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.

Fiction: Quicksilver

So this is the real meat of what I wanted to do with this blog. I've been reading a lot of historical fiction in the past year or so, and I wanted a place where I could think out loud about technique in the stuff I was reading. Why start with Quicksilver? Two reasons. One, for all what I say below may sound critical, I thought it was a great read. And, two, because, while I had read historical fiction before (I mean, who growing up where I did could avoid Johnny Tremaine?), this was the first piece that really made me think consciously about method. And, I think it did, because it’s kind of a crossover piece.

Stephenson started out as a science fiction writer. (Snow Crash, The Diamond Age.) He had a mainstream hit with Cryptonomicon. After that, he started on the Baroque Cycle, of which this is the first volume. And he’s pretty transparent about taking some of the obsessions and techniques of science fiction and using them in his historical fiction. There is no doubt that this is historical fiction, but it feels different than something that Bernard Cromwell, or Dorothy Dunnett, or Phillippa Gregory might write. So, we’ll start here. (And, needless to say, some SPOILERS below.)

• There’s crossover with Cryptonomicon (among other things, the main characters are Shaftoes and Waterhouses), which is a nice marketing technique. It pulls in people who otherwise might have been turned off by the length or the historical period. Remember that last really long book you read and loved? Here’s more of the same. Sort of.
• In fact he starts the book with Enoch Root, who one assumes is a predecessor of the Enoch Root in Cryptonomicon. ("Enoch rounds the corner just as the executioner raises the noose above the woman's head.") Why another Enoch Root? Now that I’ve finished, I think I know, but, I have to admit, this one bugged the hell out of me for nigh-on 2,700 pages.
• And the length is an issue. In hardcover, this book is a whopping 916 pages of narrative, and there is no question that, with something this long, there can be vast stretches where the thing drags. I was talking to a work colleague about this, and he mentioned that he likes long books like this because he can skim past the stuff he finds less interesting to get to the stuff that appeals to him. I can understand some of that impulse, but in a market already saturated with books, do you really need to throw three 300 page books into one? (You think I'm kidding? Stephenson has now released the Baroque Cycle as an eight-volume series, of which the first three volumes are titled Quicksilver, King of the Vagabonds, and Odalisque -- the three "books" in the Quicksilver I read.)
• One other issue is that, for all its length, this is definitely the first of a trilogy. It doesn’t really have its own beginning, middle and end. While the Waterhouse operation makes for a nice cliffhanger, it makes it tougher to read the Confusion, because you know that you won’t get a satisfying chapter out of it.
• Another reason for the occasional drag is that Stephenson does love his exposition. Granted, that's part of the hook here. He's good at exposition. But it works much better when he’s doing it as part of the narration than when he does it as dialogue (of which there are long stretches). His voice works well as narration. His dialogue, while not bad, can get didactic. (More on this in the later volumes.)
• He does take great pains to keep the plot moving, just in case you thought it was all going to be long historical lectures. So he starts off early getting you to the King of the Vagabonds -- a character that promises tours of the seedy underbelly of Europe.
  
• One thing Stephenson does a great job of in here is playing with language. Some of it is minor variations in spelling, "mathematick," "philosophick." But then occasionally he'll switch it up even more, using “phant’sy” for “fancy,” giving you an idea of the etymology. And then he will introduce as if it were a new concept the hotel, a French word for "private compound of nobles." The language is in a state of flux during this period, and Stephenson goes to pains to show that. At times it borders on the overly cute, but for the most part, it allows him to strike a colloquial tone while still maintaining that this the past is a foreign country. THIS is the stuff that gets me excited about Stephenson.