National Post (National Edition)
‘A faithful adaptation is a boring idea’
Author Peter Carey tells Duncan White why the film version of Ned Kelly is not at all like his book
On the streets of Manhattan, the morning crowds are being drenched by a freezing rain sweeping off the Hudson river, but six storeys up, Peter Carey’s home office feels like a sanctuary. The walls are lined with bookshelves and on the desk a laptop is raised on a stand, braced to receive its punishment from the notoriously hard-typing novelist who burns through at least one keyboard a year. After ushering me in, Carey folds his tall frame into an office chair that swivels and rocks, accommodating his restlessness. Perhaps it is this energy that makes him seem much younger than his 76 years.
Carey left Australia for New York in 1990, but he still feels — and sounds — resolutely Australian. The same is true of his fiction which, over the course of 14 novels, has probed questions of the Australian identity, and the complex, often cruel, history that formed it. The best-known among them is True History of the Kelly Gang, Carey’s reinvention of the Ned Kelly story, which earned him his second Booker Prize in 2001 (the first was for Oscar and Lucinda in 1988) and has finally been given the film adaptation it deserves. “It’s this huge story that was incredibly underimagined, it seemed to me,” says Carey of his initial motivation for telling Kelly’s tale. “These were poor people so there were no diaries or private libraries. The only written records came from the courts and the police, and of course later newspaper reports of those wonderful robberies.”
One document that did survive was the so-called Jerilderie letter of 1879, in which Kelly’s voice jumps off the page, a mixture of dialect, scrambled syntax and moments of lyricism. “I would have scattered their blood and brains like rain,” he writes, of the police on his tail. “I would manure the 11 mile with their bloated carcasses.”
Carey ventriloquized that voice in his novel but the result left him fearing he had sabotaged his career. “I wanted to take the letter and keep on writing,” he explained. “The letter itself is not very clear but I tried to do it like that, with the runon sentences and it didn’t really work at all. At that stage I hadn’t figured out the dramatic structure or the characterization, but I thought it was the run-on sentences that were the problem.
“So, I started to write it using commas continually and almost no full stops. I did that for a couple of years but realized it wasn’t what I really wanted to do. I did a global search of the manuscript and deleted every bit of punctuation. Then I want back through it, feeling my way for what were sentences and what could flow together. When I was done, I knew it really worked. I had wanted to get this voice right for years. But I was also convinced I was shooting myself in the foot. When I finished, I thought commercially it was the end of me.”
He could hardly have been more wrong. Fuelled by adulatory reviews and literary awards, True History of the Kelly Gang sold more than two million copies. Almost at once, there was talk of a film adaptation, to be directed by Neil Jordan. “We met and I was excited about it. The book was selling well. And then, well… my friend, the Australian writer Robert Drewe, had written a book about Ned Kelly called Our Sunshine years before, in 1991 — I’d actually blurbed it at the time — when I never imagined I’d write a book about Ned Kelly myself.
“There was a screenplay of Rob’s book that had been drifting around forever and suddenly it became viable because of the success of my book. That became the film starring Heath Ledger,” he says, referring to Ned Kelly, a critical and commercial failure on its release in 2003. “And of course, that f––ked me, and when the film didn’t do well, it f––ked the idea of Ned Kelly in Hollywood forever, which in Hollywood is about two years.”
Or, in this case, more like two decades. The film based on Carey’s novel has a cast that includes George MacKay of 1917 as Kelly, Russell Crowe as his mentor Harry Power, Nicholas Hoult and Charlie Hunnam as creepy colonial police officers, and Essie Davis stealing scenes as Kelly’s mother. Director Justin Kurzel and screenwriter Shaun Grant made a name for themselves in 2011 with the almost unwatchably violent Snowtown.
Kurzel and Grant soon stray from Carey’s source material, jettisoning its deeply researched historical reality for surreal, jagged psychodrama, dressed in an intense, de-historicized punk aesthetic. Their film crackles with brutality and barely suppressed homoeroticism.
“A faithful adaptation is a boring idea to me,” says Carey. “If you are going to make a book into a film, you really have to break it. So, what I will say about this film is that they broke it — and I gave them permission and continue to give them permission to do so.
“Their politics are different to my politics. Theirs is about toxic masculinity perhaps, and a boy driven mad. Mine is about the convict stain and the convict seed who becomes the hero of the country. They are different things. Some of the things that they have done with the book are really thrilling and I like the degree to which it is reckless and transgressive. But it is not my book. And that’s all right.”
Carey has continued to take risks of his own. His 2014 novel Amnesia was about an Australian computer hacker and the history of American interference in Australian politics, a project for which he had to take a crash course in coding. Sonny Mehta, the publisher, had asked Carey to work with Julian Assange on a book about his life and, while he declined, Amnesia came out of that research. Did he not see something of Ned Kelly in Assange, the Australian rebel sticking it to the bullying imperial power?
“I sort of wanted Julian Assange to be that. I was outraged that American politicians were calling him a traitor. How could he be a f––king traitor? He’s an Australian, not an American.”
Carey says the affair reminded him of the events of 1975, allegedly involving the CIA, in which the Australian prime minister Gough Whitlam was removed from office by the governor-general John Kerr, and replaced by the leader of the Liberal Party. “Nobody in the United States even thinks that happened because The New York Times didn’t write about it. Assange’s mother was active in the Labour Party at the time, and I thought he was motivated by striking back against the United States. That’s what I wanted him to be. And he wasn’t.”
In his most recent novel, 2017’s A Long Way From Home, Carey for the first time engaged directly with the continued plight of the indigenous people of Australia, knowing that by representing their voices, he could well be accused of appropriation or exploitation.
“I thought, I’m meant to be an Australian writer and I have written all these books but not once directly addressed this subject, of stolen lands, attempted genocides and of white Australians’ relationship with oppressed peoples. I mean Oscar and Lucinda is about it but not directly. I was frightened of the idea (of writing from an indigenous perspective), but I did what I always do and talked to a lot of people and, in the end, it was really thrilling.
“Some of the Aboriginal dialogue was rewritten or corrected by people from Fitzroy Crossing (a town in northwestern Australia known for its indigenous population). I like that. There might be people who are offended or outraged but I haven’t heard from them nor have I read anything like that. Which is not what I expected.”
Thirty years of expatriate life have not dulled Carey’s love for an Australian countryside he renders so vividly in his fiction. He watched with horror as the recent bushfires ripped through New South Wales and Victoria, parts of the country in which he grew up. He was asked to read at a fundraising event — “I was Kylie Minogue’s warm-up” — and went back to True History of the Kelly Gang, looking for a passage in which Ned and Harry Power are trying to escape a bushfire.
“It has been weird. Australia doesn’t mean that much to people (in America). It is misunderstood. One gets used to the idea of secret places like Mallacoota, places that are an intimate part of one’s life. Then suddenly you started seeing these places in The New York Times. This tragedy was going on that I thought I understood.
“So I rang a friend who lives out in the bush. Isolated. I started telling her all this and she says she’ll never forget the screams of the animals in the night. Then I realized that I’m not there. She’s there, but I’m not. It’s the only time in my life I have felt that.”
Carey hopes that the fires will prompt the Australian government to take the climate crisis more seriously. “Our kids live with the notion of apocalypse in a very real way. I thought people of my generation were traumatized by the Cuban Missile Crisis but it was nothing compared to what our kids live with.” In general, he is pessimistic. “Can you imagine the world in five or 10 years being better than it is now?”
Nevertheless, Carey continues to write. He is working on a new novel and all he will say is that it is long and there is a problem with it that is proving difficult to solve. His subject remains Australia, even if he cannot see himself returning to live there.
“I feel at home (in New York),” he says. “When you sit on the subway you know that all these other people are going around with their heads in two places, all these different histories and pasts, private mythologies and visual memories of somewhere that is not here; I like that.”