A tale of evil personified
Booker prizewinner Richard Flanagan tells Robbie Millen about the real-life conman who inspired his new novel.
‘Inever thought people could be called evil until I met him,’’ says Richard Flanagan. ‘‘Each day I had to teeter on this abyss and not fall in. He was terrifying to be with.’’
‘‘The Evil One’’ was a conman called John Friedrich. In 1991, 23 years before he won the Man Booker prize, Flanagan ghost-wrote Friedrich’s autobiography in six weeks. His experience inspired his new novel, First Person, about a would-be novelist called Kif Kehlmann who is pushed to the abyss as he ghost-writes the memoirs of a fabulist, liar and crook called Siegfried Heidl.
‘‘He really liked having power over people,’’ Flanagan says of Friedrich. ‘‘Once he had power over people it intrigued him to see what he could make them do. His method of gaining power was to discover everything about your private life.’’
In First Person, Flanagan gives a sense of how oppressive it was to be in Friedrich/Heidl’s presence as the miniSatan, father of lies, tries to manipulate and worm his way into the writer’s life.
Friedrich can lay claim to being Australia’s most infamous fraudster. In the 1980s he took over an innocuous charity, the National Safety Council of Australia, and turned it into a swashbuckling search-and-rescue operation, with ships, helicopters, aircraft, even a submarine.
Odd rumours soon circulated that he was running a paramilitary force with CIA backing. And then there were the whispers of financial skulduggery. Soon enough it went bust and Friedrich was charged with defrauding nearly $300 million.
While Friedrich waited for his trial, Flanagan was commissioned to write his memoir. A tricky task. This man with ‘‘no birth certificate, no passport’’ was not on speaking terms with the truth. Separating truth from lies became even harder for Flanagan when, three weeks into the project, Friedrich blew his brains out.
The autobiography, Codename Iago, did appear. It is ‘‘currently unavailable’’ on Amazon. It’s a ‘‘crappy paperback with even crappier content’’, Flanagan says. It is a ‘‘terrible book. I was never ashamed of it, though I should have been. It’s not much of a book. It’s as much as one could be by someone who has never written a book and had to do it in six weeks about someone who shot himself in the middle of it’’.
As Flanagan says, it taught him how to construct a book and inhabit the mind of another person. Three years later the first of his seven novels appeared.
Flanagan’s interest in evil is a recurrent theme. He won the Man Booker prize in 2014 for his novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North, about the PoWs who worked on the Burma Death Railway and the Japanese soldiers who terrorised them. His father, Archie (‘‘prisoner No 335’’), a teacher, was one of the labourers. That novel, so personal, is a study of evil.
‘‘I was brought up in an era where evil [supposedly] did not exist – it was a product of environment. After I met Friedrich I did not believe in that at all. Unless you view the possibility of evil as real, you can go to a dark place yourself or, worse, society can. I think by not admitting it for some decades evil has returned.’’
He believes Australia has embraced ‘‘some very evil acts’’, in particular the ‘‘treatment of refugees. With the Pacific Solution [where asylum seekers are transported to Papua New Guinea and other Pacific islands] we now pay vast sums for asylum seekers to be raped, murdered, children sexually abused. Politicians trade on whose policies will be the cruellest. That is evil.’’
There is a timeliness to the novel. ‘‘Something happened to me and I was haunted by it, but I didn’t want to write about my own experience,’’ he says, ‘‘As the years and decades passed it seems to me that it spoke to the strange new world that was coming into being.’’ When the book came out in Australia this year some saw it as a parable for the Trump era, but Flanagan started writing the book well before last year’s US election. ‘‘There were a couple of references [in it] to Trump when he was a joke. I then had to take them out because I wasn’t trying to write a zeitgeisty book.’’
He regards truth as being under sustained assault. ‘‘The hinge that holds freedom together is truth – and it is very rusty,’’ he says. Truth’s enemies are ‘‘lying so outrageously, they are destroying the sense that any truth matters. They just shout another outrageous opinion. Whether it is Putin or climate-change deniers or Trump-style politicians, if they can denigrate the truth they have won.’’
So if facts matter, why write this story as fiction? The answer lies in the novel, which makes the case for fiction. ‘‘The novel is a high point of our capacity to understand ourselves through story,’’ says Flanagan.
Flanagan makes a strong case for the novel: ‘‘If there is one defence of a novel, it reminds us that we are not alone. Reading is a private act, but it is not solipsistic because it connects you
"With the Pacific Solution [where asylum seekers are transported to Papua New Guinea and other Pacific islands] we now pay vast sums for asylum seekers to be raped, murdered, children sexually abused." Richard Flanagan
to everyone else.’’ And amid Facebook, Twitter and state surveillance, in a world where the private sphere has shrunk, ‘‘reading becomes much more powerful; books become subversive.
‘‘It sounds hyperbolic, but an actress, Shailene Woodley [the American star of Divergent, The Fault in Our Stars and Big Little Lies], walking down the red carpet at the Emmys, was asked what were her favourite TV shows and she said, ‘I don’t have a TV. I prefer to read books.’ What I thought was an entirely innocent remark was condemned. She was given a pasting in the media. Books, it seems, are the new counterculture,’’ he says.
Flanagan, 55, looks as pugnacious as he can sound and has views to match. Anzac Day is a ‘‘nationalistic festival which has become like a death cult. It commemorates the idiocy of Australians who go across to the other side of the world and invade another empire, the Ottoman, for the sake of another empire, the English. All these young men are massacred – and we lose. What good is there in that story?
Flanagan was born in Tasmania in 1961 to descendants of Irish convicts, a family who have been on the island for 170 years. And he has stayed in the Aussie boondocks.
‘‘I existed like a foreign writer in my own country for years. My first novel had no reviews. The Sydney Morning Herald refused to review it, saying that it did not fit into any recognisable school of Australian writing.’’
Other than passing a few terms as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, he was never tempted to follow Clive James, Barry Humphries and Germaine Greer and settle in Britain. ‘‘I have always seen those people as part of the old empire. I feel they were beholden to imperial myths. They felt there was a centre and the centre was London. And they had to go there or they were nothing.
‘‘Australia was until the 1970s a colony of the mind. They were prisoners of that colony and they felt that their liberation came in coming to the great centre.’’
The father of three adult daughters, Flanagan lives in Hobart with his wife, Magda, who comes from a Slovenian immigrant family, worked for a Labour politician and is now an assistant to a federal court judge in Hobart.
Flanagan is a walking book of quotations: ‘‘Homer writes in Book 8 of The Odyssey that the gods gave us misfortune to give later generations something to sing about’’; ‘‘Emerson said, ‘In every work of genius we recognise our own rejected thoughts’,’’ and such like. It could be annoying, but I rather like the mix of Australian directness and intellectual seriousness.
He’s pretty damn eloquent about his belief in the moral power of novels. Maybe the truth is so precious that it should always be attended by a bodyguard of fiction writers.
– The Times