True History of the Kelly Gang

I really, really should have known better.  Prepping for my trip to Australia in September, I've done some of the recommended reading by the tour company: The Fatal Shore, This Golden Land, etc.  I have Bill Bryson's In A Sunburned Country sitting by my bedside that I'm saving as a special treat.  One of the other books on the recommended list is True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey.  It also appeared in Nancy Pearl's Book Lust To Go: recommended reading for travelers, vagabonds, and dreamers that I happened to pick up and browse through at our local library.  I checked it out, my husband took it first, but I have to confess that I've returned it to the library unread.  Very few books that I open make it to that list.  In fact, since I've started this blog, this is the very first one, but I might have guessed it would be.  So to be perfectly accurate, I did not give True History of the Kelly Gang a number, since I haven't actually read it. 

Personally, I find Peter Carey unreadable.  I've finally reached a point where I've realized that time is too precious to waste on something that is unappealing on every level.  Discard it, and move on to something else.  Everyone else - the critics and the literary set - seem to find Mr. Carey's work amusing and entertaining.  He's on the favorite writer list of people I know.  All I can think of is that in the words of that immortal movie "What we have here is a failure to communicate."  Mr. Carey does not speak to me at all.  It's comforting to know, however, that I'm not alone in my opinion.  When I asked my husband what he thought of the book (and he's just as big a devourer of books as I am!), he came clean and told me that after the first few pages he gave up reading and skimmed it to see what information he could glean about Ned Kelly, Australia's folk hero.  The best my husband could come up with is "They hung him.  They really hated the Irish out in Australia.  (No kidding!  That was evident in The Fatal Shore.) And we're not really going to the area where he lived except Melbourne."  I never even made it that far in the book.  After several attempts to get past the first couple of pages, I gave up and put True History of the Kelly Gang in our return stack.

At least when I read Carey's Parrot and Olivier in America, I loved the cover art the editor chose for the book.  That led me to one of the best sites on the web that I've ever visited - the Louvre's resource on the Delatour's portrait of Madame Pompadour.  So I did get some reward from it.  Unfortunately, the cover art of this book didn't offer any such redeeming quality - very pedestrian and forgettable.  I guess I'll be getting my information about Ned Kelly from other sources!