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 confessed book Norde, 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 two novelists. 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, storied career as a journal 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 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 that 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, Lovndi Barrier, 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, in which he's filmed 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 nineties. For a while he was the chief cricket correspondent there, but he really broke out in two thousand and four when as literary editor, he broke the story of the fake Jordanian memoirs Nor McCoury. He won a walk the Award for that effort. Since then, he's written more than a dozen books of nonfiction and been publishing novels since two thousand. 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.
I've always had friendship at the center of the stories I tell, often male friendship, not always, and that.
Was at the center of this book as well.
I began writing this in twenty twenty one, 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 needed to do much less for friendships to 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 Purtin Shooting Ping, Boris Johnson, all the way down to your mini trump in Scott Morrison. So these things converged to give me the feeling that my 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 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, a 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 in time, in the Great Terror in the Soviet Union in nineteen thirty eight. 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 out with the different 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 statistic personality was as close as you can come to evil, and if you just twisted the circumstances a little bit and you put yourself in a place that was a mobster state or a murderous state, that person would be right into the heart of it. And basically 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 bigness 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 thing things happening around us was suddenly not very believable.
You know.
I remember in the early stages of this writing this book, I was in hotel quarantine. Well, you know, locked up on my own for fourteen days.
Is that believable.
Well, no, it wouldn't have been eighteen months earlier. Was Trump in any way believable? No, you know, 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 proing them with a legend to well, you know, the place I've created, which is called Blair, is actually based on the Soviet Union at that time. You know, the Gangland boss I've created.
Is actually based on Barrier.
So you know, 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, you know, famously, you know, when Kate Gremville 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 fabuloust turning their hand to Are you scared of Russian scholars?
Very much?
Yes and no, because I have fooled around with the historical record, and you know, I haven't used pure fantastical
names for settings and people. But at the same time, as any Russian scholar, we'll 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 gas lighting their own populations, and I did think, well, where is the place in time where gas lighting the population was done to an extreme and done with complete impunity,
And that was Soviet Union under Sullen in particular, where lying to the population was a kind of you, 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 the next step in the retention of power, the consolidation of power. And though he was certainly motivated by his own paranoia over time, of course, it's 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, a way 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 Barrier himself or even Stylin 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're 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.
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 Barrier? We'll be right back. 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, what's wrong with men of a certain age?
You know, 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 you know, somebody out in the real world doing things rather than about them slash 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 fearing of greater and greater danger physical danger. I know that doesn't really answer your question, because it doesn't. It doesn't get back before, you know, before the anger and before the
outcome of the anger. But you know, 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 interlot with so many social, economic, political factors that.
It's beyond me.
And I would say it's beyond 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 the lack of a less resolutely twenty first century therapy word enablers and the ways in which love and friendship see us enabling other people. Was that the initial engine was that 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 first novel, 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 Myrtov 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 overwhelmingly flipped by the Russian Revolution, where Barrier becomes the boss, and he keeps
Myrtov 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 miss steps in a friendship that I've written a lot about before, the stakes in this book are life and death.
Yeah, yeah, no, The flawed friendship being shifted into this kind of setting is fabulous. As you say, the effect that has on the kind of sense of stakes. Were there times in writing that you're 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 I think it's hard to keep a sense of proportion and that balance between, you know, up being the suspense for fictional purposes and also making it palatable to the reader. Where you know, the fun quotion you know 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 over balance 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 Murdov, whether it's with his family, whether it's with the fact that he's motivated at a personal level, not at a political level, or
at a wider level. You know, does that redeem him to you? And is that important that it does?
Yeah?
Definitely, that he has as individual agency if you like. But you know, 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 Babylina, 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 has to take
matters within her own hands. You know, redemption is a funny 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 pretty black.
Surrounds, as this book does. Oh you know, well, we'll suddenly make him do something good and you know the reader will be happy in the air and that we've kind of pulled him out of the fire. But I think as you get to know this character. You know, he's an every man because 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 writers though, or artists, you know, like, if you're creating art, you're not guilty of being passive.
No, No, isn't that Isn't that weird that?
You know?
I kind of regard myself as a pretty passive person and 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 Knox.
Thank you by 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 Arnott 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,