BookMuse Interview with Peter Carey
By phone and email in May of this year, Peter Carey, author of True History of the Ned Kelly Gang, was interviewed by BookMuse reviewer Patricia Marby Harrison. Look for Patricia's Muse Notes on True History.
Growing up in Australia, you've had a long exposure to the Ned Kelly legend. What were some impressions of Ned Kelly from your childhood?
It says a lot about Australia and its view of its own history that I didn't pretend to be Ned Kelly; I played cowboys and Indians when I was growing up! But of course I always knew about Ned Kelly. He was always there, in the air I breathed. One connection I did have to Ned Kelly was that my grandfather had known Thomas Curnow [the schoolteacher who betrayed Ned Kelly to the police]. That connection made him seem real to me.
How did you choose to write this book? Did you have any trepidation about taking on such a sacred cow as the legendary Ned Kelly?
Well, I always like a certain element of risk. To take on Dickens and Great Expectations in Jack Maggs was certainly, let us say, stimulating. If you imagine how passionate the English are about Dickens, then you'll be on the foothills of the feelings Australians have about Kelly.
The event that finally made me write about Kelly was an exhibition of paintings by Sydney Nolan at the Met. Those paintings are a wonderful narrative of the Kelly legend, and seeing them in New York, out of their cultural context, gave me a fresh sense of what a strange and wonderful story it was. Of course, in the Nolan paintings Ned Kelly is wearing the armor. That was a little bizarre to my Manhattan friends, who asked me what it meant. And having to explain, to answer questions for people who weren't familiar with the story made me ask a whole lot of new questions for myself. For instance, did it mean that we [Australians], as a people, had decided this was not just A story but the single most important story for our culture? Also, why did such an intelligent man wear that suicidal armor? My inability to answer many of these questions made me realize how little we had imagined the emotional, the social life of Ned Kelly. It seemed to me that if we don't know a character's emotions, then we cannot know the man at all.
It was said that Ned Kelly was friends with Constable Fitzpatrick, for example. But what exactly did that mean? In what way were they friends? We Aussies are used to thinking of the cops in this story as BAD guys, and the robbers as GOOD guys, but it must have been much more complicated. When I told my Australian friends that I was writing this book, their reaction was "Why would you bother? We know all about him." But we didn't. . . .
What is the relationship of the novel to the historical record? How much is fact and how much is embellishment?
Well, it's hugely made up. But I did try to respect what is known about him. Ian Jones' book Ned Kelly: A Short Life seemed the most researched and the most trustworthy history. But I just wanted to write all the stuff historians cannot write but that novelists are permitted to imagine.
My book is weighted toward Ned Kelly's early life, while the history books are weighted toward the end of his life. I wanted to imagine all the stuff behind the history that is never thought about. The novel doesn't contradict historical fact. In fact, many of the scenes and even some of the dialogue are as reported in the historical records. But my characters' motivations, what is at stake for them, are completely, sometimes shockingly, different. Sometimes I reconfigured the facts--Bill Frost was shot in the stomach, for example, but he never said who shot him. So I imagined how that happened.
Another example--I wanted to think about the mother, Ellen Kelly. The relationship between mother and son seemed a central part of the story. Historically, we know the father died, we know the year he died, we know the size of the hut they lived in, we know she had lovers and that there were no walls in the hut. He was a teenage boy; there must have been some jealousy of those lovers. We don't want to think about that, but it must have affected his character. I wanted to explore that.
True History is being marketed in the U.S. as an American-style Western. How do you feel about that? Is this novel a Western?
Well, I can understand why the publishers would present it as a Western. In part, it's an attempt to help people connect to the novel, to think, "this is not alien after all." All readers will find a way to connect with the book they're reading, anyway. We hook into our own experience, so most American readers think it is a Western.
But Australians see it as totally different. The whole thing about American Westerns is the alienated individual. . . isn't it? But Ned Kelly was a man of social action, not a sociopathic outsider. Whenever I hear people say that Ned Kelly was a murderer, I think, "well, but he's not. He's so much more than that." There is so much more to the story.
You have called Ned Kelly the Thomas Jefferson of Australia. What did you mean by this comparison?
I was referring to Ned Kelly's place in society, his place in the pantheon. When we were at the Met exhibition, one of my friends listened to the story of Ned Kelly and then said, "So he's like Jesse James." Trying to get his attention, I said, "No, no, he was more like Thomas Jefferson." I meant that Australians have no Thomas Jeffersons, no George Washington of their own. Ned Kelly serves that purpose. And what that says about Australians is worth thinking about.
If you could imagine the ideal book group discussion on this novel, what would people be talking about? What subjects would you like the readers of your novel to discuss?
(Laughs) I have no idea. . . . Well, ideally I'd like them to look at the relationship of the novel to Ian Jones' history--to see the way in which the fiction works in relation to what's known about Kelly--and how events are re-shaped and reinterpreted. To me that was one of the big challenges of the book. If you just read the novel and don't know the history, you should enjoy yourself but there is probably even more pleasure awaiting the reader who can relate it to its historical and cultural context. I'd love readers to appreciate the level of invention, and the way this invention dovetails with the matrix of history.
The whole question of Australianness, what it is, what it was. It's hard to imagine a discussion not taking up this subject. It would be great if people read Robert Hughes' The Fatal Shore. That's really a tremendous, excellent history that puts Kelly's actions into context.
In terms of the style, some early Australian reviewers didn't appreciate the art of those apparently artless run-on sentences. But if people could take a look at the Jerilderie letter [available online through the State Library of Victoria, Australia; see the MuseNotes on this book for the link], they would realize two things. First, that my language grows out of Kelly's soil. Second, that it is not a parody of the Jerilderie Letter. Kelly was an intelligent but poorly educated bushranger. This is a novel which couldn't have been written if there had been no James Joyce or William Faulkner or Samuel Beckett.
