I began this book some years ago and found it so painful I couldn't continue. One of these days, I'll get back to it. Obviously wonderful writing only exacerbated the horror of the abuse portrayed.

This was a good book but I aboandoned it halfway thru. I just did not care. Stupid artijival words ( )

Had I done the slightest bit of research before starting to read this book, I would have known that Ned Kelly and his "gang" were true historical figures and considered by many Australians as folk heroes. As it was I thought that Peter Carey was very clever to invent this fictional character and present him to us through a series documents supposedly written by the infamous Kelly himself. Of course, Carey did in fact write a fictional story since Kelly’s exact actions, thoughts and intentions will never be known to us and had to be made up based on historical documents. Ned’s first person account of his life story begins when he was a young boy living with his mother, six siblings, and occasionally with his father too, who was an outlaw and was repeatedly incarcerated. If we are to believe this fictional Ned’s version of the events, he became an outlaw because circumstances forced him to adopt that way of life although he was not in the least the hardened killer he was made out to be by the government and the media, and it’s hard not to feel sympathetic toward his cause. In any case, it’s an entertaining story with good guys that are bad and bad guys that are actually good, lots of horses, guns and shooting and a detailed description of what living as a poor farmer in Australia in the late 19th century, or being apprentice to an experienced bushranger (Australian outlaw) must have been like. It’s all made all the more colourful thanks to Ned’s simple "adjectival" prose which is riddled with the suggestion of expletives, although Ned’s obviously gone through pains to keep things as clean as he knew how since the raison d'être of these documents is for his daughter to one day have a true account of the events that led up to her father’s death. ( )

Carey messes with an Australian hero!

The story of Ned Kelly is something every Australian holds dear to their heart - bushranger supreme, but part larrikin lad and underdog. Perhaps much of what's been handed down is apocryphal, but we love it.

What was Carey trying to do? Set the record straight? Why bother? How could he, anyway, with much of the 'fact' lost forever?

Carey has done historical fiction before and more successfully. For instance, in Jack Maggs any 'facts' (if there were any) are subsumed into wonderful fiction. And Illywacker and Oscar and Lucinda are more magical and fantastical than historical.

I put the Kelly book down within sight of the end. I just couldn't bring myself to finish it. I didn't like the fact that I could not tell the fact from the fiction. Perhaps I didn't want my illusions shattered.

I'm not sure Australian's want their heroes reinterpreted.

Don't get me wrong - I love much of Peter Carey's work [Illywacher, Oscar & Lucinda, Jack Maggs - he is one of my favourite authors], but I can't help seeing True History of the Kelly Gang as a shameless attempt to 'milk' a good story.

It must have worked - or, I'm wrong - because the book as won literary acclaim, having won both the Man Booker and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize in 2001. [But in the Miles Franklin Award (Australia's own), it was only shortlisted!] ( )

Ever since my high school boyfriend outed me to my youthful music idol as a slavering fangirl, I resolved to be moderate in my attitudes towards artists whose work I admire. Not that I want to downplay my enjoyment of their art, or affect a "too cool for enthusiasm" attitude. But I realized that day at the indie-rock festival how wrong it was that I was uncomfortable speaking face-to-face with this personable, modest woman, all because I had elevated her onto an unreasonable pedestal. I was unable to relate to her as a person, because my veneration of her got in the way, and I was unable to take myself seriously as a fellow musician, because of my veneration for her art. And that, it seemed to me, was a situation worth avoiding in the future.

All of which is to say: my long-time resolution is being put to a severe test by the novels of Peter Carey.

On the plane back from New Hampshire in October, I was practically hyperventilating over the final pages of Carey's Oscar and Lucinda, having to stop after every chapter and decompress for ten minutes before moving on. On the way back from (appropriately enough) Australia, I devoured the entirety of his My Life as a Fake. And now, having just burned through True History of the Kelly Gang, I have to admit to a certain amount of giddy adulation. Carey's consistent ability to create a strong, vital narrative voice; the sheer creative exuberance of his language; the crippling pathos of his storylines and the way his characters grip your heart and won't let go: reading his work is artistically, mentally and emotionally an utter joy.

One of my favorite qualities in a novel is a narrative voice so distinctive that I carry it around with me in my head while going about my business, and Ned Kelly's is a beautiful example. The language and character development here are intimately linked, in a way much more sophisticated than the over-used equation of "writing in dialect" with "uneducated" and/or "stupid." Kelly's unorthodox grammar and punctuation do point, of course, to his lack of formal education, but his style as a whole does so much more, immersing the reader in a wild, hybrid, semi-Biblical landscape that flexes and reels through the narrative, at times becoming so taut that it approaches poetry, yet never seeming unnatural. From his first sentence, Carey had me:

I lost my own father at 12 yr. of age and know what it is to be raised on lies and silences my dear daughter you are presently too young to understand a word I write but this history is for you and will contain no single lie may I burn in Hell if I speak false.

Even in these scant lines, so much of Kelly is present: his anger and his tenderness, his self-justification and his inescapable ties to past and family. And, of course, his religion, for being poor Irish Catholic "currency" (the nominally free offspring of convicts forcibly settled on Australian soil) is at the heart of Kelly's identity and his actions.

One of the many things I love about Carey's novels is how thought-provoking and ambiguous their morality tends to be. From a self-sacrificing love expressed by a gambling addict as a suicidal bet, to a mysterious manuscript whose ownership is so murky that an obsessed collector is left wandering in a morass of half-truth, his characters operate within moral frameworks that are engaged with tradition, yet strikingly unique. Kelly Gang is somewhat less unexpected in its morality than either Oscar & Lucinda or My Life as a Fake - after all, the rise and inevitable fall of the folk-hero outlaw has a well-established canon behind it, from Robin Hood to Jesse James to Don Vito Corleone - but Carey creates a typically nuanced version of the stock character. Rather than taking to crime to alleviate the suffering of the peasantry, or out of dreams of glory, Kelly is born, like all currency, on the edge of the law, and slides gradually over the line under the pressure of poverty, police harassment and family loyalty. At the same time, he is far from a helpless victim of circumstance. Kelly is passionately engaged with his world and his system of honor; the tragedy lies in the radical difference between his understanding of what is honorable, and the definition held by the colonizing English police.

As an interesting take on the outlaw archetype, I particularly liked the scene in which Kelly resolves to start robbing banks. Railroaded into hiding after a police-killing that was two-thirds self-defence and one-third accident, Kelly comes to the realization that the only thing capable of protecting him and his brother from the police are the poor inhabitants of the bush, and resolves to win their sympathies by stealing from the relatively rich and giving to the dirt poor. This is a much more practical, yet still sympathetic, picture of the thought process leading to the Robin Hood mode of operation, than the standard assumption of selfless outrage on behalf of the peasantry. I liked it, and I liked Kelly. I also liked the way in which Kelly's genuine affection for, and identification with, the poor folks he wins over with his bank proceeds grows over time, until we get a passage like this one, a last celebratory hurrah on the evening he learns he is a father:

These was your own people girl I mean the good people of Greta & Moyhu & Euroa & Benalla who come drifting down the track all through the morn & afternoon & night. How was they told of your birth did the bush telegraph alert them I do not know only that they come the men the women with babies at their breast shivering kiddies with cotton coats their eyes slitted against the wind. They arrived in broken cart & drays they was of that type THE BENALLA ENSIGN named the most frightful class of people they couldnt afford to leave their cows & pigs but they done so because we was them and they was us and 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.
Through the dusk & icy starbright night them visitors continued to rise from the earth like winter oats their cold faces was soon pressed through doorway and window and even when the grog wore out they wd. not leave they come to touch my sleeve or clap my back they hitched great logs to their horses' tails to drag them out beside the track. 6 fires these was your birthday candles shining in 200 eyes.

The real star of the show here is Kelly's language, and I admired the way Carey escalates the final tragedy by yanking the narrative out of his anti-hero's hands, to be finished by an antagonist - although, in typical Carey fashion, even that antagonism is tinged with ambiguity.

From first to last, a truly excellent novel, exhilarating and lovely. If we ever go together to meet Peter Carey, you can tell him I said so...just please don't tell him I have Ned Kelly posters all over my walls.

I LOVED this and I don't know why. It should have been so annoying and pretentious and Safran Foer-esque, but instead it was FANTASTIC.

Sort of the Australian version of the James gang from the American west. It even happened around the same time. This is a novel, although it may be based on fact - I didn’t realize this until I read the acknowledgments at the end. It’s written in the form of a journal by Ned Kelly, an account of his true history addressed to his daughter.

Which is part of the problem I had with the book. Kelly didn’t know how to use commas, or, more correctly, the author chose that Kelly should write that way. Not only commas, but the usual things that an author would use to show that his narrator is uneducated. Makes the novel a little difficult to get interested in, and hard to read, and wearing. I almost gave up around page 200 - it was just more of the same, but I slogged all the way to the end.

It won the Booker prize, but I was not that impressed. ( )

This book was the winner of the Booker Prize and is an amazing historical fiction of a criminal and popular hero in 19th century Australia named Ned Kelly. The story recounts, in Kelly's first person voice, his life from childhood until his untimely death. The book is packed with action, drama, trumped up crime and real crime. The protagonist is completely likeable, ethical, and a swirling mess of characters, motives, governments and relationships conspire to put a group of men against the law but not the populace. I would highly recommend this book.

A note on style and punctuation. To add character to the story, the author is presenting the story with details as if truly written almost as a diary, and embellishing the presentation. (If the author could, I suspect he would have bound the book as it would have been in the 1800's). As such, being particularly accurate includes the punctuation that Ned Kelly would have used writing this himself. Which is to say none. I found this practice added to my experience of the book. Perhaps only twice or thrice did I find myself having to re-read a sentence again to get the break point. Once the reader plunges into the 'voice' of the reader and gets into it, it makes the book more real and the experience more vibrant. As an aside, I did feel the book got a little ribald at times which was my only and very slight complaint. ( )

This is a wonderfull novel that works on several levels. Its a marvellous indictement of British colonial rule, a social history, a travelog, and a rather grim adventure story. Carey displays such imagination and literary bravado. What is fact and what may be fiction hardly matters. His descriptions of an underclass battling oppression and poverty are timeless. I finished reading this novel two days ago, and Im still haunted by the images conjured by the author, and I really miss Ned Kelly's company. This is writing at its best. Thought provoking, heart wrenching, and imaginative. Superb!

Thoroughly engaging story that should be required reading for both police and people working with families trying to overcome the impossible. ( )

http://nhw.livejournal.com/1026668.ht...

I was a bit unimpressed by the same author's Oscar and Lucinda, but this really grabbed me; I was only vaguely aware of the story of Ned Kelly, but Carey has given him and his country (the Australian state of Victoria in the 1870s) a resounding voice. The story is dramatic and moving; the underlying theme of the book is the injustice by which Kelly and his family, and their community, were shut out of having their voice heard, and had to submit to the lies and distortions of their more powerful enemies. Kelly becomes a robber and a murderer, but only after the authorities have made him so; he is motivated by love and loyalty for his family, and comes across as flawed but in his own way noble. ( )

The life story of Ned Kelly, Australian Bushranger and Outlaw, as told through his fictional diaries. Wow, this was an amazing book. From page two I was hooked on the story and the life of this man. I found myself absolutely intrigued by him and since I started the book I have been reading about him online as well. Since the story is told through Ned's point of view we come to feel for him and root for him, perhaps as the Australian people themselves did at the time. This was a wonderful book, you really can't ask for more in a novel.

The one negative comment I have is about the lack of punctuation. I don't feel it added any authenticity to the story at all but instead showed the author's own arrogance. The lack of sentence structure made this a very slow read. My reading speed decreased dramatically. I would often have to read a 'sentence' 2 or three times to understand and this particularly happened when people were speaking as the lack of quotations in the book leaves the reader unsure of who is speaking at many times. However, this should not be a deterrent to reading the book. As I read the last page I closed the book and spoke aloud to the empty room, "Wow, that was good." This book will be certainly be a contender for my best book of the year. ( )

I was actually surprised I enjoyed this as much as I did. I liked the style of the novel, and thought how well Carey managed to make Ned Kelly a sympathetic character. It highlights brilliantly the struggle people had merely to survive, in what was a hard and unforgiving environment.

I decided rather quickly not to finish this. It's written in a sort of semi-literate 19th-century Australian vernacular that was just going to take more work to negotiate than I wanted to invest, though I've like some of Carey's earlier work, especially Oscar & Lucinda. ( )

A bit difficult to read, puntuation etc but well worth it ( )

3534. True History of the Kelly Gang, by Peter Carey (read 30 Jan 2002) This won last year's Booker Prize, else I'd never have read it. It proves to me the valuableness of reading prizewinners, which I do. The book is annoying because of the punctuation and dialect, though one gradually gets used to it. I wish before I read it I had realized what the Kelly Gang was and how important it is to Australian history. I would have been more patient with the book. It is solidly based on the actual or believed facts of the life of Ned Kelly, the Robin Hood of Australia. In retrospect, this was well worth reading. ( )

Ned Kelly was an Australian outlaw bushranger in the 1800s. His Irish father was convicted of a crime and sent to Van Diemen's land. The family settled in Australia after his release. Ned was forced into adulthood at an early age, and was sent to be an apprentice to another bushranger at the age of 15. From there he fell into a life of crime, and gained notoriety by consistently eluding capture. However, he also remained fiercely loyal to his large family, especially his mother and brother.

Peter Carey recounts Ned's life story in Ned's own voice, complete with the grammatical anomalies and lack of punctuation that might be expected from a semi-literate young man. The story is compelling and the character development, wonderful. Ned Kelly is a violent criminal, and yet very likeable. I actually found myself cheering him on in his escapades with the police.

True History of the Kelly Gang reminded me of other "outlaw" tales, like the story of Jesse James, or Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. This is not a subject that I'm particularly interested in, and I only read this book because it won the Booker Prize in 2001. I was not disappointed; in fact, I found this book absolutely delightful and difficult to put down. Peter Carey is one of only two authors to win the Booker Prize twice (the other is J. M. Coetzee). Now I can't wait to read his 1988 Booker winner, Oscar and Lucinda. ( )

I thought this was really lacklustre for Peter Carey. I normally love his stuff, but I didn't enjoy this. The story is very familiar to me and I didn't feel this retelling added anything to my experience of it. ( )

This "true history, " is a fictional autobiography of Australia's most notorious folk-hero and bushranger. The story of the scourge of the government of the Colony of Victoria is vividly told by native Australian Peter Carey in a primitive and compelling style inspired by Kelly's own prose.
This is one adjectival effing good book, mate! ( )

A historical novel in the form of the rough and rustic memoir of real 19th century Australian outlaw Ned Kelly. Sometimes bleak, sometimes funny; the story of the first and second generation of poor Irish settlers in Australia.

Quote: "They arrived in broken cart & drays they was of that type THE BENALLA ENSIGN named the most frightful class of people they couldnt afford to leave their cows & pigs but they done so because we was them and they was us and 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." ( )

Ned Kelly is Australia's anti-hero, a poor Irish farm boy who, at least according to legend, robbed from the rich and gave to the poor. True History is written as Ned Kelly's autobiography, penned on whatever scraps of paper could be found in a farm house or cave, riddled with grammatical errors and run-on sentences, intended for the daughter Kelly would never get to meet. What makes this book so strong is its unexpectedly poignancy. Young Kelly's life is full of disappointments -- dying siblings, draughts, harsh treatment from the mother he loves, and a justice system seemingly bent on persecuting the poor Irish minority. Carey imbues his writing with the pathos of a boy forced to become a man before his time. "I were but 14 1/2 yr. old no razor had yet touched my upper lip but as I cantered after [the outlaw] Harry Power ... I were already traveling full-tilt toward the man I would become," Kelly narrates. Equally powerful is the way Carey evokes the harsh life of newly-colonized Australia. This isn't just the story of Ned Kelly; it's the story of everyone who suffered poverty and hardship in what they hoped would be a land of opportunity. Still, Carey doesn't forget that Ned Kelly is an outlaw, quick-tempered and with blood on his hands. With a small twist at the end, he works around Kelly's limited first person vision to suggest a more complex portrait of the man and the legacy he left. If the final chapters lagged a bit, it's only because I was more interested in the story of becoming an outlaw than the story of being an outlaw. Still, I recommend this book to anyone looking to learn a bit about Australia or just to read the narrative of a compelling character. ( )

Ned Kelly as literary hero? Strangely enough, that's what he becomes, at least in Carey's rendering. Pouring his heart out in a series of letters to the country at large, Kelly wants nothing more than to be heard--and for the dirt-poor son of an Irish convict, that's an audacious ambition indeed. It's not so surprising, then, that his story continues to speak to Australians. Like all colonial countries, Australia was built at a steep human price, and the memory of all those silenced voices lives on. True History of the Kelly Gang takes its epigraph from Faulkner: "The past is not dead. It is not even past." And like Faulkner's own vast chronicle of dispossession, it's haunted by tragedies as large as history itself ( )

Peter Carey decided he needed to find an authentic voice to relate the tale of Australian folk-lore out-law Ned Kelly and boy did he find one. This novel is an incredible literary feat even for someone as skilled and experienced as Peter Carey. The book pitches you head first into the blood, spit, sweat and dust at the feet of Australia's most celebrated figure and then abandons you to his care. You'd best not start whinging like a Pommie or you're not going to last three pages. A novel to be experienced rather than read. ( )

IMO the best thing I've read by Carey and well deserving of the Booker prize. The book follows the trials, tribulations and adventures of the legendary Australian bandit Ned Kelly as he outwits and battles with the forces of law and order. Carey's rendering of the iron helmeted clad Irish descendent cum troublemaker is not truly historical fiction--it is more of an idealized and sympathetic look at his native land's own version of Robin Hood the action mainly described by Ned in his own words and dialect in papers he writes to his infant daughter while on the run from a variety of law officers and bounty hunters. The Kelly's are certainly a rough lot but also often victims of circmumstances beyond their control and prey to the whims and vindictiveness of numerous local authorities and some not so nice, often sleazy but upstanding citizens. In any case though it ends sadly with Ned being hanged it is a very entertaining read. ( )

The Old West comes alive on the pages of Peter Carey’s new novel True History of the Kelly Gang. That’s right, pardner, there’s a whole passel of bank holdups, horse rustling and highway robbing going on.

But would it surprise you to learn I’m talking about the Old West of the Australian Outback, circa 1875? Carey’s felonious protagonist is Ned Kelly, a historical figure who has become a legend in Australian lore—sort of like Billy the Kid, the Down Under version.

Being a Yank (born in Pennsylvania, raised in Wyoming), I’d never heard of the notorious Kelly until I picked up Carey’s novel. Somehow, I’d missed the 1970 movie starring Mick Jagger as the outlaw (and music by poet Shel Silverstein!). Apparently, Ned’s the stuff of Robin Hood legends in the former British penal colony. Here’s a thumbnail sketch of the true history, for those as ignorant as I was:

Born in 1854 to Irish immigrants, Ned begins by telling us he was left fatherless when he was 12 (“raised on lies and silences‿). Forced off their land by poverty and circumstance, the Kellys (Ned, his mother and several siblings) moved to another district. But times proved hard there on the new farm and the teenage Ned was apprenticed to a highway robber (or “bushranger‿) named Harry Power. Young Ned learned the art of stick-ups (or “bail ups,‿ in the novel’s slang) and it wasn’t long before he landed in jail—his most frequent place of residence in the years to come. After doing hard labor, he was released from prison and returned home to find his family farm depleted and his mother persecuted by the local constabulary. He vowed to take his revenge on the local law for the injustices he perceived; and so, he and a small gang (which included his brother Dan) started horse thieving. Then, in 1878, a constable named Fitzgerald moved in on the farm—supposedly to arrest Dan, but as it turns out he wanted to see their sister Kate. One thing led to another, Kate was assaulted, Fitzgerald was wounded and embarrassed and he vowed to get retribution from the Kellys. A bounty was soon on the gang’s head and a posse was formed. This, in turn, led to a deadly shootout—deadly for the police, that is. Three constables were killed at a gun battle near Stringybark Creek, elevating the Kelly gang’s notoriety. Then banks were robbed, trains held up and more people murdered. As the noose tightened around Ned, he came up with a harebrained scheme to outwit the authorities: he built the first bullet-proof suit, an entire outfit made of iron (including a pot-like helmet with a slit cut out for the eyes). Unfortunately, in the gang’s final confrontation with the law, the 97-pound suit of armor proved only slightly impenetrable. A shot to his legs crippled him and he was captured. On November 11, 1880, Ned Kelly was hanged until dead.

Those are the “facts‿ as I’ve been able to glean them from skimming the internet. Read the jaunty novel by Carey (author of Oscar and Lucinda and Jack Maggs) and you’ll get a slightly narrower view of things—mainly because the entire rip-roaring tale is told in Kelly’s own voice, set down as a series of narratives to his daughter (a fictional license—the real Ned never married or fathered a child).

Presented as a series of “packets‿ whose contents have been hastily scrawled on bank letterhead and envelopes, the story comes to us smelling of unwashed grammar and rip-snorting vernacular. But because he’s writing to his daughter, Ned writes tenderly, avoiding unsavory language (the word “adjectival‿ is substituted for most four-letter oaths). The unpunctuated and run-on result is something that could be coming ripe off the pencil of Jesse James or Black Bart. Here, for instance, is a particularly memorable robbery scene where Ned and Harry have bailed up a stagecoach and the volatile Harry starts arguing with the driver:

I told him said the driver there aint no adjectival gold.

I’m Harry Power cried Harry and I say there is.

I don’t care if you’re the Duke of Gloucester said the driver there aint no gold mate and no amount of hollering is going to change that.

Eff you roared Harry firing the muzzleloader by design or accident decapitating a crow which had been innocently loitering by the road. The explosion alarmed my nervous packhorse so severely that it now went plunging out onto the open road with me clinging to the reins scratching my face in the wattle all I could think was I was now marked as a robber a woman inside the coach were staring directly at me.

True History of the Kelly Gang is sympathetic to the outlaw in the same way that the movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid washed those fellows in golden light. Here, the ink is gold and so too, it would appear, is Ned’s heart. Carey’s favor lies with the ironclad bad guy and that certainly tilts the book to one side (“I have spilled human blood when there were no other choice‿).

While Carey’s passion for his subject is unmistakable, I couldn’t summon as much passion for the novel itself. For one thing, it gets my vote as the Most Laborious Reading Experience of the Year. I’ve read passage of James Joyce which were smoother sailing than Carey’s rough-hewed narrative, written almost entirely in Ned’s uneducated 19th-century dialect. The tumble-without-end sentences will remind some readers of William Faulkner or even the more contemporary Don DeLillo when he gets warmed up. Unfortunately, the prose created a barrier between the story and me; it took me nearly three weeks to work my way from first page to last.

And yet, I’ve got to admit that True History of the Kelly Gang might just be one of the most daring tricks of the literary year. It’s hard to sustain such an intensely illiterate voice for 354 pages, but Carey pulls it off with the confidence of someone who knows his subject inside out (from the golden heart to his ironclad clothes). This is not, by any means, a timid novel. ( )