Books: True History of the Kelly Gang

• True History of the Kelly Gang won the Mann Booker Prize in 2001. I picked it up off a remainder shelf in San Francisco, ecstatic to find a Peter Carey novel on the cheap. Which tells you something about the sales power of the Mann Booker Prize in the United States.
• Carey uses a neat device here. While the “found papers” novel is nothing unusual (cf. any epistolary novel ever), he goes so far as to include archival notes, describing each set of documents. They make for a naturalistic way to break the novel up into chapters, and even allow for a old-fashioned “summation” of the story in each chapter.
• Which leads to one question. Why doesn’t the summation doesn’t wreck the narrative tension? Probably because the story isn’t really about what it’s supposed to be about. The Kelly boys are well-known in Australia. So what is the novel about?
• It seems, in part, to be about the ways in which outlaws get mythologized. But, more importantly, it’s about why Ned Kelly decided to write his life story. We know early on that he’s writing it for his daughter, but the reason he wants to pass it on stays hidden, which creates the same kind of tension found in the short story “First Defeat.” It seems that maybe, more than in other kinds of fiction, historical fiction can use this question of why the story exists in the first place to great effect.
• The narrative voice is one of the big attractions of the novel. (In the cover blurbs, Janet Maslin calls it one of the great acts of literary ventriloquism.) It’s effective, too, once you get used to it. I was concerned at first that it sounded too contrived, but I found myself considering it normal after about fifty pages. (Before that, it was work, but rewarding work.) It’s far from flowery. Instead, it’s hot-blooded but halting, earthy, but with the restraint of a man who’s trying not to set a bad example for the daughter he barely knew. The more one learns about Kelly, the more the voice in this novel seems a real achievement.
• Not that the novel is flawless. (Brilliant, just not flawless.) One question that bothered me: why does Carey start with the incident where Kelly improvises body armor in a gunfight? It’s an arresting image, but it’s not like the incident drives the story. And it’s not like he plays a whole lot with chronology otherwise. So what purpose does the flashforward serve? As is, it feels kind of like a bad JJ Abrams trick.