Richard Flanagan - First Person

First Person by Richard Flanagan
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

In 1991 John Friedrich was in the centre of media attention. A person with unknown background climbed to the top of Victorian Branch of National Safety Council (NSCA) and changed it from an advisory body employing maybe a dozen people to a very modern search and rescue organisation with some 400 employees and state of art equipment. For this he was awarded Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM).
2 years later NSCA collapsed with debts of around 300 million dollars. Friedrich was arrested and charged of obtaining property by deception.
He became media celebrity, no wonder he received a lucrative offer of writing an autobiography. A ghost writer was hired to assist in this task.
I looked in the result - John Friedrich with Richard Flanagan (the second name in smaller print): Codename Iago: the story of John Friedrich.
In a book there is a short note about the helping hand: Richard Flanagan is a writer who lives in Tasmania... he is presently writing a feature film script and completing his first novel.
First Person is Richard Flanagan's story about above project.
In first two chapters I enjoyed Flanagan's great writing style and some observations on literature and publishing industry. We are also introduced to main characters of the story - Siegfried Heidl, the con man and Kif Kehlman, the ghost-writer - and realize that the task will be difficult. Heidl does not cooperate at all in providing details for the book, he limits his relation to ambiguous comments and observations - euphenisms, riddles, rhetorical formulations that could mean everything or nothing.
Frustrated by the lack of progress and pressed by a publisher, Kif Kehlman finds himself dependent on Heidl, he feels that his own character changes, that he becomes Heidl-like.
For a while I enjoyed Flanagan's language and style, but there is too much of it. Some 200 pages and no progress of the story.
And then, unexpectedly the pace accelerates - Kif writes like an automaton, book completed, money received, but this is no longer Kif we knew at the beginning of the book, his family breaks, he becomes an unscrupulous producer of best-selling media contents. He became Heidl.

I paged through the real product of Friedrich-Flanagan cooperation - Codename Iago. I wanted to see the very beginning:
Chapter 1.
I have been absent throughout my life.
In First Person we have:
I typed (after Heidl): I have been missing since I was born.
I stared at that line. And then cut it from the end of my document, scrolled upwards, and pasted it at the top, immediately below the words Chapter 1..
As for the rest of the book, I found it very average. Only opening chapters about Friedrich's work in Aboriginal communities were interesting to me.

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