What Book to Read?

I see that Peter Carey’s book Parrot and Olivier in America has been short-listed for the 2010 Man Booker Prize. He has already won twice before, with Oscar and Lucinda (1988) and True History of the Kelly Gang (2001). No one has yet won three Bookers; indeed only one other writer, J.M. Coetzee, has won two. Winning a third time would be a major achievement. So let me put on record before all the adulation (potentially) begins, that I didn’t much like True History of the Kelly Gang, and I wouldn’t have awarded it the Booker Prize.

The book purports to be based on documents written by the Australian outlaw, Ned Kelly, interleaved with newspaper accounts. The documents are addressed by Kelly to his daughter, so that she will understand ‘the injustice we poor Irish suffered in this present age’. The narrative ends abruptly in the Glenrowan Hotel. The events recounted follow closely the known facts of Kelly’s life, but the story is history as imagined by a novelist, not the truth of a biographer. Carey has also drawn on the 8,000 word ‘Jerilderie Letter’ that Kelly left to justify his actions, saying ‘If my lips taught the public that men are made mad by bad treatment, then my life will not have been thrown away’.

The judges liked the book because it fleshed out the Kelly legend, and because they liked the way it was written. It is on both these grounds that I am not particularly keen on it.

The vernacular writing style Carey uses is much admired, and has been compared to the stream of consciousness style of the great Irish writer, James Joyce (though Carey’s is more the absence of punctuation than genuine stream of consciousness). It bears a striking similarity to Kelly’s own prose in the Jerilderie Letter (or actually his dictation, as another gang member wrote it down). I can’t help wondering what are the limits, if any, of mimicry? You can check out the similarities between the prose of the letter and the prose of the book by reading the Jerilderie Letter here.

The book gives a picture of Ned Kelly as an essentially good man who is forced into crime. But it seems from the Letter there was a darker side. Here, for example, is what he threatened to do to any one who informed on him: to be:

pegged on an ant-bed with their bellies opened their fat taken out rendered and poured down their throat boiling hot will be cool to what pleasure I will give some of them and any person aiding or harbouring or assisting the Police in any way whatever

In sticking to the legend of the good but wronged Kelly, Carey has wasted an opportunity and created a less complex character than the real Kelly.

It also seems likely that the Kellys were professional criminals who ran a fairly sophisticated horse and cattle stealing operation, rather than poor selectors forced into the occasional theft of a stray animal. Kelly writes in the Letter ‘I never worked on a farm’ and boasts that he had stolen horses and cattle ‘innumerable’, he and his stepfather George King being the ‘greatest horsestealer[s]’ in the region.

Writing about a national legend is bound to be tricky. Had Carey ignored Kelly’s own distinctive style, he could have been criticized for disregarding reality. He can either be praised or blamed for his ‘historical ventriloquism’. It’s clever, but I wouldn’t give it a prize. As for the content of the legend, I think he has rendered it sentimental, where he might truly have given it flesh. What we get is the Ned Kelly of the tourist theme park.

The Man Booker Prize winner will be announced on 12 October 2010. I haven’t yet read Parrot and Olivier in America, but even if I had, I fear the judges wouldn’t take any notice of my opinion.