NED KELLY

REVIEW
HERO WORSHIP
Peter Carey makes an icon out of an outlaw.

by MATT BUCKINGHAM
243-2122

"Unhappy the land that needs heroes." --Bertolt Brecht

Australia is a nation desperate for heroes. When an outlaw named Ned Kelly led a gang of bushrangers on a murderous crime spree through the outback in the late 1870s, Australians deified him as a national legend. As one character in Peter Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang puts it: "Might not we find someone better to admire than a horse-thief and a murderer? Must we always make such an embarrassing spectacle of ourselves?" Carey would have done well to ask himself the same questions before attempting to rehabilitate Kelly into a sensitive guy who just wanted justice for Australians.

True History of the Kelly Gang is as enjoyable as any well-researched western one finds on paperback racks. But it lacks both the historical heft of Russell Banks' Cloudsplitter and the literary verve of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, two other novels offering fictional accounts of real outlaws.

Carey was inspired to tell the story of Kelly from the outlaw's point of view after reading the Jerilderie Letter, an 8,000-word manifesto that Kelly dictated to an associate before raiding the town of Jerilderie. Carey assumes Kelly's voice for most of the book, writing in unpunctuated, run-on sentences. He also adds odd quirks to Kelly's grammar that don't appear in the Jerilderie Letter, such as using "were" for "was" and vice-versa.

Many of the incidents Carey describes in True History are lifted almost verbatim from the Jerilderie Letter, so there's no arguing the historical accuracy. However, the logic behind his interpretation of Kelly's life--that he was essentially a misunderstood cowboy forced into crime by British classism--begins to break down as the novel's action heats up. Kelly becomes obsessed with persuading a sympathetic politician that the gang's murder of three constables was self-defense, but he hurts his own case by later leading a clever bank robbery.

Kelly's justification for the hold-up is that his gang needs the money to escape to California, but he refuses to flee Australia until he can free his mother from prison. In a teary-eyed scene of bushranger camaraderie, his gang decides to stay and stand by him to stick up one more bank.

Kelly's conduct becomes truly delusional by the book's penultimate chapter when the gang forges suits of armor out of quarter-inch iron plate. Now believing himself and his mates invincible, Kelly leads the gang in a final, bloody shootout with police, somehow overlooking that the armor won't protect their arms and legs. The gang is eventually roasted alive in a hotel where they're hiding. Kelly survives, but only to be hanged in Melbourne in 1880.

Carey brilliantly evokes the forbidding landscape of his homeland--the "cursed odour" of a eucalyptus bushfire, the perils of traversing the Wombat Ranges on horseback. Where the book falls short, though, is in conveying the complex social milieu--the difference between "selectors" and "squatters," for instance--that shaped Kelly and his country. Without a clearer understanding of this human landscape, it's impossible to tell whether Ned Kelly deserves a hero's tale.