For a work explicitly promoted as a defence of the historical novel, A. S. Byatt's recent On Histories and Stories (Chatto and Windus) is oddly light on references to Peter Carey: just a couple of glancing mentions in among the analyses of Fitzgerald, Fowles, Golding and co. While no one expects exhaustiveness from a book with less than 200 pages, this neglect is something of a surprise, as few English language novelists of the past 20 years have played such dramatic and energetic games with history.

Jack Maggs (1997) wove all manner of devious patterns from the fog of early Victorian London. True History of the Kelly Gang, on the other hand, turns the compass point in the direction of more distant ghosts: Herbert Badgery, the 130 something fabulist of Illywhacker (1985), or the idiosyncratic cleric-and-heiress pairing of Oscar and Lucinda (1988). Although Carey's new novel is “true” in the sense that Kelly and his associates are historical figures—whatever liberties are taken with their lives, thoughts and articulations—the same questions of national identity seem to push their way to the surface. Just as Badgery's career as a “rifferty man” (ie, a confidence trickster) supplied a metaphor for the whole early Antipodean experience, so Ned Kelly—an Irishman stuck at the very bottom of the 19th-century colonial antheap—is capable of providing his own sharply figurative gloss.

True History of the Kelly Gang (the absence of the definite article is a nice authenticating touch) is the usual exercise in self-conscious fakery, a series of “parcels” in various stages of preservation (“Brown wrapping paper cut to 40 rough pages 4″ × 8″ approximate, then crudely bound with twine. Title page has a large hole along the gutter not affecting any text”) containing Ned's first-hand account of his short life, supposedly written for his daughter. As pieces of writing, these have an immediate power. There is an elemental savagery, which is also a kind of ingenuousness, about Ned's description of his mother giving birth in the rundown farming shack without medical help, his slaughter of a neighbour's heifer (for which his father goes to jail) and his “apprenticeship” to the celebrated bushranger Harry Power. As ever in Carey's writing, the comedy runs sinuously beneath the surface: the account of Power holding up coaches whose hard-up passengers reproach him on the grounds of his supposed Robin Hood status treads a fine but successful line between menace and humour.

Continuities with Carey's earlier work abound: for example, the tall stories that are a part of Ned's Irish heritage, and even the Oscar and Lucinda-style marbles carried by the Chinese traveller whom Power and his teenage sidekick attempt to rob. What remains, following the final penetration of Ned's ingeniously wrought suit of armour, is a ventriloquial tour de force. And yet, as so often in these ventures in historical fakery, leaving aside the metaphorical add-ons, there is only the “voice”. According to the dust jacket, this is an instrument “so wild, passionate and original that it is impossible not to believe that the famous bushranger himself is speaking from beyond the grave”.

No disrespect to whichever Faber and Faber employee wrote these words, but I didn't believe for a moment that Ned Kelly was speaking from beyond the grave and, while appreciating the many flashes of boot-level poetry, I could never get beyond the idea of the authorial performance. True History is mesmerising stuff, but there is a way in which the real people tend to disappear into the background, while all that is left on stage is the spectacle of an imaginative author playing all the parts himself.