Corinthian Vase-Painting of the Archaic Period, Set of 3 volumes.: Vol. 1: Catalogue; Vol. I... Book

Well here I am being a bad person again, I try to be good and I really do like to like things but you all are probably by now getting the strong idea that really I like to dislike things, such as Booker Prize winners and movies with Scarlet Johanssssssen in them. They call me Mr Grumpy, baby, cause baby, that’s my name. No, Otis Redding did not sing that song, I did. Well I did not make it even to the middle of this Kelly Gang saga and the reasons are disturbing – for me, that is, not for you.

Peter Cary can write well, he’s lyrical, and salty, and all that- mmmm, smell that kangaroo, taste that kookaburra. Ned Kelly, whose unlikely autobiography this is, is sweet and pungent and naïve and knowing and really beautiful, everybody says so and everybody is right. You can’t get past Peter Carey’s front door without shoving aside all the awards which have spilled off his shelves, lots of them for this very novel. But when I put this novel down to read a nonfiction zinger about obscure 78 records, and then another nonfiction zinger about the publication history of Ulysses, and then, today, I thought I’d better pick Ned Kelly up again & finish it, I found a new thought lying around in my brain, and the thought was – nah, let’s not.

It wasn’t the fact that this man Ned has perfect recall of every single solitary moment of his life, because that kind of annoying unlikeliness is something I guess you have to go along with because every long first person narrative has a bit of that about it, although it does grate here; it was more the whole illiteratish working class no-good-Irish bushranger-type turns out to be sensitive yet strong courageous yet nice, tough yet tasty, mean yet poetic.... my God the human admirableness of Ned was laid on with a trowel, I could not tell if Ned was totally in love with himself or if Peter Carey was totally in love with Ned his creature. But fatally for me, this whole cool-Ned thing became cute. He was cute. He was romantic. He was like the guy in the Shangri-Las song – “Oh yeah? Well I hear he’s bad” “Mmmm- he’s good-bad, but he’s not evil”. So this was shaping up to be a claustrophobically told cowboy yarn (think The Outlaw Josey Wales or High Plains Drifter with a dash of Unforgiven) and with another 237 pages to go I got off of my roan mare with the splash of silver over its left eye and stuffed a jumbuck in my tucker bag and scrambled over the billabong back to the 21st century.