ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

I am only up to page 65 of Richard Flanagan’s new book, First Person, and it seems to me that I have only just been able to resist sharing excerpts from almost every mischievous page so far. But now I can’t help myself.  I wasn’t sure until now just how much he was taking the mickey…

With a nod to George Gissing’s The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft, the narrator, who is a fictionalised Flanagan telling us about his travails as a ghost writer for a notorious conman, is at his day job as a doorman at the Hobart City Council’s civic square exhibition.  He is supposed to use a counter to track the number of visitors – which is easy, because there aren’t any.  No one is sufficiently interested in the desultory models, plans, and interpretation panels [forming] an exhibition which purported to encourage informed civic debate.  Similarly easy is the task of ensuring that no one walked out with one of the models. 

So four days a week he gets to write his novel, in an exercise book concealed beneath his table.  But on this day he is agonising about the job offer: not about the ethics of ghost-writing for a conman, but about selling his literary soul for mere money, and about his literary reputation:

I worried once more about my literary reputation.  After a time, I realised I had no literary reputation to worry about.  For that matter, I had no novel. Some years earlier there had been my art history honours thesis, which had been published to a screaming silence by a Brisbane publishing co-operative, Hoppy Head Press – not so much a publishing house as a share house got lucky, first through a commercial connection with Rodney McNeep, and later by making a great deal of money out of a Pritikin diet cookbook.  A little of this then lost on a far less lucrative McNeep suggestion: my Quiet Currents, A History of Tasmanian Modernism, 1922-1939.

There had, in addition, been two short stories, one of which won the Wangaratta City Council Edith Langley Award, the citation for which had meant even more than the five-hundred-dollar cheque, extolling me as ‘possibly a new voice in Australian literature.’   The adverb was, as I felt adverbs were, hopefully redundant.

(First Person, by Richard Flanagan, Knopf, 2017, p.64)

I can just imagine Flanagan, with that irrepressible smile, cheekily inserting that adverb into his sentence!

If you haven’t got your copy yet, you can buy it from Fishpond: First Person