FIRST PERSON

Chatto, 400pp, £18.99, Oldie price £13.33 inc p&p

Tasmanian author Richard Flanagan’s last novel, The Narrow

Road to the Deep North, won the 2014 Man Booker Prize, so his latest comes with mighty expectations. Reviewers’ opinions of First Person were mixed, many taking the view

‘It is an absorbing novel, intermittently very enjoyable too’

that this fictionalised account of his own early experience ghosting the memoirs of a notorious conman didn’t quite work.

John Friedrich (Siegfried Heidl in the novel) was on bail when he approached Flanagan (fictional narrator Kif), then unknown, to ghost his life and times. John Sutherland filled in the background in the Times: ‘Flanagan was flat broke and his wife was pregnant with twins. $10,000 for six weeks of work was a godsend.’ In the third week, Friedrich shot himself. ‘The book Flanagan produced at Friedrich’s behest was called

Codename Iago. It is a farrago of untruth, a knowing tissue of lies in aid of a known crook. But it got Flanagan going as a writer.’ Claire Allfree in the Evening

Standard had her doubts: ‘experience feeds claustrophobically into this novel, a fictionalised memoir about a man writing a fictionalised memoir’. In the Scotsman, Allan Massie was more impressed: ‘If you can’t quite believe in Heidl, this is because Flanagan presents him as the faceless face of a world given over to selfinvention and fantasy. So it’s an absorbing novel, intermittently very enjoyable too. Yet I can’t avoid the thought that it would have been a better one if Flanagan had taken more out and stuffed less in.’ But Simon Caterson in the TLS found the Faustian pact between the ghost and his subject depressing: ‘By the end of this troublingly gory and pessimistic novel, it is obvious that neither Kif nor Heidl has a soul worth selling.’