Awards
Winner of the 2001 Booker Prize.
From Powells.com
"Sentimental attachment to geography irritated her, Australians were riddled
with it," writes Tim
Winton of his protagonist Georgie Jutland in his glorious new novel Dirt
Music. As an Australian ex-patriot I concur. I can also add that sentimental
attachment to rogue outlaws, and in particular the "bushranger" Ned
Kelly, has persisted for over 100 years. The tiny town of Glenrowan, site of Kelly's
historic showdown, is covered with Kelly icons, and one of Australia's most successful
artists, Sydney
Nolan is renowned for his haunting silhouettes of the distinctive metal
armor.
Peter
Carey is also an ex-pat, a novelist who conquered the Australian literary
world almost immediately with his first novel Bliss,
which won the prestigious Miles Franklin award in 1981 and was made into a film
(by Lantana director Ray Laurence) in 1985. After winning handfuls of
awards in Australia, as well as the Booker
Prize in 1988 for Oscar
and Lucinda, Carey moved to New York in the late 1980s where he has remained
ever since. Yet Carey's bittersweet ties to his home country remain strong,
his writing consistently focusing on the origin of Australian character, and
his most recent offering a personal musing on his return to his native land
the first in seventeen years titled 30
Days in Sydney: A Wildly Distorted Account.
The 2001 Booker award winning True History of the Kelly Gang, however,
may be said to be Carey's crowning achievement. A fictionalized autobiography
of Australia's most notorious gangster Ned Kelly, it is a Joycean trip into
first person narrative, a coming of age story, and a thundering, adventurous
ride. The prose is extraordinary, an almost invented language that is breathlessly
hypnotic. The story of Ned Kelly, so strong in the memories of anyone who grew
up in Australia, has now been given its true mythological due. Carey has created
vivid, beautiful poetry out of dusty legend. Georgie, Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
Out of nineteenth-century Australia rides a hero of his people and a man for all nations, in this masterpiece by the Booker Prize-winning author of
Oscar and Lucinda and
Jack Maggs. Exhilarating, hilarious, panoramic, and immediately engrossing, it is also at a distance of many thousand miles and more than a century a Great American Novel.
This is Ned Kelly's true confession, in his own words and written on the run for an infant daughter he has never seen. To the authorities, this son of dirt-poor Irish immigrants was a born thief and, ultimately, a cold-blooded murderer; to most other Australians, he was a scapegoat and patriot persecuted by "English" landlords and their agents.
With his brothers and two friends, Kelly eluded a massive police manhunt for twenty months, living by his wits and strong heart, supplementing his bushwhacking skills with ingenious bank robberies while enjoying the support of most everyone not in uniform. He declined to flee overseas when he could, bound to win his jailed mother's freedom by any means possible, including his own surrender. In the end, however, she served out her sentence in the same Melbourne prison where, in 1880, her son was hanged.
Still his country's most powerful legend, Ned Kelly is here chiefly a man in full: devoted son, loving husband, fretful father, and loyal friend, now speaking as if from the grave. With this mythic outlaw and the story of his mighty travails and exploits, and with all the force of a classic Western, Peter Carey has breathed life into a historical figure who transcends all borders and embodies tragedy, perseverance, and freedom.