One of my favorite TV writers of all time is British show runner Armando Ernucci. He created some of my favorite comedy. He was the inventor of Alan Partridge and I could watch the Thick of It and veep on a loop endlessly. There's nobody better at the art of the well lobbed insult. Nobody with greater faculty for both
savagery and bureaucratic ineptitude. He's a comedic genius. So it came as a bit of a surprise a few years ago when it was announced that he was making a film about the internal social and political power struggle among the members of the Soviet polit Bureau following the death of Joseph Stalin in nineteen fifty three. Not obvious territory for comedy. Picturing something with dubious Russian accents and period specific detail didn't seem like the neatest fit I needn't
have wired. Here's a brief taste of Nikita Khrushev, played by Steve Bushemi, of all people, scheming with Jason Isaac's field Marshal Zukov about what they should do about Stalin's chief enforcer, Lovrendi Barrier fans of The Energy's work won't need me to say this before playing the clip, but it's a little bit sweary. I really need your help.
To do what the bodies fucking pine up in the streets.
A bit late, isn't it.
What if we blame this on someone was out of control, Nikki, be very careful what you say next. Who Barrier, I'm gonna have to report this conversation threatening to do harm or obstruct any member of Presidium in the process.
Of looking at your fucking face.
You balls like Kremlin Dol be serious, are you went?
Amen? I?
Amen thinks he can take on the Red Army, I thought, Germany, I think I can take a flash lumpit of fucking waistecould.
The genius of what The Energy did in the Death of Stalin was to tell the story straight, with the language and accents idiosyncratic and resolutely contemporary, because it's a story about politics and power, about cowardice and brutality, historically specific but thematically timeless. And it's a movie I thought of as I began to read Malcolm Knox's latest novel, The First Friend. It too takes inspiration from the height of Soviet Russia. It too, is liberated rather than constrained,
by taking a real historical episode as its inspiration. Fans of Knox's gentle vernacular explorations of fragile men and the relationships that enable or sustain them will see this new book as a departure, but also one that's squarely in
his wheelhouse. There was a review in The Guardian that suggested that it reads like an alternate take on Eleana Ferunde's beloved Neapolitan Quartet, but this time the two friends at its core aunt Lila and Lena, young women in Naples, but they are instead one of the twentieth century's most brutal mass murderers and his driver, Williams. And this is read. This the show about the books we love and the
toxic friendships behind them. 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 litter editor he broke the story of the fake Jordanian memoirris Norm McCurry. He won a Walkley Award for that effort. Since then, he's written more than a dozen books of non fiction 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 as 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 pertin Hitting Ping, Boris Johnson all the way down
to your mini trump in Scott Morrison. So these things converged to give me the feeling that, like kind of sock 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 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 and 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 at with the differences between this and
my previous work. So I'll give you an example. I'd 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, this sick 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 thumb. 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 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 providing them with a legend to well, you know, the place I've created, which is called Blah, 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 Gremvill 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 fabulouist 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 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 red 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 slighting 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 Salen 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 Salin 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 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 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 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 Evan 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'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.
When we return, Malcolm reveals the major novelistic challenge of The First Friend. How do you balance the blackness of this book with comedy? Where are the laughs in barrier? We'll be right back. This is a question a kind of 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 Malcolmknox, 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 writing 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 five century therapy word enablers and the ways in which love and friendship see us enabling other people. Was that the initial engine 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 Mertov was the rich boy whose family adopted this 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 Mrtov 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 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 a 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, 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, upping the suspense for fictional purposes and also making it palatable to the reader, where you know, the fun quotion, you know it's 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, 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 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 end that we've kind of pulled him out of the fire. But I think, 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 day 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 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 if 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 Munks.
Thank you by Preks.
Malcolm Knox's new novel, The First Friend, is available at all good bookstores now before we go, So I wanted to let you know what I've been reading this week. A few years ago, a debut book of short stories came out locally by an author called Katerina Gibson. The book was called Women I Know, and it was seriously good. Is there anything more exciting than getting to read someone who's just starting out and loving their writing. Well, Gibbson
is back with her first novel. It's called The Temperature, and it's every bit as exhilarating as her debut. It follows six characters through secrets and disaster, threading their stories together with grace and style and impeccable storytelling instincts. I'm having an excellent time with it. You can find it and all the other books we've mentioned today at your favorite independent bookstore. And one more little armando En Nucci
shout out. He did an adaptation a few years ago of Charles Dickens's David Copperfield and it is one of my favorite films of recent years. Once again, he uses contemporary language and rhythms to tell Dickens's story like no other, and it's an absolute cracker. That's it for this week's show. If you enjoyed it, please tell your friends and rate
and review us. It helps a lot. Next week I read this I am joined by rock star writer and comedian Richard Osmond to discuss his new thriller series We Solve Murders.
Weirdly, every time I do start a new book or a new something, I think, or maybe I wonder if this is the one where actually I find that I'm going to be barely very serious this time, and I'm going to write a proper kind of you book, a prize winning six hundred page novel. And as you say, within three pages, I'm writing about twixes and you know, sausage roles, and I think, oh no, it's listen, it's going to be more of the same. But my note to myself is always make it brilliant, maybe as great
as you can be. Make it something you're proud of.
Read.
This is produced and edited by Clara Ames The show is mixed by Travis Evans with original compositions by Zalton Fitcher. Thanks for listening, See you next week.
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