CONVERSATION
To call the sense of wellbeing emanating from author Richard Flanagan Zen-like is a step too far. But as he fronts a 600-strong crowd in Hobart, there is something verging on Buddhist monkish about his serene state – if you can imagine a monk with an ocker accent who invites the entire audience to the pub. Flanagan laughs comfortably at himself and ponders calmly the dire state of the world. Perhaps it is because a weight has been lifted from his shoulders. The follow-up novel for any writer who wins the world’s most prestigious literary prize, the Man Booker, is always going to be burdened by expectations. But Flanagan has passed the hurdle. First Person, his first novel since he won the Booker in 2014, has hit the shelves in Australia, initial reviews are positive and he is looking forward to writing nothing for a while.
“For the first time in my life I want to take a bit of a break. I actually want to not write for a while,” Flanagan says – serenely.
His relaxed good humour is a contrast to the angry cynicism the audience may be expecting, given his new book is, in the words of his US publisher, “a core-shaking commentary on the world we live in”. Zen is certainly not what Flanagan’s interviewer, ABC radio presenter Phillip Adams, is expecting from the evening. “I’m infuriated by your optimism,” he tells the author. Flanagan, 56, has been an outspoken critic of governments on both environmental and humanitarian issues. In 2014, after winning the Booker, he told the BBC he was “ashamed to be Australian” because of his country’s continued reliance on coal. So Adams is quite understandably expecting to enjoy an eloquently gloomy discourse on the tyrannies of US President Donald Trump, Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin and a world potentially on the brink of nuclear annihilation.
Instead, those who have paid $20 to hear Flanagan speak are treated to a series of hilariously self-mocking anecdotes and wellcrafted thoughts on why we should proceed with optimism in a seemingly crazy world.
There are appreciative chuckles all around when Adams reminds the audience of former premier Paul Lennon’s famous comments 13 years ago that “Richard Flanagan and his fictions are not welcome in the new Tasmania”, in response to the author’s criticisms of the then-Labor government.
The packed event at The Friends’ School’s enormous timberlined auditorium is Flanagan’s first public gig in Tasmania since winning the £50,000 ($80,000) Booker for The Narrow Road to the Deep North – a novel based in part on the experiences of his late father and other POWs on the Burma railway – which has exceeded a million sales worldwide.
He is introduced by the evening’s sponsor, State Cinema owner John Kelly, as “Tasmania’s favourite son” and welcomed on stage by the warm ovation of a crowd clearly proud to share a hometown with one of the literary world’s golden people, especially one so lacking in snobbery. With his curious West Coast Tasmanian twang, it sounds neither pompous nor studied when Flanagan mentions Hemingway and Fitzgerald and pulls out words such as “crepuscular” and “crapulent”.
First Person has been decades in the making, springing from his experiences as a struggling young writer. In 1991, Flanagan, whose wife Majda was heavily pregnant with twins at the time, was asked to ghost-write the memoirs of notorious fraudster John Friedrich. A recipient of the Medal of the Order of Australia (before it was discovered he was not an Australian citizen), Friedrich headed the National Safety Council of Australia in the 1980s. By the time Flanagan met him, he was facing charges of defrauding banks to the tune of $300 million.
As Flanagan tells it, he was chosen for the job because Friedrich’s publishers were desperate to get the book written before Friedrich’s criminal trial was due to start and an old friend of Flanagan’s happened to be working as the fraudster’s bodyguard.
“I was trying to write my first novel, what would become Death of a River Guide, and surviving as a builder’s labourer and a bit of part-time work also, as a doorman for the Hobart City Council on an exhibition they had,” Flanagan says. “I tried to write the novel on my knees underneath the table and they [the council] would get enraged by this abuse of council time.
“Things were reaching a bad point when, late one wintry night, the phone rang and it was John Friedrich. He said, ‘I’ll give you $10,000 if you write my memoirs in six weeks’. I worried about my literary reputation for about five minutes and then realised I really didn’t have a literary reputation to worry about. So within 24 hours I found myself in a Port Melbourne publisher’s office with this strange, enigmatic man. Three weeks later, he shot himself, so then he was dead and I was having to ghost-write a ghost.”
The Flanagan-like protagonist in First Person is reality-TV producer Kif Kehlmann and the evil con man is Ziggy Heidl. There is a vibrancy to this first, largely autobiographical, part of the book and Flanagan veers into Martin Amis/Tom Wolfe territory with ruthless self-examination and cutting satire. It is a fresh tone for Flanagan and the novel seems to have an effortless fluency, although it took him years (off and on) to write.
It is easy to see why Flanagan is somewhat taken aback when Adams describes the book as “a tough read” and “very grim” and suggests it was “written in blood rather than ink”.
“My God, Phillip,” Flanagan says. “I should point out that some people found it funny.”
While inspired by his experiences, the extremes to which he takes both Kehlmann and Heidl go far beyond reality. “I took a few aspects of my own early life, but I wanted a character who has the vanity of thinking he’s morally superior to a man who he finds wicked,” Flanagan says of Kehlmann. “His superiority slowly unravels and he discovers that he is the evil that he thought was the other.”
Adams describes First Person as a “Zeitgeist novel”, its exploration of fakeness timely in the era of President Trump. “I certainly didn’t write it with that intention,” Flanagan responds. “I started it before the Booker and it’s a book I’ve been meaning to write for some time.”
Flanagan says that long before the rise of Trump we have been encouraged to believe there are no objective truths. But he points out we have the choice to think and act otherwise. “Really, the book is about freedom, whether we choose to live as free people or whether we accept the chains of other opinions,” he says. “In every act of your life you have to live in freedom and that requires courage and it requires you to be active, but if you can find that courage then you can look forward to the future with some hope.”
Maybe the quelling of his rage has come from an understanding we are not defined by the politicians who purportedly represent us. “We give too much credit to power and not enough to ourselves,” he says. “The world is better because of us.”
It is fair to say the mood is buoyant as we head back out into the wet and windy night, some destined for North Hobart to share a beer or two with the local boy made good. We tell ourselves that if Flanagan can find peace with the world, perhaps things are going to turn out OK after all. Hear the conversation between Phillip Adams and Richard Flanagan at abc.net.au/radionational/programs/latenightlive First Person is published by Knopf Australia, $39.99 hardback