Fiction – Kindle edition; Chatto & Windus; 400 pages; 2017. Review copy courtesy of the publisher via NetGalley.
Richard Flanagan is one of my favourite authors, but I put off reading First Person for years because I had seen so many bad reviews of it. I guess I didn’t want to have my high opinion of him altered in any way.
But I now wonder if those reviews, all published in the UK when I was living there, just didn’t properly appreciate the fact the story was about a real-life fraudster, John Friedrich, who dominated the Australian media landscape in the 1980s and early 1990s. It turns out that when Flanagan was a struggling writer — while he was penning his first novel Death of a River Guide — he was contracted to write Friedrich’s memoir.
This novel is a fictionalised account of what it was like to act as the ghostwriter of “Australia’s biggest conman”, a man who lied about everything, including where he was born and gave Flanagan so little to work with he had to make large chunks of it up. It’s a book about truth and lies and the grey margins in between, and it’s a riveting exploration of ethics and morality in publishing long before the internet or social media blurred the lines between fact and fiction.
But first, let’s talk a bit about Friedrich because I think it’s important to really understand the strange and slippery character that is at the heart of this novel.
Australia’s biggest fraudster
Friedrich, who committed suicide in July 1991 just days after he appeared in court on charges involving defrauding the banks of almost $300 million, was a complicated man.
He came to Australia, from Germany, in the 1970s using a fake name and fake qualifications. After various stints in construction and the Uniting Church, he joined the National Safety Council of Australia in Victoria, where he later became executive director. He was lauded as a hero (he was granted the Medal of the Order of Australia in 1988) because he greatly expanded the council’s role to become a vital search and rescue operation, investing money in high-tech equipment and state-of-the-art aids, but when it collapsed financially, thanks to millions of dollars worth of bank loans that couldn’t be repaid, he went on the run.
When he was found, after an exhausting nationwide manhunt, he was charged with 92 counts of obtaining property by deception. It later transpired that he was not an Australian citizen and did not have a valid birth certificate. Who exactly was this man? And how had he pulled the wool over so many people’s eyes?
In First Person, much of Friedrich’s backstory is not fully explained — it’s assumed you know about this conman’s activities — but there’s enough information for you to piece together the idea that he’s not to be trusted, that he’s done bad things and that there are so many rumours swirling around him — did he work for the CIA, for instance — that it’s seemingly impossible to get a handle on who he really is.
And that’s the dilemma that faces the narrator in the story: how does he produce a truthful ghostwritten memoir of a man who is so lax with the truth?
Fictionalised tale
But, of course, this is a novel, not non-fiction, so the Friedrich character goes by the name of Siegfried (Ziggy) Heidl, and the narrator is an impoverished writer from Hobart called Kif Kehlmann. Kif is writing a novel while working a series of unsteady jobs to make ends meet. He has a young daughter, Bo, and his wife, Suzy, is pregnant with twins.
The offer of a six-week job in Melbourne to ghostwrite the memoirs of a man due to go to prison tempts Kif because of its potential to break him into publishing, while also netting a much-needed $10,000 fee. But it comes with all kinds of strings attached (this novel does a nice send-up of the publishing industry and the bizarre “rules” of the trade), and when he meets Ziggy he does not like him very much and struggles to get any information out of him that could be used in the book.
Being nice doesn’t cut it, and Kif is too weak and ineffectual to deal with a hard nut like Ziggy who comes out with extraordinary words of wisdom and advice, quoting Neitzche and philosophising about life and how to live it.
You want to live without enemies, Heidl said, that’s your problem. You think if I am good and kind and don’t speak ill of others I won’t have enemies. But you will, you just don’t know it yet. They’re out there, your enemies, you just haven’t met them. You can seek them out or pretend they don’t exist but they’ll still find you. Trust me. You want to be like a dog that everyone likes, but there’s not a dog alive someone doesn’t want to kick or kill. You want everyone to be your friend. Why? Why bother?
Ziggy spends a lot of time having lunch with contacts, including investors he claims are going to help him build a space station in Queensland, while avoiding Kif as much as possible. Kif, in turn, spends a lot of time gnashing his teeth and then taking out all his frustrations on his poor hapless wife when he returns home for weekend visits to Hobart.
The narrative begins to build when it’s clear Kif is not going to meet deadlines or word counts set for him by the seemingly greedy publisher, Gene Paley, for whom he is working.
It’s not a plot spoiler to say that Ziggy dies — though whether by his own hand or someone else’s is one of the puzzles Flanagan explores in this fictionalised account — at around the three-quarters mark, and then First Person loses a bit of steam. The remaining quarter of the novel is taken up with Kif’s life after the memoir is posthumously published, riffing on the idea that his exposure to so many lies and untruths has somehow infected his own psyche, so it’s hard to tell what’s real and what’s not anymore.
Kif seems unable to reconcile the idea that writing novels for a living is a noble profession. A woman he meets in a New York bar sums it up neatly for him:
It’s fake, inventing stories as if they explain things, Emily was saying. Plot, character, Jack and Jill going up the hill. Just the thought of a fabricated character doing fabricated things in a fabricated story makes me want to gag. I am totally hoping never to read another novel again. Novels disempower reality, the beard said.
First Person is an eloquent, if somewhat uneven, exploration of truth, corporate greed and the idea that the past always catches up with you.
For another take on this novel, please see Lisa’s review at ANZLitLovers.
Sue at Whispering Gums has also reviewed this book.
If you like this, you might also like:
This documentary on 9 Now, is a good summary of the John Friedrich case. It’s part of the Australian Crime Stories series, so it’s likely to be geo-restricted to those with an Australian IP address.
Otherwise, this promo (see below) for a documentary that I don’t think has ever been made sums it all up rather neatly:
I read this book as part of #AusReadingMonth, hosted by Brona’s Books
Reading Matters 
I’m a Flanagan fan, and your review has encouraged me to look this one out. Thanks!
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Your library surely has this one! It’s the novel he wrote immediately after his Booker Prize win.
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Thanks for the mention…
I remember that Friedrich fraud so well, the intense sense of disbelief that an outfit so big and so reputable and so worthy in its operations, could all be an empty shell.
I think you’re right: those reviewers missed the whole point of the book because they didn’t understand how shocked we all were by the fraud.
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I very clearly remember the whole Friedrich case and, in particular, his death because it happened in Sale, where the NSCA was based, which was kind of my neck of the woods (though I was studying in Melbourne at the time). I rediscovered his exploits when I repatriated and worked my way through the Australian Crime Stories series (!!) I’m pretty sure one of the guys I went to school with, who became a helicopter pilot, had his eye on joining the NSCA all because of Friedrich and what we thought was his altruistic beliefs in helping the nation!
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It was one of the worst frauds in our history, I think.
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I’m not a Flanagan fan, but I certainly remember Friedrich, and even his ‘real’ memoir would have had to have been fiction. I remember thinking last time I read a review, presumably Lisa’s, that I’d like to read this.
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I would love to read Flanagan’s ghostwritten Friedrich memoir, but I’m sure it no longer exists. This is a good examination of a writer’s moral compass and conscience, not dissimilar to what a good journalist has to wrestle with on a daily basis. It does bring to mind Janet Malcolm’s The Journalist and The Murderer, which is excellent if you are looking for something similar that is non-fiction.
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I found this book enlightening because of the 2016 election in the US. I thought it was a brilliant explanation of how a fraudster operates and so important to understand in that moment. And I loved the ending coda describing the beauty of Tasmania he and Ray experienced in their youth, and that wonderful note, “We did not know the beauty was us.”
I remember this book as amazing on many counts.
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Yes, I could see how this book would chime with recent US politics. I think there’s a line in there somewhere about fraudsters like Friedrich getting away with a lot before the internet and social media because they could hide much more easily without intense scrutiny. But the internet and social media also gives those dodgy characters a means to communicate in ways they’ve never been able to do before, so they can perpetuate their lies just by shouting loudest.
The bit at the end was interesting… it’s almost like a natural link to his next novel, which is about beauty. Funnily enough, the latest Christos Tsiolkas book is also about beauty…and truth and the art of writing. I love the unexpected synchronicity of my reading sometimes.
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My time with Flanagan is hit or miss, but after finding so much to enjoy about Heather Rose’s The Butterfly Man, I wonder if this is one of the Flanagan’s I might enjoy? The level of deception and intrigue you describe is fascinating (for some reason I have never heard of Friedrich, but I guess I didn’t pay much attention to the news in the 80’s, as is the want of teenagers!)
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Your last line makes me realise I must have been an odd teenager because I was a news junkie! I have such clear memories of the whole Friedrich case, so the book resonated, but when it was promoted in the UK I don’t recall anyone mentioning the Friedrich name, so while I knew it was based on a real life fraudster, I didn’t join the dots, otherwise I would have read it immediately. It’s much more about the writer’s moral dilemmas than it is about the fraudster’s deceptions, but it’s fascinating nonetheless and because I’m such a Flanagan obsessive I could hear him narrating this entire book in my head in his very flat Australian accent. He does write exactly as he speaks!
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I’m a Flanagan fan, too, and I enjoyed this novel. It was also a fascinating story about someone I hadn’t heard of. But, I agree with you that it lost a bit of steam after Heidl dies.
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Were you living in the States at this time? (Just wondering why you would not know about him seeing as the Australian media was obsessed with him for years, first as a hero, then as a villain.)
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We were when he died, and also in the early to mid 80s. I had my first child in the first trip, and the second child between the trips. And I worked. To be honest life during the 1980s in particular was a blur.
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Understandable. I have added your review to my post now.
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Thanks!
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Interesting review and comment thread. That Australians would connect this fraudster to the one who became the US President gives me a layer of perspective. I always assume (as an American myself) that others aren’t as preoccupied by that profoundly dark occurrence as I’ve been. I haven’t yet read The Narrow Road to the Deep North although I do own a copy. I’ll begin there, bearing this title in mind. Thank you.
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Oh, we were all obsessed with that orange criminal in the White House! The horror of those years waking up every morning and checking the news on my phone to see what unbelievable thing he’d said or done while we were sleeping (in the UK). I reckon we all lived with a pit of dread in our stomachs for the entire time he was in office. This was only matched by the Brexit shenanigans (and which, ultimately, led to my decision to return to Australia after almost 21 years living in the UK).
I trust you will find a lot to admire in The Narrow Road to the Deep North. I couldn’t find the words to do it justice so never reviewed it here. Penguin UK did commission me to write a piece about all his novels, which you can read here: https://www.penguin.co.uk/articles/2016/the-novels-of-richard-flanagan.html
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