‘First Person’ echoes author’s haunting past
Richard Flanagan is an Australian novelist with six novels, including “The Narrow Road to the Deep North,” which won the Man Booker Prize in 2014, about POWs in Japan. (I didn’t read it, though I do recall his “Gould’s Book of Fish.”)
“First Person” is a return to Flanagan’s first writing assignment. Like Kif Kelmann, the writer portrayed here, Flanagan was hired in 1991 to ghost write a memoir for a con man facing trial for swindling the government. His subject had cheated the National Safety Council of almost $300 million. Flanagan was flat broke, working as a labourer to support his wife, who was pregnant with twins. He was paid $10,000 to deliver a manuscript in six weeks. Unfortunately, the con man committed suicide before his trial opened and before the interviews had been completed.
All of these details are repeated, prodded and probed in “First Person.” Kif is trying to complete his first book, so when the publisher calls him with the offer, he jumps at the chance, though insists that his name appear on the title page. Siegfried Heidl has asked for Kif personally: Kif’s best friend and drinking buddy Ray is working as Heidl’s bodyguard. Turns out that three ghost writers have already given up working with him, most within hours.
Kif commutes each week to the publisher’s Melbourne office from his home in Tasmania. His wife and young daughter are struggling in poverty, hoping that the payout for the memoir will come before the twins are born.
Heidl is less than co-operative (busy meeting with his lawyers) and a pathological liar; anything that Kif begins to suggest as book-worthy from his background he tries to monetize as exclusive interviews with the media. When Kif overhears him putting a hit on his former treasurer, fear compounds his intrigue with the immoral fibre of Heidl’s character.
In the early stages, Kif writes: “Every time he spoke like he just had, I worried that there was, within all this, in spite of his endless deceit, a genuine experience ... that I should be capturing in the memoir. But that essence, along with my belief in my own ability, vanished in the moment I tried to find words to capture it on the page.”
Flanagan has set a high bar for himself in “First Person”: to write about a writer, to write as he would’ve at the beginning of his career without losing the reader, and to delve into the criminal mind and render both judgment and understanding on how and why it works. If Heidl is unreliable as a source of his own story, Kif is similarly unreliable as an interpreter and fabricator of his story.
When the project is finally done, the twins are thriving, but Kif takes his box of the book to the landfill, ashamed to see his name on such sensationalist dreck. But his name is out there, and the notoriety leads to work in reality TV; he eventually becomes a topline producer. This is the latter part of “First Person,” which clearly diverts from Flanagan’s novelist career, and it left me hoping for a swifter ending.
In the age of Trump, the president who lies on a daily, if not hourly, basis, “First Person” should stand as a parable of our times.
But piecing together the story of any life rarely results in a straightforward tale. Good and evil are never black and white, all the more so when the focus is on a character who swindled millions but in his own mind did nothing wrong. The purely objective observer is also a fiction. I wonder if Flanagan remains as haunted by the original con man as Kif is, and as this reader is by Heidl.