Peter Carey
Peter Carey has written his seventh novel. Of those seven, he has won the Mils Franklin Award three times and the Booker Prize once. Ok, so we’ve established that he is an author of considerable merit. Two of his novels have been adapted into film, which also place him as an author of considerable popularity. But now he sits in the lobby of the Regency and makes jokes about me turning the lobby into my bedroom after I sling a jacket over the couch. “You need to put the socks on the floor,” he says, almost matter-of-factly. Suddenly he is transformed into a person, rather than a resumé or a narrator.
Turning ideas of people, or their attributes, into credible human beings is what Peter Carey does for a living, and it is one of the reasons the subject of his latest novel is Ned Kelly. ‘True History of the Kelly Gang’ is an account of Ned Kelly’s life from Ned’s perspective. When Carey told his friends about the topic, they responded one of two ways: either “you’re very brave,” or “why would you bother?”
“See, it’s one of those stories that we think we know all about,” says Carey. “How boring, this white, bearded bushranger who we know all about. Firstly I think it continues to be one of our most important stories, or the most important story. I mean, we really don’t have stories about philosophers and political thinkers and the stories that occupy the public imagination are stories like this. Everybody thinks there’s been a lot done, and certainly when you go to the library, there’s been endless books, mostly of no great distinction, about Ned Kelly. But then, a couple of novels, a play, it’s not really a lot. The whole emotional life of these characters never seems to me to be ever really imagined. One of the things about this book that was interesting to me when I just started to think about it, is that it’s really clearly about a mother and a son. At the very end of the Ned Kelly story, as it’s told, as he’s slowly probably going nuts, he wants to get his mother out of jail, and he’s signing his letters ‘I’m a widow’s son outlawed, who must be obeyed.’ And if you go back earlier in his life, when he’s about twelve, his father dies, and so he becomes the man. When that happens, the mother and the oldest son form a bond. It’s a survival bond and a really important bond.”
Carey makes the distinction that, with public opinion, Kelly is always perceived as a man, and never as a boy. The novel begins with Ned telling a story about when he was three, which almost immediately removes any idea from the reader’s head that Kelly was a criminal and a killer. When the reader starts the journey with Ned, he is nothing more than a child.
The obvious thought here, is that in order to create real people out of history, Carey would have had to pursue years of research. In this regard he likes to quote the American writer, E.L. Doctorow, who, when asked how much research he does for a novel replied: “Less than you think.”
“Of course I did a lot [of research],” says Carey, “and I’m reading in the period all the time, but the research is really there to get you to a point where you can be confident about what you can make up. In history, when Fitzpatrick jails Ned, they have a fight when he tries to put the handcuffs on him, and he goes through the bootmakers, and all that. All that really happened, but the motivation of the characters is totally invented.”
Peter Carey’s stories have been published for almost 30 years. Beginning with his short stories, collected within ‘The Fat Man in History’ and ‘War Crimes’ and leading up through his novels, there is a definite journey of style.
“It sort of snuck up on me,” says Carey about the changes in his work over time. “For a long time, early in my career, people would ask me about Bliss or Illywhacker, and basically I’d say to them that I was thinking the same way I did when I wrote a short story, except I’m taking longer to explore all the hills and valleys and the nuances. I think that what happens along the way, say with Oscar and Lucinda, which still could be a short story about the ending, but the exploration and the idea is a different sort of a thing. I don’t know what happened, but I think one of the things I’ve always been interested in, and which I first succeeded in doing in Illywhacker, was to look at Australia, look at my country, and re-imagine it in a way that was at once totally true to it, but totally fresh. So that was the drive in that.
“In a funny way,” Carey continues, “the Jerilderie letter (written by Kelly after a major robbery), which I read very early in the piece, did have that aspect about it. Because here it was, it was Ned Kelly, and yet the language… it’s an amazing document. When I read that in my early twenties, it reminded me – because I only had just started to read good books – it reminded me so strongly with its run-on sentences and its Irishness, and its richness of language, of Joyce or Beckett or something. So that was one of those dislocations of Australianness. I know I’m writing differently – thank God, I mean one would not want to be trapped in the same old thing. The book that I read that most affected me, when I began my reading adventures, was as I lay dying by William Faulkner. It affected me forever in the sense that you had these little chapters with conflicting points of view. But also that it gave to the poor and the unrepresented, this rich and amazing language, that if you drove past them on the street you’d never imagine they had it in them. So the notion of a poetry of the poor or uneducated was a really powerful thing for me. This, in a way is like that.”
There is a difference evident in ‘True History of the Kelly Gang’ compared with his other novels. It’s present in the writing, but also when he talks about it. Carey was obviously very excited to write this novel. It seems as if he has almost found a new passion for writing, in association with a pride regarding life in Australia.
“It’s deep in us,” he says, “and we all come out of the soil. I live in New York, but I’m 57 and I was living in Australia till I was 47. So, that doesn’t go away. And being in a foreign place, all writers as you know are total narcissists, well you’re thinking ‘I’m like this, and you’re like that.’ Even taking my friends to the [Sidney Nolan] Kelly exhibition at the New York Metropolitan Museum, which I did, over and over, explaining the story. This is how I came, finally to do this, because I’m telling the story, and the paintings look fabulous, so I’m proud and the story’s amazing, and I loved telling it to them. One of the things I just thought, what a strange country it was, that we have. Where else in the world do you have this sort of story occupying this big place in our imaginations?”
Peter Carey’s profession is a strange one. The life of a novelist requires a commitment which most people probably would find somewhat unnatural. More importantly, the audience for the product of this commitment seems to be ever-dwindling. But Carey has a theory that all writers are narcissists, plagued with self-obsession, and this is often their drive to produce a novel.
“If that’s the only thing that’s in your head,” he says about the sparking idea for the novel, “everything in the world’s about you. It’s a slight process of accretion. I’m quite capable of sitting through a really gripping bit of theatre and really only being interested in how it applies to what I’m thinking about – about my book – which is shameful.”
Perhaps self-obsession is the only thing which keeps novelists writing. There is no doubt that novels are considered ‘old technology’, and Carey assumes that young writers would naturally prefer to write for the screen, so he is somewhat amazed that there is a constant release of new novelists every year.
“I think the place for the novelist,” he says “and for the novel is really peculiar because, on the one hand, it’s no longer a popular art-form. The movies do that. Certainly theatre is marginalised even more than the novel, I’d suggest. So the movies and television tell our stories. I think it’s very interesting that the movies continue to buy novels. I think the point about the novel, even though we’re getting to a situation where a lot of well educated, smart people are down to about two novels a year, which they’re reading on their holidays. So they’re not reading as deeply as they once would, and the novel seems to be in a bad shape. But it seems to me we still need, if I can put it this crudely, stories. But God knows, maybe in the end no one will be reading books at all.”
By Josh Kinal
