True History of the Kelly Gang
Peter Carey
(Knopf)

In The Politics of Experience, R.D. Laing wrote, "Around us are pseudo-events, to which we adjust with a false consciousness adapted to see these events as true and real, and even as beautiful."

He's talking about manufactured culture. We find recurring plots and screen images often enough--a leading man and woman who begin as enemies, then fall in love, or violent drama posing as a natural and acceptable human reaction with little in the way of emotional response--and accept this as a satisfactory rendition of the world.

Milan Kundera is the perfect example of an author who leans heavily on previous theory, playing out Freudian ideas mechanically in his writing, and who's heralded as creating insightful, even beautiful work. Freud, of course, is the patriarch of pseudo-events, projecting plot onto case studies. Unfortunately, Freud has us all by the balls when it comes to talking about human internal life; he established the basis of the only language we have for this, no matter how faulty his theories may be. Repression, depression, hysteria, sublimate, subconscious, unconscious. Freud created the armature we've been hanging our personal stories on ever since.

Perhaps there's something closer to a unifying truth in human experience, but we can't reach it, because we haven't got the language right yet. We haven't found the revealing details. Instead we accept formulaic love stories or adventure tales, incorporating nature, loneliness, alcohol, sex, drugs and anything with shock value in an effort to get beyond the rut worn in the well traveled path of mass culture.

Now Peter Carey has written a novel titled True History of the Kelly Gang. He's using the legend of a nineteenth-century Australian renegade to reconstruct internal and external life of Irish immigrants. Carey is reaching back to a time and place unmarred by Freud's ideas, and it makes sense that in an effort to portray a form of truth, he's using language according to his own invention.

Carey's semi-literate first person narrator has to discover his own language for expressing emotions without turning to the packaged answers of psychoanalysis. In differentiating between two brothers, the narrator says, "My father had been a stubborn ironbark corner post you could strain a fence with 8 taut lines and never see it budge but it didnt take a day to realise Uncle James were dug too shallow or placed in sandy soil."

Even with this inventive language and believably wild characters, we come back to moments that would make Freud smug. When the narrator accidentally assists his father off to jail, he says, "I were so v. guilty I could never of admitted that life without my father had become in many ways more pleasant. Only when his big old buck cat went missing did I frankly tell my ma I were pleased to see it gone." This is guilt and transference, which may or may not have been recognized in a population without Freud's insights.

Overall, Carey's sentences are challenging and original, creating a voice that moves easily from witness to victim to perpetrator while all the time holding fast to humanity. Perhaps in this fabricated version of a legendary story, something like a unifying human truth is revealed.