The 100 best novels: No 100 – True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey (2000)

Peter Carey rounds off our list of literary milestones with a Booker prize-winning tour-de-force examining the life and times of Australia’s infamous antihero, Ned Kelly
• 100 best novels: from Bunyan’s pilgrim to Carey’s Ned Kelly – Robert McCrum reflects on his choices

Peter Carey arrived exuberantly on the international literary scene as the dominant Australian writer of his generation with Illywhacker, his second novel, in 1985. He went on to win the Booker prize with Oscar and Lucinda (1988), but it was not until the publication of True History of the Kelly Gang in 2000 that his lifelong fascination with the antipodean predicament and his own impish love of narrative innovation met in the voice of the bushranger Ned Kelly, an archetypal Australian hero.

This tour-de-force of storytelling, Carey’s great gift, is a postmodern historical novel, a quasi-autobiography, narrated in the Australian vernacular with primitive grammar and scant punctuation, a dazzling act of ventriloquism, in a style inspired by an extraordinary fragment of Kelly’s prose known as the Jerilderie letter.

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