True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter CareyMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
"I were already travelling full tilt towards the man I would become."
Fresh from Peter Carey's first Booker Prize winning novel OSCAR & LUCINDA, I hastily moved on to his SECOND novel that also won the same prize!
This book demonstrates Carey's incredible range, for the whole thing start to finish is written in the form of a long letter from the Australian Robin Hood to his daughter, in what felt like Ned Kelly's voice. Carey as author absolutely disappears! I felt as if I had read the real autobiography (although what the book is, is the best kind of historical fiction: a serious literary work as well).
"I wished only to be a citizen I had tried to speak but the mongrels stole my tongue when I asked for justice they give me none."
Ned Kelly is so famous, UNESCO claims he inspired the world's first full length feature film (THE STORY OF THE KELLY GANG, 1906). He's the outlaw who faced off against police in a homemade suit of armor, allowing him to take several shots (around thirty) and living long enough to be hanged for his crimes.
After reading the first chapter depicting the famous last stand at Glenrowan, I could not put the book down!
For Carey, the child makes the man. Inspired by the actual handwritten manifesto of the real outlaw, Carey traces how an unjust government creates its own criminal heroes, taking the reader for a wild ride from Kelly's tormented childhood up until his infamous demise.
"In the heat of the furnace metals change their nature in olden days they could make gold from lead. Wait to see what more there is to hear my daughter for in the end we poor uneducated people will all be made noble in the fire."
In Carey's work, it is revealed that sometimes, an oppressive system's workers are the ultimate bad guys, and sometimes, those marked as "criminals" are merely men with their backs to the wall, fighting for a chance to live, a chance denied them by abusive policemen and indifferent authorities.
When policemen put hands on your innocent 14 year old sister and imprison your mother for a crime she did not commit, separating her from a 9 month old baby ... wouldn't you do as Ned Kelly did?
"We had showed the world what convict blood could do. We proved there were no taint we was of true bone blood and beauty born."
What emerges is a thoroughly sympathetic character, and provokes a curious reaction in the reader. For we realize that the only thing separating us from Ned Kelly and a life marked as an outlaw is one of pure luck and mere circumstance.
Carey, in a stroke of inspiration, carefully inserted the St. Crispin's Day speech from Shakespeare's Henry V on the eve of the final battle and I shall never read that speech again without remembering the week I was in thrall to this literary tribute to a just criminal.
"From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered;
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers."
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