I would meet myself writing Heidl. There was no other way to write the book. I and I. Me and me. Did I know, at the very beginning, the crimes I would commit? If I did, it's not that I didn't tell others, it's that I didn't even admit them to myself. But I think even then Heidl knew. Being the first person, perhaps that's what I hated in him most.
The only Richard Flanagan I had read before was his Man Booker Prize-winning The Narrow Road to the Deep North; a book based on his father's WWII experiences that I felt was difficult but rewarding. It was, therefore, a surprise to me to have found First Person to be so different – confiding in tone and accessible (in the first person, no less), it tells an interesting story; treats some dark material lightly. It was an enjoyable read in its own right, but it was the information that I later learned that elevated the whole experience for me: In a way, I was led astray by the author (which is, in a way, the author's point here), and because I so enjoyed the “Aha” moment of after-the-book discovery, I would encourage other readers to also go into this read blind as to what other reviewers have written. I'll tread carefully hereafter myself.
What this book is about: It is 1992 and Kif Kehlmann is a struggling young writer – 100% committed to his art and agonising over getting every word in his first novel just right – but with a wife about to give birth to twins, and another young child to support and a crippling mortgage and every second-hand convenience they own about to fall apart, when his oldest friend calls to ask him if he'd like to ghostwrite a memoir for a quick $10 k, Kif wants to refuse out of artistic pride, but finds himself compromising his principles for the sake of his young family. When the (backwoods) Tasmanian author travels to the (big city) publishing company in Melbourne, he meets his subject, Seigfried Heidl: Australia's most notorious conman – having stolen 700 million dollars from the banks and government in a high profile Ponzi scheme, “Ziggy” is either a remorseless but brilliant manipulator or a very dangerous shadow figure with links to the CIA and the criminal underworld – and with just six weeks to write the man's memoir before Ziggy is due in court, Kif is unable to get the conman to tell a straight story, commit to even the most basic of biographical information, or even spend significant amounts of time in the same room as him. In the end, Kif finds himself inventing the memoir to get the paycheque, and every bit that Ziggy reads, he agrees, “Yes, it was just like that!” (proceeding to then call various magazines to give them these “scoops” for a fee).
Ziggy gets into Kif's brain – questioning the point of struggling for art or familial duty when there's riches and pleasure aplenty out there for the taking – and there's a persistent thread running through the narrative of people discussing “story”; declaring the death of the novel and the rise of the memoir form (with, of course, the fictionalised memoir that Kif is writing straddling the two poles), and throughout, the book skewers the publishing industry that seems more concerned with sales than art. Kif's initial impression of the publishing house:
It was feared by others that I might relapse into literature. By which I mean allegory, symbol, the tropes of time dancing; of books that didn’t have a particular beginning or end, or at least not in that order. By whom I mean the publisher, a man by the unexpected name of Gene Paley. He had been quite specific in this regard: I was to tell a simple story simply, and where it was not simple – when it dealt with the complexities of the spectacular crime – simplify, illustrate by way of anecdote, and never have a sentence that lingered longer than two lines.Ziggy's take on his crimes and reality:
Stories are all that we have to hold us together. Religion, science, money – they're all just stories. Australia is a story, politics is a story, religion is a story, money is a story and the ASO was a story. The banks just stopped believing in my story. And when belief dies, nothing is left.Eventually, seeming to have learned from Ziggy's philosophy, and after the complete failure of his first novel, Kif devotes himself to trash TV – first writing for Australian soaps, and then pioneering the rise of the worst of today's reality television. When in NYC in the present, he runs into his editor from the Heidl memoir, and through her, is introduced to Emily Coppin – a wildly successful twenty-something serial memoirist who “understood her own limited experience as the full extent of the universe” – who says:
Plot, character, Jack and Jill going up the hill. Just the thought of a fabricated character doing fabricated things in a fabricated story makes me want to gag. I am totally hoping never to read another novel again.So, all of this was a very interesting and timely examination of “story” and “literature”: the rise of fake news and “reality TV”; the current success of fictionalised memoirs by writers such as Rachel Cusk and Karl Ove Knausgård (both mentioned by name). I enjoyed the seemingly light tone of the writing, even as some quite dark events occur. The passage when Kif's wife gives birth to the twin's was astonishingly captivating to me (even if a review in The Guardian complains of this bit, “it is intense and involving to a degree that makes it seem part of a different project entirely”; actually, most newspaper reviews that I read about First Person didn't like it as well as I did). I simply loved the writing in passages like this:
They want to say things, the dead. Ordinary things, everyday things. Of a night they return to me, and I let them in. I let them their tongue. They talk of what we watch, what we see, what we hear and touch, free as the moon to wander the true night. The unbodied air, wrote Melville. But there is no Ziggy Heidl. No Ray. No others. Back then, before I had written anything, I knew everything about writing. Now I know nothing. Living? Nothing. Life? Nothing. Nothing at all.So, that's what's in the book, and I could leave the review there, but this is what I later learned (and what I'd consider a spoiler for those who haven't read it yet; hint, hint): In 1991, Richard Flanagan was a struggling young writer – 100% committed to his art and agonising over getting every word in his first novel just right – but with a wife about to give birth to twins, and another young child to support, when his oldest friend called to ask him if he'd like to ghostwrite a memoir for a quick $10 k, Flanagan wanted to refuse out of artistic pride, but found himself compromising his principles for the sake of his young family. When the (backwoods) Tasmanian author travelled to the (big city) publishing company in Melbourne, he met his subject, John Friedrich: a German-born conman who had embezzled 300 million dollars from the Australian banks and government in a high profile Ponzi scheme. With just six weeks to write the man's memoir before Friedrich was due in court, Flanagan was unable to get the conman to tell a straight story, commit to even the most basic of biographical information, or even spend significant amounts of time in the same room as him. In the end, Flanagan started inventing the memoir to get the paycheque, and when Friedrich killed himself halfway through the process, Flanagan created the rest from his imagination. While this memoir, Codename Iago, was a flop, the novel that Flanagan was able to finish writing because of that paycheque, Death of a River Guide, was such a critical success that it set the author on a very different path than poor Kif Kehlmann.
So, in addition to having enjoyed the narrative in its own right, I loved discovering that this is an autobiographical fiction about having written a fictionalised memoir; there's a nice irony in reading it during our age of fake news and whatever it is Knausgård has been up to. An article in The Sydney Morning Herald nicely outlines everything in First Person that's autobiographical (turns out, quite a bit) and provides this explanatory quote from Flanagan:
There's this strong belief, almost a dogma, that novels are finished and reality's outstripped fiction and therefore the only true literary form is the literary memoir, because you can only describe what happened to yourself. But really, we're constantly imagining and reimagining who we are. Most of what we choose to recall is selection and invention. I liked the idea of taking some facts from my life and creating a complete invention around them and in that way questioning what a memoir is.Roger that. Now I want to go back and read all of Flanagan's earlier novels.
I wanted to reinforce the necessity and power of invented stories, because what's happened isn't that reality's outstripped fiction. It's that fiction has outstripped reality. From the claims of climate-change denialists to the £350 million per week that the Brexiteers were going to get back from the EU, to Donald Trump's claims of the size of his inauguration crowds, none of these things were reality. They were fictions designed to bolster power and deny people the fundamental truth of the world. The fiction you get in novels speaks to that truth. Lies are a pernicious form of fiction, while novels are a liberating form of fiction that we need more than ever. In a way, my book is an argument for the necessity of novels.
