Malcolm Knox began his career as a journalist for the Sydney Morning Herald, back in the 90s. His breakout was in 2004 when, as literary editor, he broke the story of the fake Jordanian memoirist, Norma Khouri for which he won a Walkley Award. Since then he has written more than a dozen books of nonfiction and has been publishing fiction since 2000. On this episode of Read This, Malcolm sits down with Michael to discuss his seventh and latest novel, The First Friend.
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Read This: Malcolm Knox Finds Comedy in Toxic Friendships
Malcolm Knox began his career as a journalist for the Sydney Morning Herald, back in the 90s. His breakout was in 2004 when, as literary editor, he broke the story of the fake Jordanian memoirist, Norma Khouri for which he won a Walkley Award. Since then he has written more than a dozen books of nonfiction and has been publishing fiction since 2000. On this episode of Read This, Malcolm sits down with Michael to discuss his seventh and latest novel, The First Friend.
- Broadcast on:
- 12 Oct 2024
- Audio Format:
- other
Hello, hello, it's Ruby Jones and I'm back to introduce another episode of Read This, our sister podcast, hosted by editor of the monthly and self-compressed book nerd Michael Williams. It features conversations with some of the best and most beloved writers from Australia and around the world. In this episode, we're going to hear from Australian writer Malcolm Knox. Before we do, Michael is here to share a bit about their conversation. Michael, hello, hello. Hi, Ruby. So Michael, Malcolm Knox, he started out his career as a journalist for Sydney Morning Herald and other places. He seems to have completely, though, now made the transition to novelist. So can you tell me a bit about his career as a fiction writer? Yeah, it's amazing Malcolm had such a kind of established story to career as a journalist and still does that work. But over the course of half a dozen books, he really has carved out a niche for himself as someone who's writing a really kind of interesting, divergent, realistic fiction, most often about the plight of the contemporary male in Australian society and the ways in which that figure is varying degrees of doomed or hopeless. It's very resonant. And as the title of this episode suggests, the humor in the first friend is really one of its biggest selling points, but humor is tricky, isn't it? So tell me a bit about that and about why you think that in this case, it does work so well. All of Malcolm's books have a kind of vein of comedy that runs through them, often acquired even melancholy vein of comedy. But this one has a different focus altogether. It's historical fiction for the first time. And what he's doing is telling a story from the height of Soviet Russia, a story that centers around Stalin's chief enforcer, La Venti Beria. And fans of Knox are going to see lots of stuff that's familiar here. You know, it is still about fragile men and the relationships that enable or sustain them. But by setting it in a historical period, he frees himself up to be maybe more outrageous, darker, certainly, than we've ever seen him before. Anyone who's seen Armando Iain which is film The Death of Stalin will know how awful historical moments can be skewed towards comedy. And there's quite a bit of that in what Malcolm's doing here. Coming up in just a moment, Malcolm Knox finds comedy in toxic friendships. Malcolm Knox began his career as a journalist for the Sydney Morning Herald back in the 90s. For a while, he was the chief cricket correspondent there, but he really broke out in 2004 when, as literary editor, he broke the story of the fake Jordanian memoirist Norm McCurry. He won a Walkley Award for that effort. Since then, he's written more than a dozen books of nonfiction and been publishing novels since 2000. The first friend is his seventh novel. Each of your novels is quite different to the ones that have come before in kind of fundamental ways, but at no point in your career as a novelist has it felt like such a seismic shift to the shift that brings you to the first friend. And I'd love you to share with us whether that was a deliberate seismic shift or if it's something that crept up on you. Yeah, boys had friendship at the centre of the stories I tell, often male friendship, not always. And that was at the centre of this book as well. I began writing this in 2021 and it was, you know, in the second year of the pandemic, everything in private life and in public life felt as if it was moving closer to the edge and the stakes were rising. For example, in friendships, you'd needed to do much less. For friendships would be broken. And in my kind of little area of public life, small indiscretions became, you know, things that had major consequences. And then when I looked beyond that, our public life was dominated by Trump, Putin, Xi Jinping, Boris Johnson, all the way down to Yemeni Trump in Scott Morrison. So these things converged to give me the feeling that like kind of stock in trade of these domestic relationships needed both a bigger canvas and something closer to a fantasy canvas because reality was outstripping what a fiction writer could do. So I was still digging into the old material that I've always dug into, but everything around it needed to be enlarged. I mean, the continuity is certainly there and the themes that have so defined your work are there. But there's something about the historical lens when it comes to fiction. There's something about occupying that space that does present a completely different set of expectations, I think, for the reader, different tenor. How fun was it to identify what people generally want from a historical novel and then decide to either deliver or withhold? This book was probably the most fun that I've ever had writing anything. And I hope that's conveyed because it is on a surface level potentially quite a grim place and time in the, you know, the Great Terror in the Soviet Union in 1938. Fun is not what immediately springs to mind, but you know, you change one thing when you're writing a novel, you change everything. And that seems to be what you're getting at with the differences between this and my previous work. So I'll give you an example. I had been for a long time very keen to write about a person who had been in my life who I'd always thought, "I'll never come across pure evil in ordinary life." But I did once. And this was a person who I really thought enjoyed, you know, sadistic personality was as close as you could come to evil. And if you just twisted the circumstances a little bit and you put yourself in a place that was a, you know, a mobster state or a murderous state, that person would be right into the heart of it. And I think began interviewing other people who had had deeper relationships with this person. And one of them said to me, "Look, you write about him. Nobody will believe you. Nobody will believe that a person like that could exist and could do what he was doing in contemporary Australia. But if you place that person in a far away, almost imaginary place, all of a sudden they become believable." I can see why that would be liberating on a level of fun. I do want to dig in for a second more though on that question of believability. One of your other characters, the protagonist of the Wonder lover, for example, that's your book about a guy who is a biggomist, essentially. I mean, sorry to reduce it to a single log line, but there you go. And it's a kind of extraordinary story about multiple families and about this guy at the heart of it. It's a kind of outrageous story. It's an almost deliberately unbelievable story, but that centers around a character whose believability seems to me to be very important, that you can have wild things happen around them because he rings true. Yeah, I suppose it had to be believable to me because the things happening around us were suddenly not very believable. I remember in the early stages of this writing this book, I was in hotel quarantine, locked up on my own for 14 days. Is that believable? Well, no, it wouldn't have been 18 months earlier. Was Trump in any way believable? No, even Morrison was not believable, but it was happening. And so we were all having to suddenly adjust our personal settings to cope with a world that had not been believable until then. So it didn't work for me to delink this story into a completely made up fantasy world. It didn't feel right because when I was describing it back to myself or even to someone who was asking me what I was writing, I was providing them with a legend to, well, the place I've created, which is called BLAR, is actually based on the Soviet Union at that time. The gangland boss I've created is actually based on barrier. So what's the point in doing a fantasy if it's just a thinly cloaked version of reality? Does that create a kind of tyranny of expectation, though? I mean, famously, when Kate Grenville wrote The Secret River, historians took issue with it because he was a novelist who was using the historical record and historical facts to underpin a fiction. And even though it's a very old practice, Shakespeare's historical plays spring to mind, despite it being a very old practice, there is an anxiety about the novelist or the fabulous turning their hand to fiction. Are you scared of Russian scholars? Very much yes and no, because I have fooled around with the historical record, and I haven't used pure fantastical names for settings and people. But at the same time, as any Russian scholar will see, I've departed quite outrageously, in some cases, from the record and openly done so. For the reason that when I was writing this, most of the world was living under leaders that were pretty shamelessly gaslighting their own populations. And I did think, well, where is the place in time where gaslighting the population was done to an extreme and done with complete impunity, and that was Soviet Union, under Stalin in particular, where lying to the population was a kind of, you know, it wasn't even a pretense. And I wanted to take that idea of a leader or a country that was openly giving away any claim to an historical record. And that was kind of what Stalin did. He was making an exchange. He was saying, every time I tell a lie, and every time we cook up fake statistics, it's with the purpose of short term gain. It's with the purpose of, you know, the next step in the retention of power, the consolidation of power, and he was certainly motivated by his own paranoia. Over time, of course, it's a zero-sum game. Every lie he tells for short term gain comes in exchange for long term claim on any historical record. And you don't write with a thesis in mind, but if I did have an idea in mind, and this is motivated largely by my own anger at what was going on around me, it was that every little lie or big lie that Donald Trump tells or Scott Morrison tells is a direct exchange for how an historical record of their time will see them. So, you know, Trump's kind of given everything away for short term gain. Morrison gave, you know, probably more than he realized away in striving for short term gain. And so, when Russian scholars, you know, might question things that I've used in this book, my answer is, well, we all agree that that was a regime that lived upon and nurtured itself from lying. So, it has surrendered any true historical record. And when you're talking about Beria himself or even Stalin, the rulers that I find them most comparable to, you know, the ancient rulers that somebody like Mary Beard writes about, and I heard Mary Beard speak quite recently, and she said, "Well, when you're writing about the rulers of ancient Rome, you are just piecing together a few clues, but even those clues may not be true." So, every generation of historians that's written about the Roman rulers has been constructing a fiction that reflects the time that they live in and their own culture and their own motivations. So, that's what I think I'm doing. I'm piecing together clues that some of them may be true, some of them may not be, many of them have just been repeated so often that they seem true. But I think anybody who writes about the Soviet regime at that time is a fiction writer. When we return, Malcolm reveals the major novelistic challenge of the first friend. How do you balance out the blackness of this book with comedy? Where are the laughs in Beria? We'll be right back. Want to impress your loved ones with the ultimate gift? Create a bottle of personalized Archie Rose Australian whiskey, gin or vodka. Select your blend, create your label, and complete it with a message on the back. Head to archerose.com.au to start creating. This is a question I kind of could have asked you after any one of your books was written and came out, but I'm going to ask it here because it still applies. Malcolm Knox, what's wrong with men of a certain age? I've expended a lot of words on dramatizing what's wrong because I don't know. If I knew what was wrong, I'd be in a slightly different job. I'd probably be a counselor or a psychiatrist or somebody out in the real world doing things rather than writing about them/us. In this case, at this time, it was that upwelling of anger and in the real, real world, we've seen this ever since the pandemic, that feeling of greater and greater danger, physical danger. I know that doesn't really answer your question because it doesn't get back before the anger and before the outcome of the anger, but it can feel so overwhelming that as a storyteller, the only place you can get to is the final stage, the explanatory stuff, before it just feels so overwhelmingly complex and interlocked with so many social, economic, political factors that it's beyond me. If they're being honest, it's beyond anyone who's writing novels. I'm glad it's beyond you because it means that that's the impetus to keep going back and writing it again and again and writing ways into it. At the heart of the book, as its title would suggest, is this friendship and this question of, for lack of a less resolutely 21st century therapy word, enablers and the ways in which love and friendship see us enabling other people. Was that the initial engine? Did you know that was the kind of dynamic that you wanted to explore? Yeah, and that's always been my interest. Going back to my personal role, I've always been really much more interested in the dog's body of the very active person, the enabler, as you put it, or the fixer, because very often it is the fixer who, while they seem a passive character, they're actually the one that does things. And within friendship, I guess one of my recurrent themes has been friendship before and after power flips. And this one is very kind of concretely that because Mertov was the rich boy whose family adopted this kind of smart little semi orphan young barrier. And the relationship is one of a great power imbalance that gets very suddenly and overwhelmingly flipped by the Russian Revolution, where barrier becomes the boss and he keeps Mertov alive as his driver, as his enabler, as his fixer, and also as his witness, barrier needs that witness. But at the same time, due to the circumstances, the stakes have been increased to the extent where ordinary missteps in a friendship that I've written a lot about before the stakes in this book are light and death. Yeah, yeah, no, the flawed friendship being shifted into this kind of setting is fabulous. As you say, the effect it has on a kind of sense of stakes. Were there times in writing that you worried that you've made the stakes too high that the kind of atrocities that the monstrosity is so stark, such an extreme example of monstrousness and its consequences? Was that hard to write, or did that have a kind of joyous weight of inevitability to it? Yeah, I think it's hard to keep a sense of proportion and that balance between upping the suspense for fictional purposes and also making it palatable to the reader, where the fun quotient is black comedy, but it's very, very black. So how do you balance out the blackness with the comedy? And at the same time, if you overbalance on the comedy, you're letting them off the hook. So you are dealing with life and death and you can't forget that. So I would say what you're pointing to is the major novelistic challenge in a book like this. Returning to the kind of allegorical reading of this book and the ways in which wherever you are in history or in fiction, fetishizing a particular kind of strong man leader has some kind of inevitable and terrible outcomes. What was the temptation to try and find something redemptive in this story? Something redemptive for Murtov, whether it's with his family, whether it's with the fact that he's motivated a personal level, not at a political level or at a wider level. Does that redeem him to you and is that important that it does? Yeah, definitely that he has individual agency, if you like, but he's redeemed by his love for his wife and his children, but that love must remain encoded and secret all through the book. And secret to a point where Babalina, his wife, can't even be sure if he knows what he's doing. So she will have to ask herself the question of how much she trusts him and ask herself whether she has to take matters within her own hands. You know, redemptions are a funny word because it can seem like such a formulaic out for a novelist and probably even more so where you've got pretty black surrounds as this book does. Oh, you know, we'll suddenly make him do something good and the reader will be happy in the end that we've kind of pulled him out of the fire. But I think as you get to know this character, he's an every man, but of course he's passive. And I feel that in our days that we live in, that's how a lot of us try to redeem ourselves. Not right as though, or artists. You know, like, if you're creating art, you're not guilty of being passive. No, no, isn't that, um, isn't that weird that, uh, you know, I kind of regard myself as a pretty passive person than a pretty scared person. I don't see myself as courageous or active until I sit at the keyboard where a fantasy of my own self takes over. Well, I'm glad it does and very grateful to read the product of it. Yet again, it's been a treat to chat to you today. Thank you so much, Malcolm Marks. Thank you. Well, thanks. Malcolm Knox's new novel, The First Friend, is available at all good bookstores now. Thanks so much for listening to another special episode of Read This. Join us each Sunday to hear our favorite interviews from the show. Listen out for upcoming conversations with Robbie Anot and Melanie Chang. And if you don't want to wait until next Sunday to dive in to read this, you can always search for it wherever you listen to podcasts.