Review of True History of the Kelly Gang
Lubna Ahmed on the "Wooden Trunk" weblog: "Contrary to the title, the story is a work of fiction on Ned Kelly's life and his rise (or is it fall?) to becoming an outlaw. Told in first person by the leader of the Kelly Gang, the story starts with his childhood and family history and moves on to his later years. The book is divided in 13 sections, called parcels, each with a small summary of its contents, giving it a very authentic air. So much so that I had to keep reading the actual version of the incidents and remind myself that it is fiction, not biography that I am reading."
Review of My Life as a Fake
"Mindful Pleasures" weblog: "Carey's My Life As A Fake is surprisingly good, considering the lukewarm-at-best reviews it received upon publication. It's a very enjoyable, original, quite clever literary novel--perhaps too clever for its own good, since it apparently flew over the heads of most reviewers. They failed to appreciate Carey's deliberate, often subtle, sometimes intertextual, provocations of disbelief, his many signals that the text we're reading is, like all the other narratives and texts it contains, a 'fake,' a fiction the validity of which must be questioned and the motives of its teller examined. It's a delicious book, delightful, maybe the most purely enjoyable thing Carey has yet written."
Other
In a review of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, Prof Mike compares the book to Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang: "Perhaps most striking is McCarthy's use of nineteenth century vernacular. In this sense it is slightly redolent of Peter Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang (or should it be the other way round?)."
Winnipeg's "Uptown Magazine" gets a bit over-stretched in attempting a linking phrase: "And speaking of Nobel Prize winners, Peter Carey never disappoints. Latest proof: His Illegal Self (Random House Canada), a novel concerning a maternal love story between the child of domestic terrorists and an unwilling nursemaid."
Well before he left Bacchus Marsh to become the writer that he is today, Peter Carey was mentioned in "The Adventure of Black Peter", a Sherlock Holmes story by Arthur Conan Doyle: "In this memorable year '95, a curious and incongruous succession of cases had engaged his attention, ranging from his famous investigation of the sudden death of Cardinal Tosca--an inquiry which was carried out by him at the express desire of His Holiness the Pope--down to his arrest of Wilson, the notorious canary-trainer, which removed a plague-spot from the East End of London. Close on the heels of these two famous cases came the tragedy of Woodman's Lee, and the very obscure circumstances which surrounded the death of Captain Peter Carey. No record of the doings of Mr. Sherlock Holmes would be complete which did not include some account of this very unusual affair."
Peter Carey will be appearing at the New York State Writers Institute on April 7th.
Scotland's national opera company will be performing a number of new operas this year, one of which will be titled "Happy Story" written by David Fennessy and Nicholas Bone, and based on a short story by Peter Carey.
The Australian National Portrait Gallery has made available Peter Carey in Kelly Country (2000) by Bruce Armstrong.
