Can a ghost writer ever really give us the true story?
FIRST PERSON by Richard Flanagan (Chatto, £18.99)
OCTOBER is traditionally when celebrities release memoirs; those carefully presented confessionals that promise a warts- and-all authenticity just in time for the Christmas market. The more resonant story, however, perhaps lies somewhere between the facts of the so-called author’s life and the way the ghost writer invariably employed on these sorts of projects has calibrated them into something that can be flogged to a willing readership. “A ghost writer exists somewhere between a courtesan and a cleaner,” says a publisher in this new novel from the Tasmanian author Richard Flanagan. “Privy to much, revealing only what is appropriate.”
In the early Nineties, a then struggling Flanagan, who has since won the 2013 Man Booker prize for his historical novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North, was hired to write the memoirs of a once infamous Australian con man, John Friedrich, who was awaiting trial for defrauding banks out of millions. Broke, with a wife at home heavily pregnant with twins, Flanagan accepted $10,000 to write the memoir in six weeks, only for Friedrich to kill himself three weeks before the deadline. Somehow, despite Friedrich having proved a slippery blank space, implacably resistant to questioning and with the truth of his life almost entirely obscured by rumour and nebulous half facts, Flanagan finished the book.
That experience feeds claustrophobically into this novel, essentially a fictionalised memoir about a man writing a fictionalised memoir. The narrator, Kif Kehlmann, shares plenty of biographical details with Flanagan back then — no money, pregnant wife and a desperation to be seen as a writer, despite, at the point at which he is hired by a rampantly commercial publishing house, having written little. His job, or Faustian pact as he sees it, is to speedily write the memoirs of Ziggy Heidl, a high-profile fraudster awaiting trial with rumoured links to drug running, hitmen and the CIA, and a man for whom the art of the con has become an existential way of life.
The job soon becomes a nightmare. Holed up with Heidl in a poky office for days on end, Kehlmann spends his mornings struggling to confirm even the basic details about Heidl’s apparently extraordinary experiences, only for Heidl to either reply in cod philosophical sentences or remember an appointment with his lawyer and go for a lengthy lunch.
Recently, Andrew O’Hagan wrote about the quasi-impossible task of writing the memoir of Wikileaks’s Julian Assange in The Secret Life. You can’t help but wonder whether Flanagan also should have written a memoir about his time with Friedrich instead of turning it into a novel. Kehlmann is a self-absorbed narrator, given to apocalyptic metaphor. For him, Heidl starts to signify all manner of decay: a craven publishing industry; a civilisation gorging itself to death on celebrity mythology; even our cavalier relationship to truth itself. For this to matter we need to care about Kehlmann as a character, and we don’t.
He also, of course, serves as a sort of ghost writer for Flanagan. And as is the case with so many ghostwritten books, you wonder if what you are reading is, in the end, quite the right story.