Darkness Down Under

Australia's bushranger hero, Ned Kelly, is tailor-made for Peter Carey's gifts. After all, Carey has specialised in picaresque heroes - Illywhacker, the impossibly old and dubious narrator of his second novel, Jack Maggs, the Dickensian scruff - and the gothic sprawl of 19th-century fiction, as in Oscar and Lucinda. No wonder then that one of Australia's premier novelists should turn his gaze on Kelly, the archetypal Australian folk hero.

The son of an Irish convict, Kelly lived at subsistence level as a child as the family eked out a livelihood on poor scrubland in rural Victoria of the mid-1800s. Carey's take on Kelly is an interestingly revisionist one. Kelly is more often viewed as single-mindedly cruel and violent, or foolish and misguided. The most enduring vision of Kelly (universalised by the Australian painter, Sidney Nolan) is dressed in his preposterous iron-plated armour with its letter-box aperture for the eyes, clanking about the bush. The image suggests a grandiloquent eccentric, a man engaged in endearing folly.

Carey's Kelly upholds this tin man vision - up to a point. Ned is presented as a victim of circumstance, but one who falls foul of the law more by accident than design. Kelly's father died when he was 12 and after that the Kelly clan depended almost exclusively on Ma Kelly's earnings - from selling grog and related services, and becoming embroiled with a list of unsuitable men, upon whom she depended to keep her brood from starving. Ned as the eldest of eight is thrust into adulthood as a 12-year-old, and dies at 26; and it is this short span that interests Carey. The brevity of his life alone speaks volumes.

At one level, Carey sustains the myth of the loveable rogue, the "larrikin" of Australian lore, in his depiction of Kelly. But there is also a great deal of rage against the penal system, and the land acts of mid 19th-century Australia. This rage burns quietly at the core of the novel, though the narrative is set up as a harum-scarum romp through Kelly's exploits, told in the first person in a quaint and unpunctuated voice. "I were but 14 and a 1/2 yr. old no razor had yet touched my upper lip but as I cantered after Harry Power my pockets crammed with marbles I were already travelling full tilt towards the man I would become."

Carey's novel is presented as a mock archival trove, grubby packages of Kelly's letters and accounts of his doings, scribbled on stolen bank stationery and addressed to his as yet unborn daughter. Presented as self-justification, Carey's novel cunningly undermines the myth of the happy-go-lucky Australian rebel, bucking at authority, "who'd rather die than be impressed by anyone". The revisionism even extends to the sexual politics. In True History, the Kelly gang dress up in women's clothing and not just, the author suggests, because it was a handy disguise for getaways. Indeed, there was a deal of transvestism going on in the Australian bush in the 1870s, if Carey is to be believed. There is a strong sense of ambiguity running through Kelly's penned accounts that hints at a darker sexual dynamic at work. And perhaps this is the hidden source of Ned Kelly's rage. Carey's narrative certainly leads the reader to query Kelly's relationship with his mother. Devotion, or obsession? Certainly not just a simple case of the Irish mammy syndrome, Carey suggests.

But perhaps Carey's ultimate subversion of the Ned Kelly myth is the proposition that the armoured-plated hero was, in fact, a frustrated writer. In the latter parts of the novel Carey's Kelly is more concerned with getting his version of the truth down on paper than he is about robbing banks. Carey's True History has a slow burn. There is an eloquent darkness implicit in the narrative, pervasive in the atmosphere. Carey's Australia here seems predominantly dark, sombre and primeval, as is the mood of this book. Not, perhaps, the most engaging of Carey's novels - but certainly one of his most intriguing.

Mary Morrissy is a novelist and an Irish Times journalist