Here’s a book so good it’s almost depressing, like: how has this Carey guy done this?
It tells a fictionalized version of the life of the Australian bank robber Ned Kelly, in the imagined voice of Ned Kelly. There’s not a lot in the way of punctuation, and sometimes we run dangerously close to getting a bit cute, but overall it’s amazingly successful. Try this:
“Inside the shanty were much laughing and singing the shadows flitting across the curtains. Harry Power were dancing I heard not a word about the bunions he otherwise were whingeing about night and day. I never knew a man to make such a fuss about his feet.”
Or this, about a bushfire:
“God willing one day I would tell that baby the story of the apple gums exploding in the night the ½ mad kangaroos driven down before this wrath into the township of Sebastopol . . “
Or this:
“. . a number of Chinamen was engaged with a game of mahjong on a wide wooden plank. These was hard looking fellows all dried out and salted down for keeping.”
It takes you right inside his mind, very successfully. He grows up in poverty, the child of a transported man, and very much at the mercy of landowners and their corrupt police. He is almost forced into the life of the outlaw, and is greatly admired by the poor for his success. I always want to believe the life of an outlaw is glamorous, but this book shows what I guess I always suspect, which is that in fact it is stressful and difficult and given the choice we’d all rather be landowners. A fantastic book.