A couple of things I struggle with: Booker Prize winning novels; authorial ventures into the demotic - the former tend to the overwritten and the latter can be embarrassing. But both these prejudices are triumphantly defeated by Peter Carey's
True History of the Kelly Gang. In a thrilling exercise in literary ventriloquism, Carey gives Ned Kelly a plausible voice, a voice that can be affectingly beautiful:
That is the agony of the Great Transportation that our parents would rather forget so we currency lads is left alone ignorant as tadpoles spawned in puddles on the moon.
To maltreat someone else's joke, if I could write that well I would never go out, I'd stay at home reading my own words. This is a mighty novel.
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