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True History of the Kelly Gang | 
| Author: Peter Carey
Publisher: Faber and Faber
Category: Book
List Price: £8.99
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Avg. Customer Rating:  35 reviews
Sales Rank: 16218
Media: Paperback
Edition: New edition
Pages: 432
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 7.6 x 4.9 x 1.1
ISBN: 0571209874
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN: 9780571209873
ASIN: 0571209874
Publication Date: August 5, 2004
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Amazon.co.uk Review
In True History of the Kelly Gang Peter Carey returns to the harsh, brutal world of Australian history, so brilliantly evoked in earlier novels such as Illywhacker and Oscar and Lucinda. Set in the desolate settler communities north of Melbourne in the late 19th century, the novel is told in the form of a journal, written by the famous outlaw and "bushranger" Ned Kelly, to a daughter he will never see. As Kelly explains, "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 lies may I burn in hell if I speak false".The salty, colloquial, unpunctuated style of Kelly's journal is reproduced with great skill, as Carey recounts the outlaw's early life with a cross-dressing, Irish immigrant sheep worker, and a beautiful but headstrong mother, always on the wrong side of the law. Inadvertently causing the arrest and death of his father, Ned realises that "there were a drought and nothing flourishing there but misery I were the oldest son I thought it time to earn my place", a decision that ultimately leads him into conflict with the law, and to form the notorious Kelly Gang. The novel contains some wonderfully lyrical and deeply moving moments, as Ned struggles to articulate the harsh injustice of the world around him, but some readers might find Carey's epistolary style rather restrictive and colourless after the first 100 pages, and lacking in the imaginative excitement of Carey's earlier novels. --Jerry Brotton
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| Customer Reviews: Read 30 more reviews...
 Peter Carey and his book True History Of The Kelly Gang January 5, 2009
Peter Carey and his book True History Of The Kelly Gang became the winner of the Book Prize 2001. This is a good book but the style of the author might be hard to read sometimes and as for me the book is slow book to read. The time in the book goes by very slowly and sometimes it can bore the reader.
This story takes place in Australia. Whole book contains series of letters from Ned Kelly to his daughter he will never see and says, "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 lies may I burn in hell if I speak false".
This book is well history based and gives the reader the overview of the life in Australia in 19th century with all the problems and weaknesses of the country.
There was an idea that Ned Kelly was like Robin Hood some people thought he was a theft and some thought that he was a hero.
Ned Kelly and his brother Dan hide out in the hills and than their friends joined them. Kelly's mother is arrested along with her baby daughter and imprisoned in Melbourne.
During the raids, Ned Kelly meets an Irish girl named Mary Hearn, who already has a son by Kelly's stepfather, George King. Kelly falls in love with Mary wants to escape the colony with her after she becomes pregnant.
This book is written in a very special way and worst reading.
Masterful portrayal of the social conditions of the time September 15, 2007
22 out of 22 found this review helpful
I don't know enough about the history of Ned Kelly to comment on the historical accuracy of the events, though I gather that the novel is quite well researched. What makes the book such an enjoyable read though is the remarkable portrayal of life in colonial Australia. You get a visceral sense of how it might have felt to be poor in the dog-eat-dog world of Ned Kelly's time, of the desperate struggle to conquer the Australian bush, of the constant oppression by authorities for whom laws rarely provide an effective check on power, of the solidarity of human beings brought together by their shared trials and tribulations. Carey has managed to convey a sense of this era in a way that few writers are able to. It is a portrait of social conditions that can be compared to the novels of Charles Dickens.
work of genius September 19, 2005
4 out of 8 found this review helpful
This is a truly wonderful book. The sense of place and the evocation of the era are fabulous. It's an adventure story and a love story. Above all, the absolutely incredible narrative voice make this a hilarious and also moving read.
An engaging style that brings Kelly to life August 11, 2005
7 out of 8 found this review helpful
This is an absorbing book, written as a sequence of letters supposedly penned by Kelly himself - his attempt to explain his life and death to a daughter he will not live to see. Carey has written the book without punctuation in a conversational style. I quickly got used to this and found that the technique gave weight and realism to the story. Carey tells us about the paper used for each set of letters and we can imagine Kelly coming across some scraps on which he can continue his story - it is a charming touch. Although this is a fictional work, it is so well-written and Carey's mode of writing is so persuasive that it seems entirely plausible that Ned Kelly is speaking to us from beyond the grave. I enjoyed it enormously - it is imaginative, clever and very entertaining.
The song of Australia August 20, 2004
7 out of 8 found this review helpful
Mr Carey's novel relates the epic life of Ned Kelly in Australia in the second half of the 19th century. The text comes in the form of 13 parcels of varying length (from 7 to 50 pages). Sometimes they are sheets of National Bank or Bank of New South Wales letterhead, a cloth booklet, octavo pages, open envelopes providing space for text, a pocket diary or the reverse side of advertising fliers. They cover Ned's adventurous life until the manuscript abruptly terminates when he was 26 years old and it is told in a tone so wild and passionate that the reader often believes that the bushranger is speaking to him from the grave! It is a breathtaking account of an existence marked by a cascade of events where Ned is in turn a reformer, a criminal, a horse thief, a farmer, a bushranger and an orphan. Ned's voice is very convincing, continually creating new surprises on every page despite the plainness of his language, or rather perhaps because of it. Actually his uneducated voice is very much part of the originality of Mr Carey's novel.
The critics have ranked Mr Carey next to Charles Dickens and Lawrence Sterne - very rightly so, in my opinion.
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