Speaker 1: One of my favorite TV writers of all time is
Speaker 1: British show runner Armando Ernucci. He created some of my
Speaker 1: favorite comedy. He was the inventor of Alan Partridge and
Speaker 1: I could watch the Thick of It and veep on
Speaker 1: a loop endlessly. There's nobody better at the art of
Speaker 1: the well lobbed insult. Nobody with greater faculty for both
Speaker 1: savagery and bureaucratic ineptitude. He's a comedic genius. So it
Speaker 1: came as a bit of a surprise a few years
Speaker 1: ago when it was announced that he was making a
Speaker 1: film about the internal social and political power struggle among
Speaker 1: the members of the Soviet polit Bureau following the death
Speaker 1: of Joseph Stalin in nineteen fifty three. Not obvious territory
Speaker 1: for comedy. Picturing something with dubious Russian accents and period
Speaker 1: specific detail didn't seem like the neatest fit I needn't
Speaker 1: have wired. Here's a brief taste of Nikita Khrushev, played
Speaker 1: by Steve Bushemi, of all people, scheming with Jason Isaac's
Speaker 1: field Marshal Zukov about what they should do about Stalin's
Speaker 1: chief enforcer, Lovrendi Barrier fans of The Energy's work won't
Speaker 1: need me to say this before playing the clip, but
Speaker 1: it's a little bit sweary. I really need your help.
Speaker 2: To do what the bodies fucking pine up in the streets.
Speaker 3: A bit late, isn't it.
Speaker 2: What if we blame this on someone was out of control, Nikki,
Speaker 2: be very careful what you say next. Who Barrier, I'm
Speaker 2: gonna have to report this conversation threatening to do harm
Speaker 2: or obstruct any member of Presidium in the process.
Speaker 3: Of looking at your fucking face.
Speaker 2: You balls like Kremlin Dol be serious, are you went?
Speaker 1: Amen? I?
Speaker 2: Amen thinks he can take on the Red Army, I thought, Germany,
Speaker 2: I think I can take a flash lumpit of fucking waistecould.
Speaker 1: The genius of what The Energy did in the Death
Speaker 1: of Stalin was to tell the story straight, with the
Speaker 1: language and accents idiosyncratic and resolutely contemporary, because it's a
Speaker 1: story about politics and power, about cowardice and brutality, historically
Speaker 1: specific but thematically timeless. And it's a movie I thought
Speaker 1: of as I began to read Malcolm Knox's latest novel,
Speaker 1: The First Friend. It too takes inspiration from the height
Speaker 1: of Soviet Russia. It too, is liberated rather than constrained,
Speaker 1: by taking a real historical episode as its inspiration. Fans
Speaker 1: of Knox's gentle vernacular explorations of fragile men and the
Speaker 1: relationships that enable or sustain them will see this new
Speaker 1: book as a departure, but also one that's squarely in
Speaker 1: his wheelhouse. There was a review in The Guardian that
Speaker 1: suggested that it reads like an alternate take on Eleana
Speaker 1: Ferunde's beloved Neapolitan Quartet, but this time the two friends
Speaker 1: at its core aunt Lila and Lena, young women in Naples,
Speaker 1: but they are instead one of the twentieth century's most
Speaker 1: brutal mass murderers and his driver, Williams. And this is read.
Speaker 1: This the show about the books we love and the
Speaker 1: toxic friendships behind them. Malcolm Knox began his career as
Speaker 1: a journalist for the Sydney Morning Herald back in the nineties.
Speaker 1: For a while he was the chief cricket correspondent there,
Speaker 1: but he really broke out in two thousand and four,
Speaker 1: when as litter editor he broke the story of the
Speaker 1: fake Jordanian memoirris Norm McCurry. He won a Walkley Award
Speaker 1: for that effort. Since then, he's written more than a
Speaker 1: dozen books of non fiction and been publishing novels since
Speaker 1: two thousand. The First Friend is his seventh novel. Each
Speaker 1: of your novels is quite different to the ones that
Speaker 1: have come before in kind of fundamental ways. But at
Speaker 1: no point in your career as a novelist as it
Speaker 1: felt like such a seismic shift to the shift that
Speaker 1: brings you to The First Friend. And I'd love you
Speaker 1: to share with us whether that was a deliberate seismic
Speaker 1: shift or if it's something that crept up on you.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I've always had friendship at the center of the
Speaker 3: stories I tell, often male friendship, not always, and that
Speaker 3: was at the center of this book as well. I
Speaker 3: began writing this in twenty twenty one, and it was,
Speaker 3: you know, in the second year of the pandemic. Everything
Speaker 3: in private life and in public life felt as if
Speaker 3: it was moving closer to the edge and the stakes
Speaker 3: were rising. For example, in friendships, you needed to do
Speaker 3: much less for friendships to be broken. And in my
Speaker 3: kind of little area of public life, small indiscretions became,
Speaker 3: you know, things that had major consequences. And then when
Speaker 3: I looked beyond that, our public life was dominated by
Speaker 3: Trump pertin Hitting Ping, Boris Johnson all the way down
Speaker 3: to your mini trump in Scott Morrison. So these things
Speaker 3: converged to give me the feeling that, like kind of
Speaker 3: sock in trade, of these domestic relationships needed both a
Speaker 3: bigger canvas and something closer to a fantasy canvas, because
Speaker 3: reality was outstripping what a fiction writer could do. So
Speaker 3: I was still digging into the old material that I've
Speaker 3: always dug into, but everything around it needed to be enlarged.
Speaker 1: I mean, the continuity is certainly there, and the themes that
Speaker 1: have so defined your work there, But there's something about
Speaker 1: the historical lens when it comes to fiction. There's something
Speaker 1: about occupying that space that does present a completely different
Speaker 1: set of expectations, I think for the reader, a different
Speaker 1: tenor How fun was it to identify what people generally
Speaker 1: want from a historical novel and then decide to either
Speaker 1: deliver or withhold.
Speaker 3: This book was probably the most fun that I've ever
Speaker 3: had writing anything, and I hope that's conveyed because it is,
Speaker 3: on a surface level, potentially quite a grim place and
Speaker 3: time in the Great Terror in the Soviet Union in
Speaker 3: nineteen thirty eight. Fun is not what immediately springs to mind.
Speaker 3: But you know, you change one thing when you're writing
Speaker 3: a novel, you change everything, and that seems to be
Speaker 3: what you're getting at with the differences between this and
Speaker 3: my previous work. So I'll give you an example. I'd
Speaker 3: been for a long time very keen to write about
Speaker 3: a person who had been in my life, who I'd
Speaker 3: always thought I'll never come across pure evil in ordinary life,
Speaker 3: but I did once, and this was a person who
Speaker 3: I really thought enjoyed. You know, this sick personality was
Speaker 3: as close as you can come to evil, And if
Speaker 3: you just twisted the circumstances a little bit, and you
Speaker 3: put yourself in a place that was a mobster state
Speaker 3: or a murderous state, that person would be right into
Speaker 3: the heart of it. And basically began interviewing other people
Speaker 3: who had had deeper relationships with this person, and one
Speaker 3: of them said to me, look, you write about him,
Speaker 3: nobody will believe you. Nobody will believe that a person
Speaker 3: like that could exist and could do what he was
Speaker 3: doing in contemporary Australia. But if you place that person
Speaker 3: in a far away, almost imaginary place, all of a
Speaker 3: sudden they become believable.
Speaker 1: I can see why that would be liberating on a
Speaker 1: level of thumb. I do want to dig in for
Speaker 1: a second more though, on that question of believability. One
Speaker 1: of your other characters, the protagonist of The Wonder Lover,
Speaker 1: for example, that's your book about a guy who is
Speaker 1: a bigness essentially, I mean, sorry to reduce it to
Speaker 1: a single log line, but there you go. And it's
Speaker 1: a kind of extraordinary story about multiple families and about
Speaker 1: this guy at the heart of it. It's a kind
Speaker 1: of outrageous story. It's an almost deliberately unbelievable story. But
Speaker 1: that centers around a character whose believability seems to me
Speaker 1: to be very important. That you can have wild things
Speaker 1: happen around them because he rings true.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I suppose it had to be believable to me
Speaker 3: because the things happening around us was suddenly not very believable.
Speaker 3: You know, I remember in the early stages of this
Speaker 3: writing this book, I was in hotel quarantine. Well, you know,
Speaker 3: locked up on my own for fourteen days. Is that believable?
Speaker 3: Well no, it wouldn't have been eighteen months earlier. Was
Speaker 3: trump in any way believable. No, you know, even Morrison
Speaker 3: was not believable, but it was happening, and so we
Speaker 3: were all having to suddenly adjust our personal settings to
Speaker 3: cope with a world that had not been believable until then.
Speaker 3: So it didn't work for me to delink this story
Speaker 3: into a completely made up fantasy world. It didn't feel
Speaker 3: right because when I was describing it back to myself
Speaker 3: or even to someone who was asking me what I
Speaker 3: was writing, I was providing them with a legend to well,
Speaker 3: you know, the place I've created, which is called Blah,
Speaker 3: is actually based on the Soviet Union at that time.
Speaker 3: You know, the gangland boss I've created is actually based
Speaker 3: on Barrier. So you know, what's the point in doing
Speaker 3: a fantasy if it's just a thinly cloaked version of reality.
Speaker 1: Does that create a kind of tyranny of expectation?
Speaker 4: Though?
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, famously, you know, when Kate Gremvill
Speaker 1: wrote The Secret River, historians took issue with it because
Speaker 1: he was a novelist who was using the historical record
Speaker 1: and historical facts to underpin a fiction. And even though
Speaker 1: it's a very old practice, Shakespeare's historical plays spring to
Speaker 1: mind despite it being a very old practice. There is
Speaker 1: an anxiety about the novelist or the fabulouist turning their
Speaker 1: hand to fiction. Are you scared of Russian scholars?
Speaker 3: Very much? Yes and no, because I have fooled around
Speaker 3: with the historical record, and you know, I haven't used
Speaker 3: pure fantastical names for settings and people. But at the
Speaker 3: same time, as any Russian scholar, we'll see I've departed
Speaker 3: quite outrageously in some cases from the red and openly
Speaker 3: done so for the reason that when I was writing this,
Speaker 3: most of the world was living under leaders that were
Speaker 3: pretty shamelessly gas slighting their own populations. And I did think, well,
Speaker 3: where is the place in time where gas lighting the
Speaker 3: population was done to an extreme and done with complete impunity,
Speaker 3: And that was Soviet Union under Salen in particular, where
Speaker 3: lying to the population was a kind of you know,
Speaker 3: it wasn't even a pretense. And I wanted to take
Speaker 3: that idea of a leader or a country that was
Speaker 3: openly giving away any claim to an historical record, and
Speaker 3: that was kind of what Salin did. He was making
Speaker 3: an exchange. He was saying, every time I tell a
Speaker 3: lie and every time we cook up fake statistics, it's
Speaker 3: with the purpose of short term gain. It's with the
Speaker 3: purpose of, you know, the next step in the retention
Speaker 3: of power, the consolidation of power. And he was certainly
Speaker 3: motivated by his own paranoia over time. Of course, it's
Speaker 3: zero sum game. Every lie he tells for short term
Speaker 3: gain comes in exchange for long term claim on any
Speaker 3: historical record. And you don't write with a with a
Speaker 3: thesis in mind. But if I did have an idea
Speaker 3: in mind, and this is motivated largely by my own
Speaker 3: anger at what was going on around me, it was
Speaker 3: that every little lie or big lie that Donald Trump
Speaker 3: tells or Scott Morrison tells is a direct exchange for
Speaker 3: how an historical record of their time will see them. So,
Speaker 3: you know, Trump's kind of given everything away for short
Speaker 3: term gain. Morrison gave, you know, probably more than he realized,
Speaker 3: a way in striving for short term gain. And so
Speaker 3: when Russian scholars you might question things that I've used
Speaker 3: in this book, my answer is, well, we all agree
Speaker 3: that that was a regime that lived upon and nurtured
Speaker 3: itself from lying, so it has surrendered any true historical record.
Speaker 3: And when you're talking about Barrier himself or Evan Stalin
Speaker 3: the rulers that I find them most comparable to, you know,
Speaker 3: the ancient rulers that somebody like Mary Beard writes about.
Speaker 3: And I heard Mary Beard speak quite recently, and she said, well,
Speaker 3: when you're writing about the rulers of ancient Rome, you're
Speaker 3: just piecing together a few clues. But even those clues
Speaker 3: may not be true. So every generation of historians that's
Speaker 3: written about the Roman rulers has been constructing a fiction
Speaker 3: that reflects the time that they live in, and their
Speaker 3: own culture and their own motivations. So that's what I
Speaker 3: think I'm doing. I'm piecing together clues that some of
Speaker 3: them may be true, some of them may not be.
Speaker 3: Many of them have just been repeated so often that
Speaker 3: they seem true. But I think anybody who writes about
Speaker 3: the Soviet regime at that time is a fiction writer.
Speaker 1: When we return, Malcolm reveals the major novelistic challenge of
Speaker 1: The First Friend. How do you balance the blackness of
Speaker 1: this book with comedy? Where are the laughs in barrier?
Speaker 1: We'll be right back. This is a question a kind
Speaker 1: of asked you after any one of your books was
Speaker 1: written and came out, But I'm going to ask it
Speaker 1: here because it still applies Malcolmknox, what's wrong with men
Speaker 1: of a certain age?
Speaker 3: You know, I've expended a lot of words on dramatizing
Speaker 3: what's wrong, because I don't know. If I knew what
Speaker 3: was wrong, I'd be in a slightly different job. I'd
Speaker 3: probably be a counselor or a psychiatrist, or you know,
Speaker 3: somebody out in the real world doing things rather than
Speaker 3: writing about them slash us. In this case, at this time,
Speaker 3: it was that upwelling of anger, and in the real
Speaker 3: real world we've seen this ever since the pandemic, that
Speaker 3: fearing of greater and greater danger, physical danger. I know
Speaker 3: that doesn't really answer your question, because it doesn't it
Speaker 3: doesn't get back before, you know, before the anger and
Speaker 3: before the outcome of the anger. But you know, it
Speaker 3: can feel so overwhelming that as a storyteller the only
Speaker 3: place you can get to is the final stage, the
Speaker 3: explanatory stuff before it just feels so overwhelmingly complex and
Speaker 3: interlot with so many social, economic, political factors that it's
Speaker 3: beyond me. And I would say it's beyond if they're
Speaker 3: being honest, it's beyond anyone who's writing novels.
Speaker 1: I'm glad it's beyond you, because it means that that's
Speaker 1: the impetus to keep going back and writing it again
Speaker 1: and again and writing ways into it. At the heart
Speaker 1: of the book, as its title would suggest, is this
Speaker 1: friendship and this question of the lack of a less
Speaker 1: resolutely twenty five century therapy word enablers and the ways
Speaker 1: in which love and friendship see us enabling other people.
Speaker 1: Was that the initial engine that did you know that
Speaker 1: was the kind of dynamic that you wanted to explore?
Speaker 3: Yeah, And that's always been my interest, going back to
Speaker 3: my first novel, I've always been really much more interested
Speaker 3: in the dog's body of the very active person, the
Speaker 3: enabler as you put it, or the fixer, because very
Speaker 3: often it is the fixer who, while they seem a
Speaker 3: passive character, they're actually the one that does things. And
Speaker 3: within friendship, I guess one of my recurrent themes has
Speaker 3: been friendship before and after power flips, and this one
Speaker 3: is very kind of concretely that because Mertov was the
Speaker 3: rich boy whose family adopted this of smart, little semi
Speaker 3: orphan young barrier, and the relationship is one of a
Speaker 3: great power imbalance that gets very suddenly overwhelmingly flipped by
Speaker 3: the Russian Revolution, where Barrier becomes the boss and he
Speaker 3: keeps Mrtov alive as his driver, as his enabler, as
Speaker 3: his fixer, and also as his witness. Barrier needs that witness.
Speaker 3: But at the same time, due to the circumstances, the
Speaker 3: stakes have been increased to the extent where ordinary missteps
Speaker 3: in a friendship that I've written a lot about before,
Speaker 3: the stakes in this book are life and death.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, no, the flawed friendship being shifted into this
Speaker 1: kind of setting is fabulous. As you say, the effect
Speaker 1: that has on a kind of sense of stakes. Were
Speaker 1: there times in writing that you're worried that you've made
Speaker 1: the stakes too high, that the kind of atrocities, that
Speaker 1: the monstrosity is so stark, extreme example of monstrousness and
Speaker 1: its consequences. Was that hard to write or did that
Speaker 1: have a kind of joyous weight of inevitability to it?
Speaker 3: Yeah? I think I think it's hard to keep a
Speaker 3: sense of proportion and that balance between, you know, upping
Speaker 3: the suspense for fictional purposes and also making it palatable
Speaker 3: to the reader, where you know, the fun quotion, you
Speaker 3: know it's black comedy, but it's very very black. So
Speaker 3: how do you balance out the blackness with the comedy.
Speaker 3: And at the same time, if you overbalance on the comedy,
Speaker 3: you're letting them off the hook. So you are dealing
Speaker 3: with life and death, and you can't forget that. So
Speaker 3: I would say what you're pointing to is the major
Speaker 3: novelistic challenge in a book like.
Speaker 1: This, returning to the kind of allegorical reading of this book,
Speaker 1: ways in which wherever you are in history or in fiction,
Speaker 1: fetishizing a particular kind of strong man leader has some
Speaker 1: kind of inevitable and terrible outcomes. What was the temptation
Speaker 1: to try and find something redemptive in this story, something
Speaker 1: redemptive for Murdov, whether it's with his family, whether it's
Speaker 1: with the fact that he's motivated at a personal level,
Speaker 1: not at a political level, or at a wider level.
Speaker 1: You know, does that redeem him to you? And is
Speaker 1: that important that it does?
Speaker 3: Yeah, definitely, that he has individual agency if you like.
Speaker 3: But you know, he's redeemed by his love for his
Speaker 3: wife and his children. But that love must remain encoded
Speaker 3: and secret all through the book, and secret to a
Speaker 3: point where Babylina, his wife, can't even be sure if
Speaker 3: he knows what he's doing, so she will have to
Speaker 3: ask herself the question of how much she trusts him,
Speaker 3: and ask herself whether she has to has to take
Speaker 3: matters within her own hands. You know, redemption is a
Speaker 3: funny a funny word because it can seem like such
Speaker 3: a formulaic out for a novelist, and probably even more
Speaker 3: so where you've got pretty pretty black surrounds, as this
Speaker 3: book does. Oh, you know, well, we'll suddenly make him
Speaker 3: do something good, and you know the reader will be
Speaker 3: happy in the end that we've kind of pulled him
Speaker 3: out of the fire. But I think, I think as
Speaker 3: you get to know this character, you know he's an
Speaker 3: every man because he's passive. And I feel that in
Speaker 3: our day that we live in, that's how a lot
Speaker 3: of us try to redeem ourselves.
Speaker 1: Not writers though, or artists, you know, like, if you're
Speaker 1: creating art, you're not guilty of being passive.
Speaker 3: No, No, isn't that weird that? You know? I kind
Speaker 3: of regard myself as a pretty passive person and a
Speaker 3: pretty scared person. I don't see myself.
Speaker 4: As courageous or active until I sit at the keyboard
Speaker 4: where a fantasy if my own self takes over.
Speaker 1: Well, I'm glad it does, and very grateful to read
Speaker 1: the product of it. Yet again. It's been a treat
Speaker 1: to chat to you today. Thank you so much, Malcolm Munks.
Speaker 3: Thank you by Preks.
Speaker 1: Malcolm Knox's new novel, The First Friend, is available at
Speaker 1: all good bookstores now before we go, So I wanted
Speaker 1: to let you know what I've been reading this week.
Speaker 1: A few years ago, a debut book of short stories
Speaker 1: came out locally by an author called Katerina Gibson. The
Speaker 1: book was called Women I Know, and it was seriously good.
Speaker 1: Is there anything more exciting than getting to read someone
Speaker 1: who's just starting out and loving their writing. Well, Gibbson
Speaker 1: is back with her first novel. It's called The Temperature,
Speaker 1: and it's every bit as exhilarating as her debut. It
Speaker 1: follows six characters through secrets and disaster, threading their stories
Speaker 1: together with grace and style and impeccable storytelling instincts. I'm
Speaker 1: having an excellent time with it. You can find it
Speaker 1: and all the other books we've mentioned today at your
Speaker 1: favorite independent bookstore. And one more little armando En Nucci
Speaker 1: shout out. He did an adaptation a few years ago
Speaker 1: of Charles Dickens's David Copperfield and it is one of
Speaker 1: my favorite films of recent years. Once again, he uses
Speaker 1: contemporary language and rhythms to tell Dickens's story like no other,
Speaker 1: and it's an absolute cracker. That's it for this week's show.
Speaker 1: If you enjoyed it, please tell your friends and rate
Speaker 1: and review us. It helps a lot. Next week I
Speaker 1: read this I am joined by rock star writer and
Speaker 1: comedian Richard Osmond to discuss his new thriller series We
Speaker 1: Solve Murders.
Speaker 5: Weirdly, every time I do start a new book or
Speaker 5: a new something, I think, or maybe I wonder if
Speaker 5: this is the one where actually I find that I'm
Speaker 5: going to be barely very serious this time, and I'm
Speaker 5: going to write a proper kind of you book, a
Speaker 5: prize winning six hundred page novel. And as you say,
Speaker 5: within three pages, I'm writing about twixes and you know,
Speaker 5: sausage roles, and I think, oh no, it's listen, it's
Speaker 5: going to be more of the same. But my note
Speaker 5: to myself is always make it brilliant, maybe as great
Speaker 5: as you can be. Make it something you're proud of.
Speaker 3: Read.
Speaker 1: This is produced and edited by Clara Ames The show
Speaker 1: is mixed by Travis Evans with original compositions by Zalton Fitcher.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening, See you next week.
Speaker 3: Four