Bit by bit with his books, Australian author Peter Carey has stretched and broadened the narrative life of a country that seems to hum with the energy of its own myths. In expansive historical novels like Oscar and Lucinda and Illywhacker, Australia itself, particularly its past, becomes elastic. Its true stories and tall tales, raw landscape and melting pot of a population are, for the author, flexible. History, in Carey’s hands, has no fixed boundaries.

True History of the Kelly Gang, his splendid new novel, finds the author tinkering again with his country’s past as he explores the life of 19th-century outlaw Ned Kelly, a Robin Hood of sorts who has been lionized by Australian nationalists. A brisk and suspenseful narrative, Kelly Gang is Ned’s account of his own life, a memoir written for his daughter. Through his eyes, the book examines a singularly uncivilized era in Australian history, the late 1800s a time when Irish immigrants suffered at the hands of the British ruling class. Shot through with a keen sensitivity to society’s machinations and teeming with larger-than-life characters, Kelly Gang is a wonderfully Dickensian narrative.

From the start, the odds are against Ned. Born into a poor Irish family in Northeast Victoria, he is lied to and manipulated by the adults in his life, including his mother Ellen, who runs through a series of suitors after Ned’s father dies. Long on avarice, short on loyalty, Ellen remains the center of her son’s affections even after she sells him at the age of 15 to a bushranger named Harry Power. As Harry’s apprentice, the good-hearted Ned is forced into a life of crime, soon ending up in jail. This is the first of many such stays for Ned, who is, time and again, deprived of the right to defend himself and victimized by a legal system that seems to lack one important element: justice.

When, a few years later, he is accused of murder, Ned is forced to take to the bush with his younger brother Dan and a gang of allies. For nearly two years, they elude the law, robbing banks and using some of the money to aid the impoverished inhabitants of the district. Toward the end of his brief life, with the facts about himself buried beneath layers of betrayal, the 26-year-old Ned is determined to set the record straight thus, his version of events, a narrative, written during his time as a fugitive, full of censored swearwords, 19th-century slang and high good humor. Carey, pitch-perfect, works miracles with the rough vernacular of ill-educated Ned. This is beautiful, breathless prose, a torrent of language unchecked by proper punctuation, unbridled by the rules of grammar language as lawless as the land it describes, full of force, thrust and thunder. Of chopping down an ironbark on his homestead, Ned writes, "If you have felled a tree you know that sound it is the hinge of life before the door is slammed."

Broad in scope, full of Byzantine plot twists, Kelly Gang contains multitudes. The book also raises some profound questions: Who, in the end, has the right to write history? In a country where truth and justice are dangerously subjective concepts, can what is true and what is just ever be satisfactorily defined? Ned Kelly, as portrayed by the author, got lost in the margins of these ideas. He died trying to fight his way out of them.

Lincoln’s legacy lives on Abraham Lincoln was born in February of 1809, in humble surroundings. When he was assassinated 56 years later, he was one of the most famous human beings on earth. Even Uncle Sam himself had gradually evolved into a Lincolnesque figure. To this day Lincoln is the supreme deity in American mythology, and his profile on the penny is the most frequently reproduced portrait in the world. In an author’s note at the front of Lincoln: A Foreigner’s Quest (Simon ∧ Schuster, $23, 0684855151), Jan Morris offers respectful and apologetic gratitude to the living and dead scholars upon whose work she built her own. Perhaps they should thank her instead. Many historians have written about Lincoln, but few have brought the man and his times alive so vividly as Morris does in this 200-page book. She waves her imagination across the dry old facts and they stand up and dance.

Jan Morris first visited the United States during the 1950s, when Lincoln idolatry was at its peak. Over the years Morris remained skeptical but intrigued. Finally, in the late 1990s, she visited contemporary Springfield, researched the city as it was in Lincoln’s time, and wrote about both experiences. She did the same with Gettysburg and Washington and the prairie countryside. The result is this splendid book.

Lincoln rose above his humble origins by becoming a lawyer and a legislator. According to Morris, Lincoln, like many ambitious politicians, made shady deals, rewarded patronage, and made empty promises. Only later, as president, when he had nowhere else to climb and his perpetual melancholy and Shakespearean outlook grew into a sense of destiny, did he rise to the occasion and become an Emersonian great man. Morris’s account of this personal growth is riveting. Although Lincoln never lost his taste for cheap jokes, gradually he replaced the stilted rhetoric of his early years with sinewy prose of almost Elizabethan grandeur.

Morris’s description of slavery also helps bring to life the era and its issues, from the horrors of punishment to the appeal of the genteel slave-based culture of the South. Although in time he opposed slavery, Lincoln considered blacks decidedly inferior and dreamed of their repatriation to their native lands or segregation in a separate colony. Skeptical at first, always objective, Morris nonetheless grew to like her subject. Ultimately she decides that the contradictory aspects of Lincoln’s personality may be resolved by accepting that he was by nature as much an artist as anything else. The moods, the contradictions, the evasiveness, the questioning of accepted truths, the playacting, the sexual complexity, the sad resolution, and the power to move the spirit, all made a poet of this consummate politician. Two other new books address Abraham Lincoln in ways dramatically different ways from Morris’s approach. Historian and novelist Richard Slotkin has written a novel about Lincoln’s upbringing and early years, titled simply Abe. It is an adventurous, violent, and yet thoughtful melodrama based in historical research but not strangled by it.

Usually Slotkin has a light touch that brings the man alive without dressing him up as the myth. This skill shows especially in such scenes as the teenage Abe working on his reading skills, even when he pores over a book that contains the Declaration of Independence. After all, reading really was Lincoln’s salvation, and his first inklings of the power of language and the language of power came from the already sacred American gospels. Slotkin nicely renders the requisite Huck Finn scenes, such as Abe’s momentous journey down the Mississippi. However, there are moments when the author’s admiration for his hero gets out of hand. At one point Slotkin’s teenage Abe is mistaken for a high yaller octoroon and actually quotes Shylock’s Hath not a Jew eyes? speech with references to slaves replacing those to Jews. Jan Morris is skeptical about the mythological Abraham Lincoln, and Richard Slotkin’s narrative urge is inspired by both the myths and the facts. Another new book examines the ways in which Lincoln’s powerful figure captured the imagination of Hollywood and other purveyors of popular culture. Abraham Lincoln: Twentieth-Century Popular Portrayals, by Frank Thompson (Taylor, $26.95, 0878332413), is a curious labor of love. Thompson has thoughtfully examined every movie about Lincoln, including silents, and also the many portrayals on television. After all, the cinematic Lincoln ranges the spectrum from Henry Fonda’s Young Mr. Lincoln to comic appearances in Police Squad and Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. Through this surprisingly entertaining tour, Thompson evaluates the popular status of Abraham Lincoln. Apparently the myth is alive and well.

Michael Sims is the author of Darwin’s Orchestra (Henry Holt).