Book of the dayFictionReviewIn the Man Booker winner’s first novel since The Narrow Road to the Deep North, an invitation to ghostwrite a criminal’s autobiography leads a man into a moral crisis
Kif Kehlmann is a young Tasmanian with a chip on his shoulder, $200 in his bank account, a wife who is pregnant with twins, a three-year-old daughter he struggles to provide for, and thwarted ambitions to become a novelist. But he also has noble principles. When celebrated conman Siegfried Heidl – who is about to go to prison for his crimes – suggests out of the blue that Kif becomes the ghostwriter of his memoir, his first instinct is to say no, and stick to the high ground of his failing art.
But needs must. And anyway, Kif seems to have been given a head start – a 12,000-word manuscript produced by Heidl himself, which on the face of it offers a sketch of everything it will be Kif’s job to flesh out. Despite the warnings of both his conscience and his rackety best friend Ray, now employed as Heidl’s gofer, he therefore accepts the commission.
He immediately regrets it. The existing manuscript is almost entirely devoid of hard details, and Heidl’s conversation during interviews is either riddling or downright evasive. Worse still, Kif’s tendency to be easily manipulated by characters stronger than himself means that he risks encountering the worst aspects of his own personality while contemplating the behaviour of his subject. “I would meet myself writing Heidl,” he says. “I think even then Heidl knew. Being the first person, perhaps that’s what I hated in him most.”
These preliminaries fill the first 40‑odd pages of Richard Flanagan’s new novel, which is his first since winning the Man Booker prize in 2014 with The Narrow Road to the Deep North. According to an interview he gave to this paper last March, the story is based on personal experience: as a fledgling novelist, Flanagan ghostwrote the autobiography of John Friedrich, one of Australia’s most notorious conmen. This might explain why the novel takes the form of a memoir, which results in Flanagan using a more relaxed and confiding style than he did in The Narrow Road to the Deep North. To the extent that this amounts to a development, or at least a departure, it will come as good news to those who have found aspects of Flanagan’s prose too flowerily poetic in the past. But it can’t compensate for a basic structural problem. As the book effectively opens with a résumé of the entire plot, the central part of First Person involves a large amount of recapitulation; it is constantly in danger of grinding to a halt, no matter how often Flanagan tries to tease the narrative forward.
Heidl, like Friedrich, is someone who turns things on to the listener rather than revealing anything about himselfKif gradually finds some of the shady plotlines he needs to complete his book: how its subject was involved in the development of a site in Australia for a Nasa project; how he blagged his way to making a fortune by running an outfit called the Australian Safety Organisation; how he got entangled with the CIA; how he might even have been involved in the murder of one of his associates. Meanwhile, the mystery of Heidl’s operations, let alone his personality, remains intact, and exactly as advertised in the opening section of the novel. Heidl – evidently like Friedrich, whose fraudulent career and wretched end he almost exactly replicates – is someone who turns things over to the listener rather than revealing anything about himself. He invents stories off the back of other people’s conjectures. His art is “to let you create your lie from his truth”.
None of these things becomes more interesting simply by being repeated, and none of them is significantly enriched by contact with other elements of the book, such as the story of Kif’s friendship with Ray, or the saga of his decaying marriage. The components of First Person that don’t involve Heidl directly seem to exist at a strange distance from its centre, either because the characters are drawn too sketchily, or because Flanagan writes about them in prose of a different quality from the main part of his book. Perhaps this disharmony is also explained by the origins of the novel. Flanagan adopts a novelishly self-conscious memoir style for the narrative that involves Heidl; for the parts of his story that concern Kif in more personal ways, he falls back on thinly disguised autobiography. The section dealing with the birth of the twins is a case in point (Flanagan’s wife was pregnant with twins while he was writing about Friedrich). Compared with the generally chatty tone we find elsewhere, it is intense and involving to a degree that makes it seem part of a different project entirely.
In his final pages, Flanagan tries to reconcile these diverse elements by elevating his antihero to the status of a messenger from the future. It’s a bold move, but more interesting in terms of argument than character or style – both of which feel rather papery. Kif becomes a reality TV producer who makes evasiveness and moral vacuity his stock in trade: this shows that he has at once understood and ignored the warnings Ray gave him about Heidl in the early days. He has allowed Heidl’s lack of principle to become his own modus operandi, and replaced ordinary human responsibilities with lies and blandishments. As Flanagan said of Friedrich, “he was a master at inviting other people to invent the worlds he wished them to live in”. Or as we might say these days: the propagator and embodiment of fake news.
Andrew Motion’s Silver: Return to Treasure Island is published by Vintage. First Person is published by Chatto & Windus. To order a copy for £16.14 (RRP £18.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
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