Rating: 2/5
Review:
Hard going
Although some of the final parts of First Person were pretty
good, I found most of it very hard going.
It is the story of Kif, an aspiring writer who, through the need for
money and his own ambition, reluctantly agrees to ghost-write the autobiography
of Ziggy Heidl, who is awaiting trial as a colossal conman and thief on a scale
approaching Bernard Madoff. Heidl is utterly
evasive and often a downright liar, so the project becomes almost impossible
for Kif who also, somewhat implausibly, is drawn into his own dark identity
crisis.
First Person is written by a writer who is writing about a
writer who is struggling to write, which should really have been enough to warn
me off. I read it because of Flanagan's
reputation but frankly, I found most of it to be overwritten and rather tedious. There is an awful lot of stuff like, "No
graffiti had yet flowered on the grey concrete…nor damasked the umber and olive
renders of the low-rise office buildings…" or "In the silence that
followed silence followed," which simply irritated me and when, after 200
long pages, someone said of Kit's book, "Kif, there's interesting things
here, but you need something to happen,"
I said "Exactly!" out loud and with considerable warmth. And toward the end I raised a quizzical
eyebrow at the irony of "Although I had nothing to say, I had read enough
Australian literature to know this wasn't necessarily an impediment to
authorship."
To be fair, the book does begin to pick up toward the end
with some sharp observations about current attitudes to truth, deceit and
dissimulation of several kinds, and also about cheap, self-important
certainties, but it really was a struggle to get to this. There is a great deal of Writing (capital W)
but for me there was a good deal less here than meets the eye. In the end, it's a book I was glad to have
got out of the way, and I'm afraid I can't recommend it.
(I received an ARC via NetGalley.)
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