First Person

Richard Flanagan has written a smart, comic and intelligent satirical fable for our era, set in Australia. To some extent it is a blend of fact and fiction that draws on the author's well known experience of ghost writing a memoir for a con man in the 1990s. Flanagan mocks and incisively skewers the publishing industry. Kif Kehlmann is an unpublished Tasmanian writer in dire financial straits. His wife, Suzy, is expecting twins and they already have a child. He finds himself in Melbourne, having a $10, 000 contract to ghost write the memoir of the notorious con man and fraudster, Siegfried Heidl (Ziggy), within six weeks. The two men find themselves dependent on each other, with their fates intertwined. Heidl proves to be the slipperiest of customers, disinclined to offer any personal information, throwing out the odd bones that prove to be nebulous and hard to pin down. Kif struggles to write anything of value whilst being harried by the monstrous publisher.

I was amused by the picture of the publisher, Gene Paley, terrified of literature with its allegories, symbolism, tropes of time dancing, often lacking the logical structure of a beginning and an end. Paley is scared because literature does not sell, whereas celebrity memoirs and other superficial books make money. And Paley is all about the money, and he wants Kif to understand that there is no money in writing well, only in writing badly. Heidl claims to be Australian even though he has a strong German accent. He alludes to working for the CIA and mentions Laos, FRG and Chile, and that his codename was Iago. However, nothing adds up and Heidl talks of the invented lives of the famous, where the achievement invents the life it needs. Kif is drawn to and beguiled into the life of Heidl as he writes a fictional memoir, caught by the glamour of the rich and powerful, infected by their corruption. He begins to understand that Heidl may actually be guilty of far more heinous crimes that those he is charged with.

Flanagan weaves a dark story about identity, a ghostwriter performing a conjuring trick, an illusion of a life that is fictitious. It asks the questions, what is truth and what is fiction in our world? I did like the symbolism of the codename of Iago for Heidl and the portrayal of Paley, a man only interested in the badly written and the money it makes for him. Kif finds the memoir puts him on a voyage of discovery about who he is and is instrumental in the trajectory of the path his life takes later. This is a novel that catches the zeitgeist of our contemporary post truth world with its fake news. A brilliant and highly recommended read. Many thanks to Random House Vintage for an ARC..