Story about Ned Kelly the great Austrailian outlaw! Interesting stuff!It also offers alot of interesting insight into Austalian history.

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That rarest of things, a recent prize-winning and critically praised novel that does NOT disappoint. Peter Carey channels the voice of Ned Kelly, Australia's answer to Robin Hood, or perhaps Bonnie and Clyde, achieving a chronicle of the life of the bushranger that is sympathetic to the crushing poverty and prejudice that gave rise to Kelly and his family, while never soft-pedalling the reign of terror that they unleashed on Victoria State, Australia in the 1870s.

I loved it, but I know that this won't appeal to everyone: the stylized language, and the episodic storytelling is the opposite of a comfortable read. Carey's inspiration was a letter Kelly actually wrote in 1879, before he robbed a bank in New South Wales.

" ... In or about the spring of 1870 the ground was very soft a hawker named Mr Gould got his wagon bogged between Greta and my mother's house on the eleven mile creek, the ground was that rotten it would bog a duck in places..."

That's a quote from the letter, not the novel (Mr. Gould, the hawker, does get his moment in the spotlight, in the novel, and it's a good one ...) But it's all there, and it might give you an idea what to expect: the slightly formal, desperate to be taken seriously style; the blunt, no nonsense view of a world that is both beautiful and terrible, and a grinding life that has been imposed on the sons and daughters of the Irish convicts who were whisked away to these alien shores, for crimes as heinous as stealing a loaf of bread for a starving family, or standing up to a corrupt landlord. The humor: the bleak, dark laugh at the heart of the very worst situation, right up to the very end, and Kelly's own, apocryphal last words: "Such is life."

About 1/3 of the way through the novel, I realized what it reminded me of: "Riddley Walker" by Russell Hoban. Like Hoban, in that novel (which, full disclosure, I rate as probably the best thing written in the history of the world, ever), Carey has invented his own language, and devised his own mythology for a "hero" who is trying to make sense of his place in what feels like a post-apocalyptic landscape. Carey's Kelly is heartbreaking in his misplaced and mis-shaped sense of honor, and right and wrong: he is desperate to be thought of as a "good man," to look after his family, and be thought well of by the (fictional) daughter he will never see.

Carey achieves what I would have thought was impossible -- explaining, and even justifying Kelly's iconic status in Australia and beyond.

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Peter Carey, widely recognized as one of the most engaging historical novelists alive, surpasses himself in this novel about the Australian version of Jesse James. Here the author becomes historical impersonator: the chapters are 13 packets of narrative written by Ned Kelly to his baby daughter at a time when he knew his violent life was coming to its end, to give her his version of himself and his family and friends, who were seen by 19th-century Australians as thugs and killers. The voice, untutored, ungrammatical and often comically colloquial, becomes intoxicating, poetic and sinuous enough to reflect the highly idiosyncratic conversations of others without ever losing its own character. That alone would make this novel perhaps the most compelling reading on this list. But there is a kind of defiant bravery in Carey's attitude toward Ned. Kelly is a disarmingly candid young man driven to lawlessness by the corruption of the ruling establishment. In his own view he is almost always innocent, and his actions reveal what one can only call a native nobility; next to him Robin Hood looks frivolous. It is as if Carey were daring the reader to desert him as a romantic and a sentimentalist. He wins. The domestic scenes and the appalling education in crime of the boy Ned and his siblings are searing explorations of poverty, fear and ignorance; the one romance in Ned's life is wholly convincing; and the breathless chase at the end, as the vengeful constabulary closes in, is as heart-stopping a story as you can find.

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Novel about an Australian legend.

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