Best Australian Fiction of the 21st Century: #2 Carpentaria and True History of the Kelly Gang and
November 18
Toni Jordan on Carpentaria by Alexis Wright (2006)
Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria is not easy – it fits in no box, obeys no conventions and keeps no pact with book clubs. It bypasses realism in the same way that the greatest abstract painters do, instead going to the heart of what stories mean and do.
For me, Carpentaria is not about characters, although I defy any other novelist to create better ones than the traditionalist crusader Mozzie Fishman, the impossible, enchanting Angel Day and Normal Phantom, who ‘could grab hold of the river in his mind and live with it as his father’s fathers did before him’. Carpentaria is not about a sense of place, although Desperance and its river and old mines have become, not places I’ve read about, but places I’m sure I’ve been. It’s not even about the beauty of its prose, although Wright crafts the most luscious, melting sentences and paragraphs I’ve ever read over and over.
The thing that makes Carpentaria my best Australian book of the decade is the structure. The narrative flows and ebbs like Normal’s River. The plot (an insufficient word to describe what’s going on here) is often circular – looping and twisting in a way that seems more natural than character arcs or the conventional set-up–complication–climax–resolution. I’d never before considered the cultural bias behind the way I write stories, read stories and tell stories. I’d never before questioned the linear nature of time. Before reading Carpentaria, I’d never really understood that there are people who find our Western tradition of story-telling – on which Australia’s education and political systems, media and national narrative are based – just as challenging as I found this wonderful novel.
Toni Jordan’s first novel, Addition, was long-listed for the Miles Franklin literary award 2009. She also writes regularly for the Age.
Jane Gleeson-White on True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey (2000)
I was in no doubt about including a Peter Carey novel on my list of best Australian fiction of the 21st century so far – Carey is one of the greatest and most prolific novelists of the last thirty years or so – and I was completely smitten by his version of the Ned Kelly story published in 2000: True History of the Kelly Gang.
True History of the Kelly Gang is Carey’s comprehensive retelling of the life of Australia’s once most reviled bushranger, morphed by time, cinema, art and fiction into one of our most celebrated national figures. For me the novel’s most striking feature is Carey’s extraordinary act of incarnation: working from Kelly’s distinctive voice as it spoke publicly in the famous ‘Jerilderie Letter’ of 1879 – that impassioned plea of innocence and appeal for understanding and fair treatment – Carey conceived a private voice for Kelly and made from it a 450-page novel which is Kelly’s testimony recorded for his fictional baby daughter. Carey has a gift for such virtuosic ventriloquism and he lavishes it on his readers in this particular novel.
I was knocked out by Carey’s presumption in taking on Kelly’s voice and by some of the superb writing in the novel, such as Kelly’s description of his first view of Joe Byrne in the now iconic helmet forged from plough metal:
The 3 of us stood back in silent veneration as the Soldier of the Future turned his back to walk with steady tread there were a slight squeak from the cockplate swinging from its wires did ever such machine of war tread upon the earth before?
This seems to me to fuse Ned Kelly with Mad Max, the Terminator, Jurassic Park, the Iliad and Cormac McCarthy in a rather fantastic and exciting way.
Carey’s success in recreating Kelly’s life in his ‘own’ voice – in making Kelly speak ‘from beyond the grave’, as Carey so vividly put it – was acknowledged by the awards and acclaim the novel received. True History of the Kelly Gang won the 2001 Man Booker Prize, the 2001 Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for fiction. It is a beautifully composed, quintessentially Australian novel.
Jane Gleeson-White is the author of Australian Classics. Her third book, Double Entry: From Renaissance Venice to Wall Street, the amazing life and legacy of Fra Luca Pacioli, will be published in 2010.
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Comments
18 Nov 09 at 10:04
I like the pairing of these novels on the list - both obviously really pushed the use of language and narratorial voice in the novel. I particularly agree w/ Jane on Carey. I'd argue that he consecutively delivered three of his best novels in the 00s: The True History of The Kelly Gang, My Life as a Fake and Theft: A Love Story (all three excitedly praised by John Updike in The New Yorker). The key to the later two, whose language is rough, tough, gruff but utterly poetic, is in The Kelly Gang, where Carey, I think, found his second wind and, in a way, his second voice. Going back and reading the earlier novels, particularly Oscar and Lucinda, is difficult, because they don't have the same energy and can't hold the reader in the same way, namely by the cuff of their shirt, beating them black and blue. Beautiful beating.
...18 Nov 09 at 17:46
I agree with Toni that Carpentaria is the best Australian novel published since 2000 and in fact in decades - so I can't wait until tomorrow to see what novel/s the panel thought outdid it.
...19 Nov 09 at 22:31
Loved both these books. The Kelly Gang had me hooked from the first line. Carpentaria is a challenging read but has a real magic about it.
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