The True History Of The Kelly Gang

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In The Press
"A spectacular feat of imagination."- The Boston Globe

"Vastly entertaining…. Triumphantly eclectic, as if Huck Finn and Shakespeare had joined forces to prettify the legend of Jesse James."- The New York Times

"The ingenuity, empathy, and poetic ear that the novelist brings to his feat of imposture cannot be rated too high."- John Updike, The New Yorker

"Carey succeeds in creating an account that not only feels authentic but also passes as a serious novel and solid, old-fashioned 'entertainment.' A big, meaty novel, blending Dickens and Cormac McCarthy with a distinctly Australian strain of melancholy."- San Francisco Chronicle

"Abravura performance…. Rewards the persistent reader with a powerful emotional experience."- The Wall Street Journal

"Carey's pen writes with an ink that is two parts archaic and one part modern and colors a prose that rocks and cajoles the reader into a certainty that Ned Kelly is fit company not only for Jack Palance and Clint Eastwood but for Thomas Jefferson and perhaps even a bodhisattva."- Los Angeles Times

"The power and charm of [this book] arise not from fidelity to facts but rather from the voice Carey invents for Ned Kelly…."-Time

"So adroit that you never doubt it's Kelly's own words you're reading in the headlong, action-packed story."- Newsweek

"This novel is worth our best attention."- The Washington Post Book World

"An avalanche of a novel…. Cary has raised a national legend to the level of an international myth."- Christian Science Monitor

"Packed with incident, alive with comedy and pathos . . . contains pretty much everything you could ask of a novel." -The New York Times Book Review

"Carey's pen writes with an ink that is two parts archaic and one part modern and colors a prose that rocks and cajoles the reader into a certainty that Ned Kelly is fit company not only for Jack Palance and Clint Eastwood but for Thomas Jefferson and perhaps even a bodhisattva." -Los Angeles Times

"Through Kelly's keen eyes, we see the rural landscapes of 19th-century Australia: the stunted white-trunked gum trees, the mustard-coloured puddles, the ramshackle homesteads with swaybacked roofs. But it is the moral aspect that is most apparent. In this 'colony made specifically to have poor men bow down to their gaolers', injustice suffocatingly darkens the atmosphere. 'They were Australians,' Kelly observes, 'they knew full well the terror of the unyielding law the historic memory of UNFAIRNESS were in their blood.' True History of the Kelly Gang is a handsome act of reparation to a figure that Carey sees as an outstanding victim of that great unfairness." - Peter Kemp, The Sunday Times

"Whatever one's (slight) misgivings about its status as a 'true history', the book's power as a narrative is nearly overwhelming. The twang of Ned's untutored but vibrant prose would be hypnotic in itself, yet Carey adapts it to a series of set pieces -- Ned's rescue of the drowning boy, a boxing match, his first meeting with the woman who will become his wife, the ambush, even the small drama of felling a tree -- that are as gripping as any you could wish to read. His control of dialogue is similarly impressive, whether it be droll or deadpan or just plain laconic. Nor is it simply that Carey has immersed himself in the texture and language of late-19th-century rural Australia. More than this, he has transformed sepia legend into brilliant, even violent, color, and turned a distant myth into warm flesh and blood. Packed with incident, alive with comedy and pathos, True History of the Kelly Gang contains pretty much everything you could ask of a novel. It is an adjectival wonder." - Anthony Quinn, The New York Times

"Pushed centre stage with neither a definite nor an indefinite article for moral or theatrical support, True History of the Kelly Gang signals the first of its many deceits. Peter Carey's skills, passions and obsessions are all fully on display in this long-awaited take on colonial Australia's most enduring myth. Ned Kelly, cattle thief, bank robber and folk hero, was hanged at the age of 25 in Melbourne jail in 1880. Carey tells his story in the first person, in a narrative - recalling Ondaatje's Billy the Kid, Hanson's Jesse James and perhaps even Burroughs's Dutch Schultz - that his publishers refer to as a dazzling act of ventriloquism. But this is not the short-lived gimmickry of ventriloquism; it is writing, and though the voice it renders is loud, distinctive and beguiling, the concessions made by Carey to the modern reader create several potential flaws in the construction that, to begin with at least, threaten to undermine the otherwise carefully woven illusion. Happily, Carey is far too accomplished and adventurous a writer to expect anything so simple or so obvious as the suspension of disbelief in the reader. Rather, he makes a valid and sustained plea for accommodation, for readers to bring all they think they know about Ned Kelly - all those half-remembered childhood memories of a man in the heat of an outback summer with a bucket on his head - and then to allow Carey himself to fill in the empty spaces that remain. We are not seriously expected to believe that this is a transcript of Kelly's own work; we are not so easily fooled by the archive sources cited; we are not so swiftly seduced by the atrocious punctuation in a narrative otherwise so finely tuned, plotted and controlled." - Robert Edric, The Guardian

"True History shares the spare, low-key loquacity of Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy, but with a tenderness replacing McCarthy's nihilism. "In a settlers hut the smallest flutter of a mothers eyelids are like a tin sheet rattling in the wind," Kelly reflects mournfully as he watches his mother accept charity from a bushranger. Or again: 'If you have felled a tree you know that sound it is the hinge of life before the door is slammed.' Kelly is finally betrayed to a train-load of police by a crippled schoolteacher who has just recited King Harry's St Crispin exhortation from Henry V. The juxtaposition of such hope, such heroism with the bloody demise of Edward Kelly is discordant and affecting. The man was an outlaw - but we are the richer for Peter Carey's picaresque demonstration of quite how equivocal that branding can be." - James Urquhart, The Independent