it captures not only the impossible challenges faced by settlers in 19th century Australia, but the extent to which its stratified culture all-but precluded those at the bottom of the social ladder from climbing out of the lawless and soul-crushing poverty into which they'd been sold. And so, as much as Mr. Carey should be commended for authenticating his account with the lively and colorful vernacular of the period, utterly convincing the reader, at times, that this is Ned Kelly's voice, the extent to which he vividly depicts the inescapable degradation of the poor is the virtue that carries his thoughtful, funny, harsh and ultimately tragic novel.
There have been, certainly, more worthy recipients of the Booker. After all, at root, Mr. Carey has simply re-imagined the biography of a real man's life. Yes, he has animated it with relationships and shootouts, glossed it with a sympathetic sheen and packaged it with an outlaw's captivating voice, feats all,but it remains another man's story, not one conceived of by the author's own mind. His is, I'm sure, not the only winner to draw inspiration from history, but surely Mr. Carey's stands alone in the fact that all of its creativity flows from its shaping,not its content.
Notwithstanding the extent to which the work has been cribbed from history, True History of The Kelly Gang is full of colorful cutthroats and crooked cops, legendary feats and tragic calamities, polished by a memorable brogue. This well-spiced stew is more than sufficient to drag over the line Mr. Carey's fascinating and sympathetic re-imagining of one man's life. (3/5 Stars)
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