My previous Peter Carey was Oscar and Lucinda, which I read on the Poudre. I'll have photographic evidence of what I did while listening to this, eventually and maybe soon. I don't know how anyone can do anything craftie (distinct from crafty) without a book to listen to.
A Recorded Books interview with the author followed the book. The interviewer said that the New York Times reviewer called this fiction "historical invention." I do like this sort of fiction. Girl with a Pearl Earring is one sort, utter invention from the wispy known facts about Vermeer--his city, his religion, his painting. In Cold Blood is another, adopting the basics of an actual case but independent of it, written with the tone of a newspaper article though with a novel's perspective. The Confessions of Nat Turner is a pure novel, in tone and perspective, though it is anchored to historical incident. And The Known World is, surprisingly, entirely fictional; from explicit hints in the narrative I was sure its author had based his characters on actual people polled in the Census, and on archival pamphlets culled from the Library of Congress.
True History of the Kelly Gang shows yet another way to imagine historical fiction. Before I read it, I thought, from whatever I'd heard about the novel, that the Kelly Gang were historically factual. Reading it (listening to it), with the narrative distributed into parcels, written on bank stationery or brown wrapping paper, in pencil or black ink or whatever came to hand, I was sure it was entirely made up, like The Known World, and that Carey used the parcelling for verisimilitude. The Kelly Gang were real, like the Usan Jesse James gang, and Ned Kelly did write a letter, though not the several parcels; and I don't know how much of what he actually wrote found its way into Carey's novel. I do know (because Carey said so in the interview) that one Australian reviewer slammed the book for not being inventive enough, which means that the reviewer must have found that the characters, plot, and Kelly's voice in the novel accorded so well to the Kelly legend in popular culture that he didn't realize it was all pure invention.
A wonderful book.