True History of the Kelly Gang

Peter Carey, True History of the Kelly Gang

Twelve years after the 1988 success of Oscar and Lucinda, the Australian author Peter Carey again won The Man Booker Prize with his seventh novel True History of the Kelly Gang, in which he fictionalizes the life of Ned Kelly, one of Australia’s most famous bushranger. With this well devised portrait of the legendary outlaw, Carey reintroduces to the reader the unknown history of the hero through the composition of thirteen parcels, each Kelly’s own disclosure of different stages in his life. Dotted with engaging incidents, True History is a fairly paced chronicle that documents the Australian lowlifes in the Victorian age, when people faces everyday injustices; Carey successfully constructs a faux-memoir that is honest and believable, a literary tribute carefully done to commemorate Ned Kelly and his Gang.

Compiled from several reports and autobiography, True History immediately constructs an illusional “fact” that seems genuine and true. The book begins with a report on the final defeat and capture of Ned Kelly then starts with his account over his early life. With knowledge over the tragic fate that will eventually befall the protagonist, readers inevitably detect an elegiac undertone throughout the book. As Kelly addresses each thirteen parcels, all of which resonate with fatherly love, to his daughter who he never has the chance to meet, readers are helplessly drawn towards the intriguing plot and the inescapable, namely the hero’s downfall.

Remotely reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy’s work, Carey’s portrait of the life in the wilderness is comparatively more lively and interesting. As readers follow Kelly’s steps through a journey along the Australia landscape, we are awed by the rawness of its beauty, the magnificence of its range, and with the brutal and violent truth within so mesmerizing a panorama.

True History tells a tragic tale of a hero, a man who fights against the injustices all his life to no avail. Ned Kelly is a steadfast character who, in the end, dies for his own principles. His unyielding characteristic may be the one reason that results in his final fall; however, it is also this rebellion to the corrupted authority that marks the essence of Australian spirit, the steadfastness in human beings. Carey’s reconstruction of the Kelly Gang recalls back to the reader a great moment of human nature, one that shines through time and culture. It is a reminder of the heroic past which seems so long lost in our generation; an attempt to recall in all of us the courage to stand for our own beliefs. For even if we failed miserably, our spirits, like that of Kelly’s, would remain to mark its very own effort in the end .