Speaker 1: Hello, Hello. It's Ruby Jones and I'm back to introduce
Speaker 1: another episode of Read This Our Sister podcast, hosted by
Speaker 1: editor of the monthly and self confessed book Norde, Michael Williams.
Speaker 1: It features conversations with some of the best and most
Speaker 1: beloved writers from Australia and around the world. In this episode,
Speaker 1: we're going to hear from Australian writer Malcolm Knox. Before
Speaker 1: we do, Michael is here to share a bit about
Speaker 1: their conversation. Michael, Hello, Hello.
Speaker 2: Hi Ruby.
Speaker 1: So Michael Malcolm Knox. He started out his career as
Speaker 1: a journalist for Sydney Morning Herald and other places. He
Speaker 1: seems to have completely, though now made the transition two novelists.
Speaker 1: So can you tell me a bit about his career
Speaker 1: as a fiction writer.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's amazing. Malcolm had such a kind of established,
Speaker 3: storied career as a journal and still does that work.
Speaker 3: But over the course of half a dozen books, he
Speaker 3: really has carved out a niche for himself as someone
Speaker 3: who's writing really kind of interesting, divergent realistic fiction, most
Speaker 3: often about the plight of the contemporary male in Australian
Speaker 3: society and the ways in which that figure is varying
Speaker 3: degrees of doomed or hopeless.
Speaker 1: It's very resonant, and as the title of this episode suggests,
Speaker 1: the humor in The First Friend is really one of
Speaker 1: its biggest selling points. But humor is tricky, isn't it.
Speaker 1: So tell me a bit about that and about why
Speaker 1: you think that in this case it does.
Speaker 3: Work so well. All of Malcolm's books have a kind
Speaker 3: of vein of comedy that runs through that often acquired,
Speaker 3: even melancholy vein of comedy, but this one has a
Speaker 3: different focus altogether. It's historical fiction for the first time,
Speaker 3: and what he's doing is telling a story from the
Speaker 3: height of Soviet Russia, a story that centers around Stalin's
Speaker 3: chief enforcer, Lovndi Barrier, and fans of Knox are going
Speaker 3: to see lots of stuff that's familiar here. You know.
Speaker 3: It is still about fragile men and the relationships that
Speaker 3: enable or sustain them, but by setting it in a
Speaker 3: historical period, he frees himself up to be maybe more outrageous,
Speaker 3: darker certainly than we've ever seen him before. Anyone who's
Speaker 3: seen Armando, in which he's filmed the Death of Stalin,
Speaker 3: will know how awful historical moments can be skewed towards comedy,
Speaker 3: and there's quite a bit of that in what Malcolm's doing.
Speaker 1: Here coming up in just a moment, Malcolm Knox finds
Speaker 1: comedy in toxic friendships.
Speaker 3: Malcolm Knox began his career as a journalist for the
Speaker 3: Sydney Morning Herald back in the nineties. For a while
Speaker 3: he was the chief cricket correspondent there, but he really
Speaker 3: broke out in two thousand and four when as literary editor,
Speaker 3: he broke the story of the fake Jordanian memoirs Nor McCoury.
Speaker 3: He won a walk the Award for that effort. Since then,
Speaker 3: he's written more than a dozen books of nonfiction and
Speaker 3: been publishing novels since two thousand. The First Friend is
Speaker 3: his seventh novel. Each of your novels is quite different
Speaker 3: to the ones that have come before in kind of
Speaker 3: fundamental ways. But at no point in your career as
Speaker 3: a novelist has it felt like such a seismic shift
Speaker 3: to the shift that brings you to the First Friend.
Speaker 3: And I'd love you to share with us whether that
Speaker 3: was a deliberate seismic shift or if it's something that
Speaker 3: crept up on you yeah.
Speaker 4: I've always had friendship at the center of the stories
Speaker 4: I tell, often male friendship, not always, and that.
Speaker 2: Was at the center of this book as well.
Speaker 4: I began writing this in twenty twenty one, and it was,
Speaker 4: you know, in the second year of the pandemic. Everything
Speaker 4: in private life and in public life felt as if
Speaker 4: it was moving closer to the edge and the stakes
Speaker 4: were rising. For example, in friendships, you needed to do
Speaker 4: much less for friendships to be broken. And in my
Speaker 4: kind of little area of public life, small indiscretions became,
Speaker 4: you know, things that had major consequences. And then when
Speaker 4: I looked beyond that, our public life was dominated by
Speaker 4: Trump Purtin Shooting Ping, Boris Johnson, all the way down
Speaker 4: to your mini trump in Scott Morrison. So these things
Speaker 4: converged to give me the feeling that my kind of
Speaker 4: stock in trade of these domestic relationships needed both a
Speaker 4: bigger canvas and something closer to a fantasy canvas, because
Speaker 4: reality was outstripping what a fiction writer could do.
Speaker 2: So I was still digging into.
Speaker 4: The old material that I've always dug into, but everything
Speaker 4: around it needed be enlarged.
Speaker 3: I mean, the continuity is certainly there, and the themes
Speaker 3: that have so defined your work are there, but there's
Speaker 3: something about the historical lens when it comes to fiction.
Speaker 3: There's something about occupying that space that does present a
Speaker 3: completely different set of expectations, I think for the reader,
Speaker 3: a different tenor How fun was it to identify what
Speaker 3: people generally want from a historical novel and then decide
Speaker 3: to either deliver or withhold.
Speaker 4: This book was probably the most fun that I've ever
Speaker 4: had writing anything, and I hope that's conveyed because it is,
Speaker 4: on a surface level, potentially quite a grim place in time,
Speaker 4: in the Great Terror in the Soviet Union in nineteen
Speaker 4: thirty eight. Fun is not what immediately springs to mind,
Speaker 4: But you know, you change one thing when you're writing
Speaker 4: a novel, you change everything, and that seems to be
Speaker 4: what you're getting out with the different between this and
Speaker 4: my previous work. So I'll give you an example. I
Speaker 4: had been for a long time very keen to write
Speaker 4: about a person who had been in my life, who
Speaker 4: I'd always thought I'll never come across pure evil in
Speaker 4: ordinary life. But I did once, and this was a
Speaker 4: person who I really thought enjoyed statistic personality was as
Speaker 4: close as you can come to evil, and if you
Speaker 4: just twisted the circumstances a little bit and you put
Speaker 4: yourself in a place that was a mobster state or
Speaker 4: a murderous state, that person would be right into the
Speaker 4: heart of it. And basically began interviewing other people who
Speaker 4: had had deeper relationships with this person, and one of
Speaker 4: them said to me, look, you write about him.
Speaker 2: Nobody will believe you.
Speaker 4: Nobody will believe that a person like that could exist
Speaker 4: and could do what he was doing in contemporary Australia.
Speaker 4: But if you place that person in a far away,
Speaker 4: almost imaginary place, all of a sudden, they become believable.
Speaker 3: I can see why that would be liberating on a
Speaker 3: level of fun. I do want to dig in for
Speaker 3: a second more though, on that question of believability. One
Speaker 3: of your other characters, the protagonist of The Wonder Lover,
Speaker 3: for example, that's your book about a guy who is
Speaker 3: a bigness essentially, I mean, sorry to reduce it to
Speaker 3: a single log line, but there you go. And it's
Speaker 3: a kind of extraordinary story about multiple families and about
Speaker 3: this guy at the heart of it. It's a kind
Speaker 3: of outrageous story. It's an almost deliberately unbelievable story, but
Speaker 3: that centers around a character whose believability seems to me
Speaker 3: to be very important. That you can have wild things
Speaker 3: happen around them because he rings true.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I suppose it had to be believable to me
Speaker 4: because the thing things happening around us was suddenly not
Speaker 4: very believable.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 4: I remember in the early stages of this writing this book,
Speaker 4: I was in hotel quarantine. Well, you know, locked up
Speaker 4: on my own for fourteen days.
Speaker 2: Is that believable.
Speaker 4: Well, no, it wouldn't have been eighteen months earlier. Was
Speaker 4: Trump in any way believable? No, you know, even Morrison
Speaker 4: was not believable, but it was happening, and so we
Speaker 4: were all having to suddenly adjust our personal settings to
Speaker 4: cope with a world that had not been believable until then.
Speaker 4: So it didn't work for me to delink this story
Speaker 4: into a completely made up fantasy world. It didn't feel
Speaker 4: right because when I was describing it back to myself
Speaker 4: or even to someone who was asking me what I
Speaker 4: was writing, I was proing them with a legend to well,
Speaker 4: you know, the place I've created, which is called Blair,
Speaker 4: is actually based on the Soviet Union at that time.
Speaker 4: You know, the Gangland boss I've created.
Speaker 2: Is actually based on Barrier.
Speaker 4: So you know, what's the point in doing a fantasy
Speaker 4: if it's just a thinly cloaked version of reality.
Speaker 3: Does that create a kind of tyranny of expectation?
Speaker 4: Though?
Speaker 3: I mean, you know, famously, you know, when Kate Gremville
Speaker 3: wrote The Secret River, historians took issue with it because
Speaker 3: he was a novelist who was using the historical record
Speaker 3: and historical facts to underpin a fiction. And even though
Speaker 3: it's a very old practice Shakespeare's historical plays spring to mind,
Speaker 3: despite it being a very old practice, there is an
Speaker 3: anxiety about the novelist or the fabuloust turning their hand
Speaker 3: to Are you scared of Russian scholars?
Speaker 2: Very much?
Speaker 4: Yes and no, because I have fooled around with the
Speaker 4: historical record, and you know, I haven't used pure fantastical
Speaker 4: names for settings and people. But at the same time,
Speaker 4: as any Russian scholar, we'll see, I've departed quite outrageously
Speaker 4: in some cases from the record, and openly done so
Speaker 4: for the reason that when I was writing this, most
Speaker 4: of the world was living under leaders that were pretty
Speaker 4: shamelessly gas lighting their own populations, and I did think, well,
Speaker 4: where is the place in time where gas lighting the
Speaker 4: population was done to an extreme and done with complete impunity,
Speaker 4: And that was Soviet Union under Sullen in particular, where
Speaker 4: lying to the population was a kind of you, it
Speaker 4: wasn't even a pretense.
Speaker 2: And I wanted to.
Speaker 4: Take that idea of a leader or a country that
Speaker 4: was openly giving away any claim to an historical record.
Speaker 4: And that was kind of what Stalin did. He was
Speaker 4: making an exchange. He was saying, every time I tell
Speaker 4: a lie and every time we cook up fake statistics,
Speaker 4: it's with the purpose of short term gain. It's with
Speaker 4: the purpose of the next step in the retention of power,
Speaker 4: the consolidation of power. And though he was certainly motivated
Speaker 4: by his own paranoia over time, of course, it's zero
Speaker 4: sum game. Every lie he tells for short term gain
Speaker 4: comes in exchange for long term claim on any historical record.
Speaker 4: And you don't write with a thesis in mind. But
Speaker 4: if I did have an idea in mind, and this
Speaker 4: is motivated largely by my own anger at what was
Speaker 4: going on around me, it was that every little lie
Speaker 4: or big lie that Donald Trump tells or Scott Morrison
Speaker 4: tells is a direct exchange for how an historical record
Speaker 4: of their time will see them. So, you know, Trump's
Speaker 4: kind of given everything away for short term gain. Morrison gave,
Speaker 4: you know, probably more than he realized, a way in
Speaker 4: striving for short term gain. And so when Russian scholars,
Speaker 4: you know, might question things that I've used in this book,
Speaker 4: my answer is, well, we all agree that that was
Speaker 4: a regime that lived upon and nurtured itself from lying,
Speaker 4: so it has surrendered any true historical record. And when
Speaker 4: you're talking about Barrier himself or even Stylin the rulers
Speaker 4: that I find them most comparable to, you know, the
Speaker 4: ancient rulers that somebody like Mary Beard writes about. And
Speaker 4: I heard Mary Beard speak quite recently, and she said, well,
Speaker 4: when you're writing about the rulers of ancient Rome, you're
Speaker 4: just piecing together a few clues. But even those clues
Speaker 4: may not be true. So every generation of historians that's
Speaker 4: written about the Roman rulers has been constructing a fiction
Speaker 4: that reflects the time that they live in and their
Speaker 4: own culture and their own motivations. So that's what I
Speaker 4: think I'm doing. I'm piecing together clues that some of
Speaker 4: them may be true.
Speaker 2: Some of them may not be.
Speaker 4: Many of them have just been repeated so often that
Speaker 4: they seem true. But I think anybody who writes about
Speaker 4: the Soviet regime at that time.
Speaker 2: Is a fiction writer.
Speaker 3: Return, Malcolm reveals the major novelistic challenge of The First Friend.
Speaker 3: How do you balance out the blackness of this book
Speaker 3: with comedy? Where are the laughs in Barrier? We'll be
Speaker 3: right back. This is a question I kind of could
Speaker 3: have asked you after any one of your books was
Speaker 3: written and came out, but I'm going to ask it
Speaker 3: here because it still applies. Malcolm, what's wrong with men
Speaker 3: of a certain age?
Speaker 4: You know, I've expended a lot of words on dramatizing
Speaker 4: what's wrong, because I don't know. If I knew what
Speaker 4: was wrong, I'd be in a slightly different job. I'd
Speaker 4: probably be a counselor or a psychiatrist, or you know,
Speaker 4: somebody out in the real world doing things rather than
Speaker 4: about them slash us.
Speaker 2: In this case, at this time, it was.
Speaker 4: That upwelling of anger, and in the real real world
Speaker 4: we've seen this ever since the pandemic, that fearing of
Speaker 4: greater and greater danger physical danger. I know that doesn't
Speaker 4: really answer your question, because it doesn't. It doesn't get
Speaker 4: back before, you know, before the anger and before the
Speaker 4: outcome of the anger. But you know, it can feel
Speaker 4: so overwhelming that as a storyteller, the only place you
Speaker 4: can get to is the final stage, the explanatory stuff
Speaker 4: before it just feels so overwhelmingly complex and interlot with
Speaker 4: so many social, economic, political factors that.
Speaker 2: It's beyond me.
Speaker 4: And I would say it's beyond if they're being honest,
Speaker 4: it's beyond anyone who's writing novels.
Speaker 3: I'm glad it's beyond you, because it means that that's
Speaker 3: the impetus to keep going back and writing it again
Speaker 3: and again and writing ways into it. At the heart
Speaker 3: of the book, as its title would suggest, is this
Speaker 3: friendship and this question of the lack of a less
Speaker 3: resolutely twenty first century therapy word enablers and the ways
Speaker 3: in which love and friendship see us enabling other people.
Speaker 3: Was that the initial engine was that did you know
Speaker 3: that was the kind of dynamic that you wanted to explore?
Speaker 4: Yeah, And that's always been my interest, going back to
Speaker 4: my first novel, I've always been really much more interested
Speaker 4: in the dog's body of the very active person, the enabler,
Speaker 4: as you put it, or the fixer, because very often
Speaker 4: it is the fixer who, while they seem a passive character,
Speaker 4: they're actually the one that does things. And within friendship,
Speaker 4: I guess one of my recurrent themes has been friendship
Speaker 4: before and after power flips, and this one is very
Speaker 4: kind of concretely that, because Myrtov was the rich boy
Speaker 4: whose family adopted this kind of smart, little semi orphan,
Speaker 4: young Barrier, and the relationship is one of a great
Speaker 4: power imbalance that gets very suddenly overwhelmingly flipped by the
Speaker 4: Russian Revolution, where Barrier becomes the boss, and he keeps
Speaker 4: Myrtov alive as his driver, as his enabler, as his fixer,
Speaker 4: and also as his witness. Barrier needs that witness. But
Speaker 4: at the same time, due to the circumstances, the stakes
Speaker 4: have been increased to the extent where ordinary miss steps
Speaker 4: in a friendship that I've written a lot about before,
Speaker 4: the stakes in this book are life and death.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, no, The flawed friendship being shifted into this
Speaker 3: kind of setting is fabulous. As you say, the effect
Speaker 3: that has on the kind of sense of stakes. Were
Speaker 3: there times in writing that you're worried that you've made
Speaker 3: the stakes too high that the kind of atrocities, that
Speaker 3: the monstrosity is so stark, such an extreme example of
Speaker 3: monstrousness and its consequences. Was that hard to write or
Speaker 3: did that have a kind of joyous weight of inevitability
Speaker 3: to it?
Speaker 4: Yeah? I think I think it's hard to keep a
Speaker 4: sense of proportion and that balance between, you know, up
Speaker 4: being the suspense for fictional purposes and also making it
Speaker 4: palatable to the reader. Where you know, the fun quotion
Speaker 4: you know is black comedy, but it's very, very black,
Speaker 4: So how do you balance out the blackness with the comedy?
Speaker 2: And at the same time, if.
Speaker 4: You over balance on the comedy, you're letting them off
Speaker 4: the hook. So you are dealing with life and death
Speaker 4: and you can't forget that. So I would say what
Speaker 4: you're pointing to is the major novelistic challenge in a
Speaker 4: book like.
Speaker 3: This, returning to the kind of allegorical reading of this
Speaker 3: book and the ways in which wherever you are in
Speaker 3: history or in fiction, fetishizing a particular kind of strong
Speaker 3: man leader has some kind of inevitable and terrible outcomes.
Speaker 3: What was the temptation to try and find something redemptive
Speaker 3: in this story something redemptive for Murdov, whether it's with
Speaker 3: his family, whether it's with the fact that he's motivated
Speaker 3: at a personal level, not at a political level, or
Speaker 3: at a wider level. You know, does that redeem him
Speaker 3: to you? And is that important that it does?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 4: Definitely, that he has as individual agency if you like.
Speaker 4: But you know, he's redeemed by his love for his
Speaker 4: wife and his children. But that love must remain encoded
Speaker 4: and secret all through the book, and secret to a
Speaker 4: point where Babylina, his wife, can't even be sure if
Speaker 4: he knows what he's doing, so she will have to
Speaker 4: ask herself the question of how much she trusts him,
Speaker 4: and ask herself whether she has to has to take
Speaker 4: matters within her own hands. You know, redemption is a
Speaker 4: funny a funny word because it can seem like such
Speaker 4: a formulaic out for a novelist, and probably even more
Speaker 4: so where you've got.
Speaker 2: Pretty pretty black.
Speaker 4: Surrounds, as this book does. Oh you know, well, we'll
Speaker 4: suddenly make him do something good and you know the
Speaker 4: reader will be happy in the air and that we've
Speaker 4: kind of pulled him out of the fire. But I
Speaker 4: think as you get to know this character. You know,
Speaker 4: he's an every man because he's passive. And I feel
Speaker 4: that in our days that we live in, that's how
Speaker 4: a lot of us try to redeem ourselves.
Speaker 3: Not writers though, or artists, you know, like, if you're
Speaker 3: creating art, you're not guilty of being passive.
Speaker 4: No, No, isn't that Isn't that weird that?
Speaker 2: You know?
Speaker 4: I kind of regard myself as a pretty passive person
Speaker 4: and a pretty scared person.
Speaker 2: I don't see.
Speaker 4: Myself as courageous or active until I sit at the
Speaker 4: keyboard where a fantasy of my own self takes over.
Speaker 3: Well, I'm glad it does, and very grateful to read
Speaker 3: the product of it. Yet again, it's been a treat
Speaker 3: to chat to you today. Thank you so much, Malcolm Knox.
Speaker 2: Thank you by thanks.
Speaker 3: Malcolm Knox's new novel, The First Friend, is available at
Speaker 3: all Good bookstores now.
Speaker 1: Thanks so much for listening to another special episode of
Speaker 1: Read This. Join us each Sunday to hear our favorite
Speaker 1: interviews from the show. Listen out for upcoming conversations with
Speaker 1: Robbie Arnott and Melanie Chang, and if you don't want
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