It is easy to understand the attraction of these themes for fiction writers, who have professional interest in the problem of thinking their way into other people’s realities. The labour of imaginative identification requires the cultivation of a divided consciousness. At the same time, however, it actively confuses the distinction between self and other, creating an ambiguity that is potentially transformative. Is the act of creating a character a form of self-projection or self-effacement? Does the author write the book, or does the book write the author?

These questions, and many more besides, are evoked in First Person, a novel that styles itself as a psychodrama, but finds room for musings on the themes of writing and creativity, the shallowness of the commercial publishing industry, the wonder of childbirth, and the fraudulence of the financial system. It is set in 1992. The narrator, Kif Kehlmann (who is recalling events many years later), is an aspiring Tasmanian novelist in his early thirties, with pressing family responsibilities and no real prospects, who is unexpectedly hired by a publisher named Gene Paley to ghost-write a tell-all memoir. The subject of this potboiler is a con man with the preposterous name Seigfried Heidl, who has gained his notoriety by defrauding the banks of $700 million, a brazen crime for which he is soon to be tried and, undoubtedly, convicted. Kif’s job is to spend six intensive weeks in a Port Melbourne office with Heidl, extract as much biographical information as he can, and fashion the revelations into a publishable book.

The dramatic focus of First Person is the intense face-off that develops between the ghostwriter and his evasive subject. Heidl proves to be maddeningly uncooperative. He evades the simplest questions about his origins. The few stories he does tell are obviously untrue, full of blatant contradictions. ‘The challenge to reconcile such outrageous lies,’ Kif comes to realise, ‘lay not with him, but with you, the listener.’ Heidl’s casual disdain for the truth renders him inscrutable, making it impossible to tell if he is merely a shameless bullshitter or if he is concealing something genuinely sinister, but it also has the effect of turning him into a ‘funhouse mirror’. Kif provides a variation on the metaphor when he complains to Heidl that his story has ‘more angles than a smashed mirror ... It is a novel.’

Any writer who writes a book about a writer trying to write a book runs the risk of contorting himself into an inbent position where he is, as the saying goes, up himself. First Person is not that kind of book; in fact, it is Flanagan’s most artfully constructed and thematically complex novel to date. Yes, it is an often introspective work about the doubts, personal sacrifices, creative struggles, and deformations of character that are necessary to forge a fiction writer’s sensibility; yes, the narrator resembles the author in several crucial respects. Heidl’s outrageous flair for self-invention leads Kif to reflect upon his own comparatively meagre powers of invention, and he draws a novelist’s lessons from their encounter: ‘I was learning from him the power of suggestion rather than demonstration; of evasion rather than enlightenment; of giving only one fact – or really, just the rumour of a fact – and then letting the reader invent everything else around it.’

But Kif’s uneasy sense that Heidl is slowly taking him over, burrowing into his psyche, undermining his dimly understood ambition to become a novelist, is also used to draw out a more significant and far-reaching conflict. Heidl espouses a cynical question-begging philosophy that poses as worldliness: he denies the reality of truth and goodness, arguing that everything is a tissue of fictions – a position that conveniently excuses him from any obligation to behave with honesty and decency. The fear that grows in Kif is that Heidl is right: maybe the world really is built on lies and the famous confidence man was merely playing the system by its own rules. ‘Now I think that was precisely the point of all Heidl’s stories,’ he reflects: ‘to make me believe my life was based on illusions – the illusions of goodness, of love, of hope. And persuaded of that, I would betray something fundamental within myself and embrace his world as my real life.’

Richard Flanagan (photograph by Joel Saget)

Flanagan (pace Kif) has never been all that committed to the power of suggestion, having over the course of his career displayed some distinct leanings toward the tell-don’t-show school of novel writing. As its title suggests, First Person is a work written in an ostensibly confessional and reflective mode. Yet its simultaneous awareness of the fundamental unreliability of personal testimonies is not only dramatised in the plot’s cunning twists (in its latter stages, the novel takes on the overtones of a political thriller), but on the level of style. Kif’s attempt to fashion a narrative that might transform Heidl into a ‘single, plausible human being’ is an attempt make an incoherent world coherent again, to create a lie that might nevertheless have the ring of truth, but this ambition is repeatedly punctured by Heidl’s aphorisms, culled from Nietzsche and a fictional philosopher named Tebbe. At one point, a minor character proposes that Nietzsche’s aphorisms are best read as a stand-up comedian’s one-liners, but their acuity is such that that Kif cannot help but internalise them; the paradox encoded in their form – the confident assertion of the absence of certainty – encapsulates the moral struggle at the heart of the novel.

There is a sense in which First Person might be read, as Kif remarks at one point, as a kind of ‘parable’. It is a story about the soul-level corruption that results from a loss of faith in the indispensable notions of truth and goodness, though its lesson remains somewhat ambiguous. Kif remains caught between the necessity and inadequacy of fiction, fatally aware of the double-edged nature of creativity. He is compromised and he compromises, as we all do. Yet one of the recurring ideas in First Person is that there is an elusive and multifaceted quality to life that no story can ever adequately capture. ‘Life is permitted chaos,’ Kif remarks near the end of the novel, ‘but books have to fake the idea that life is order.’ On this point, it is appropriate that the novel’s best set-piece is the scene in which Kif’s partner Suzy gives birth to twins, an act of creation that is free of the taint of falsity and more deserving of awe and respect than any feat of the imagination.