Thursday, 2 November 2017

Richard Flanagan - First Person


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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