More than ever we love myths, particularly when based on history. The story of E the Australian bush outlaw, Ned Kelly, is fact embellished by a surreal iron-clad flourish. He is the stuff of fiction and his story forms a vital segment in explaining the colonial experience. No one better symbolises the exasperation of the dispossessed than Kelly, a man tormented by injustice. As Australian novelist, Peter Carey (heading for 58 but still looking like a 45-yearold mad inventor), says with typically casual but emphatic logic, "if he hadn't existed, we would have had to invent him".
That said, it is strange it took so long for someone to write a novel about him. After all, he was executed in 1880 and the Australian painter Sidney Nolan began his dazzling series of Ned Kelly paintings as long ago as in 1946. Besides, there was always somebody somewhere singing about a wild colonial boy. Carey agrees that such an obvious novel was surprisingly slow in coming. The good thing about the delay though, is that it is Carey who has written it, finally surrendering to an itch lodged in his imagination "about 35 years or so ago". It became a persistent idea in about 1996, "when the Nolan paintings arrived in Manhattan for that exhibition". The Kelly novel took over from another he was about to write: "one set in New York". True History of the Kelly Gang could be seen as the latest instalment of Carey's ingeniously random history of Australia. For about 30 seconds he agrees he has been engaged in telling the story of his native country. But then he cringes and pleads: "No. Pretend I didn't say that. I'm not telling the story of Australia. It sounds too ambitious or something. It's not exactly so." Perhaps. But it does seem that, since the publication of Illywhacker, short-listed for the 1985 Booker Prize, Carey has been writing about a country whose history has too often been denied by Europeans who often give the impression Australia and the US are merely recent additions to civilisation. Even the central characters in Oscar and Lucinda, his 1988 Booker winner, came from Britain. Having to justify your country's claim to history is a fairly common experience to Australians and Americans. Carey sighs - a combination of resignation and exhaustion.
Still, on hearing Ned Kelly described as "your Jesse James", he sits up, jet-lagged or not, and says almost competitively: "No. No. No. Ned Kelly is much bigger than Jesse James." So much for the James Boys. Carey is right. Kelly is part of a foundation myth that even now divides Australians. "Official Australia still doesn't want to recognise this guy. There's this reluctance, a national cultural divide. You either feel it's great or you really don't want to know and would rather it was forgotten. I think ordinary people mostly love him."
For Carey, the three or four years spent writing and now talking about the book have proved even more exhausting than usual. He is too likeable an individual to be described as smug, but it is obvious he is very happy with this book. "I'm proud I wrote it. Twenty years ago, even 10, I wouldn't have had the skill to do it." Not only is it a formidable technical achievement and as original as his novels always are, but it holds a deeper satisfaction. "I gave a voice to a man who didn't have one. I think that's important. There is also the fact that one of the realities of emigration is the way it transplants people who end up denying the past. Particularly in the case of Kelly's people, who arrived in Australia from Ireland as a result of a crime. They set out to lose the past."
In common with most Australians, Carey cannot remember a time when he was not aware of Ned Kelly, "although we weren't taught about him at school. Now the kids are". He also comments on the number of times he has been asked recently whether Kelly was "a good 'un or a bad 'un". As for Australians: "We all know the story, so it would have been no use having three in the gang, when everyone knows there were four."
Aside from a few interventions drawn from newspapers of the day, the narrative is told by Kelly in the form of an explanation of his life to be later read by his infant daughter born shortly before his death. "I invented the baby as well as all the stuff about the girlfriend," says Carey, never leaving any doubt that he was writing a work of fiction, not history nor a biography. He looks at the novel's jacket with the period photograph of a woman and five small children: "They're not the Kellys, they have shoes." Despite the book being in the first person, and obviously from Ned's viewpoint, a real sense of all the characters, even minor ones, is evoked as is a sense of the raw 19th-century country the events took place in. Of the narrator's stance, Carey says: "He is justifying his life." But the novel reads less as a self-justification and more as an attempt to set the record straight. One of the strongest impressions to emerge from this book is Kelly's unfailing belief in justice. There is also the overwhelming sense of life destroyed by circumstance. We tend to forget Kelly was only 25 when he was hanged and that his "career" as a fully-fledged outlaw lasted only two years. "He was forced to operate outside society." Carey does not attempt to sentimentalise Kelly, but the bush ranger is portrayed as sympathetic and human, disappointed by his father and devoted to his mother, Ellen Kelly, an astonishing woman who placed her faith in several men who all let her down. "She was quite a character and had a terrible life." As her son reports in the book: "One morning in the summer of 1872 my mother were 42 yr. old she had 2 sons in prison also 1 brother & 1 brother in law. 2 of her beloved daughters was buried beneath the willow tree and God knows what worse were on the way." Kelly's voice, sustained in an urgent vernacular, as Carey remarks with a smile: "without commas", is consistent and convincing. Its source for Carey was twofold. He first heard it when reading the Jerilderie Letter, a 58-page document dictated by Kelly to fellow gang member Joe Byrne, and intended for the authorities.
"The letter really exists. I had first read it about 1965 and was so struck by it, I copied it down. It was printed in books, but no one knew where the original was."
The publicity surrounding Carey's book in Australia was such that the owner of the letter, a private individual, came forward and donated the original document to the Victoria State Library in Melbourne. "You can actually read it yourself, if you are online," he says. "It's a wonderful piece of writing. Kelly was a clever guy. There is a real poetry about it."
Carey used the letter as a framework of sorts. History and the novelist's imagination did most of the work. Yet another valuable source for Carey, when it came to imagining the voice, was his younger self. "When I was a schoolboy, we spoke like that. It's the language I grew with. It wasn't that difficult to hear it myself. When I was writing the book, I found myself speaking with that voice, saying `I were' instead of `I was'. I discovered I knew his voice."
Carey has always possessed a magpie's mind with a genius for discovering bits of stories, old yarns, chance comments, information about the way things work. Objects have often been as important as people. He was born in 1943 and raised in the Australian equivalent of Hicksville, USA - the small town of Bacchus Marsh, about 30 miles outside Melbourne. His parents sold cars and Carey, the youngest by 10 and 11 years respectively of three, grew up daydreaming.
Having failed to acquire the desired Anglicised accent at his expensive school, he went on to university, which, after failing his first-year science exams, he left. Advertising proved an unlikely salvation. It not only put him into contact with writers and wits but he found a patron in his boss. Carey began to write. Before the publication of the short story collection, The Fat Man in History (1979), he had already written three novels that didn't work. Carey says: "They read like they were written by someone who didn't know very much . . . about novels." He learnt quickly. Novels such as Illywhacker, the picaresque history of Australia as told by a self-confessed liar; Oscar and Lucinda, his dark family expose; The Tax Inspector (1991) - possibly his best book to date; Jack Maggs (1997), an inspired Victorian pastiche; and now True History; all testify to how fine an original Carey is. Until now, it seemed he was one of those gifted novelists readers tend to forget between books. The capacity attendance at his recent reading at Eason Hanna's suggests this has changed. There is also the Irish connection with Ned Kelly. His mother believes she's hearing the banshee, and stories of the wren boys and their activities are described, indeed emulated, by members of the gang. Carey acknowledges the displacement shadowing the lives of the settlers. His Kelly certainly appears caught between two cultures, "what he was told about Ireland and what he only guessed".
While a vivid, wonderful, even at times, funny, novel, it is also a demanding book to read, set out in the form of the contents of 13 parcels of text. Kelly's story is a tough, physical one. "He was no saint. He was probably as racist as most." Yet Carey also shows Kelly's understanding of the moment he became a murderer. Kelly seems more regretful than defiant. Once upon a time, Carey had his own love/hate relationship with Australia. Then it mellowed. After a decade living in New York, he seems closer to Australia than ever but is too intelligent an observer to become blinded by nostalgia. His feeling towards Kelly is human rather than romanticised: "I believe in my character. He did believe in fair play". The real Ned Kelly also issued the threat: "I am a widow's son outlawed and must be obeyed". As Carey writes it, Kelly did love his mother and he did die saying "such is life". Carey, the Australian, has done a service that goes beyond the literary, but as a writer he has fashioned a gripping story. "It's 90 per cent invention, my invention, but it also respects the facts."
True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey, is published by Faber (£16.99 in UK)
Ned Kelly's Jerilderie Letter online: www.slv.vic.gov.au/slv/exhibitions/trea- sures/jerilderie