Volume 48, Number 5 · March 29, 2001
The Wild Colonial Boy
By John Banville
True History of the Kelly Gang
Peter Carey
Knopf, 355 pp., $25.00
Does the man in the shiny blue suit still sing 'The Wild Colonial Boy' at Irish weddings? Anyone who was a child in Ireland in the middle of the last century will remember this ubiquitous and somewhat mysterious figure. In those days, marriage in Ireland was for life, whether you liked it or not, divorce not being available. Weddings were important occasions, usually held in hotel ballrooms, with a hundred or more guests, an invariable meal of chicken and ham, much drinking, dancing, and singing. The man in the shiny blue suit, who wore a belt and suspenders, and whose provenance was uncertain—somebody's uncle, perhaps?—would choose his moment with finesse, waiting for a lull in the proceedings to take his stance dramatically beside the piano and launch into his song. And as he sang, with forceful earnestness, his large pink face perspiring and his throat sinews straining, we guests would seem to feel the heat of the Antipodean plains, and smell the scents of strange, unheard-of fauna, and see the mighty figure of the Bushranger galloping toward us.
Review, 2990 words
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