More Lies

A wonderfully warped journey into one man’s unravelling psyche, and a joyous celebration of the necessity of story.

– James Bradley, author of Ghost Species

More Lies is a metafictional romp. It is also an engaging and funny tale, full of twists and narrational acrobatics. And, though its narrator is as slippery as a Lehman Brothers banker, there is something almost believable about it.

– Matthew Campora, Head of Screen Studies, Australian Film Television & Radio School

Enjoyed More Lies in one hit – like swallowing a tab spiked with speed – with Raymond Chandler’s spook dealing and watching from the corner.

– Rae Desmond Jones, author of The End of the Line

More Lies is like being arrested and given your rights – anything you do or say or read could be used against you. The tension is high in this novel, it is not a relaxed afternoon read. Very much in the moment to the point where the “writer” is practically standing behind you, reaching over and turning the pages for you, giggling in your ear in a manic pitch. It is a continuous flow, the writer must write to stay alive, just keep typing.

The result is a performance piece of the mind. A novel played out in real time before you. It is dynamic, dramatic, and crazy. I loved it.

– Martin Thorne, NetGalley

There is seemingly nothing that Richard James Allen cannot do. Actor, poet, yoga teacher, filmmaker, dancer, and now novelist, though it’s a bit of a stretch to call More Lies a novel. It’s a kind of novel pastiche.

There is always a degree of artifice in the process of creating a narrative. A story must be constructed, and the many and multiple perspectives of reality fixed into something linear and sensical, which is, in its way, antithetical to the reality of life. Allen plays with this notion, weaving together multiple narrative threads into a story that sets itself up as a noir thriller with an engaging tagline: a writer held hostage by a beautiful woman, forced to type on his typewriter as a decoy to an assassination. But there are many other plotlines that come into this entirely unreliable narration. These include a story about a dysfunctional (to say the least) family, about the shifting nature of identity, a story about deep-seated, endemic corruption, a tale of seduction which may or may not be a love story, and a number of other mini-tales that form part of our nameless narrator’s tale, including the self-referential one about the nature of story-making itself and the way in which it creates reality–is that good (will it save us?) or bad (will it undo us) – there is no moral here but there are plenty of questions that come out of the work.

The story is told in short vignettes of one or two pages long, that repeatedly break the fourth wall:

I am the story. Don’t ask me if I am true. (54)

The book engages directly with the complexity of the narrative, playing with the form in a way that is quirky and fun but also unsettling. There is always a different perspective, another story, another socially constructed identity, a different community that we might belong to. Allen creates a dynamic story that continually undermines the reader’s perspective while simultaneously drawing us in as participants:

For all of this long and winding road you have allowed me to exist. Otherwise, I would have been only potential. Without your gaze, I am nothing. (53)

It’s hard to fix the story, as the narrative journey continues to morph in a way that is increasingly multi-genred, with poems, theatrical dialogue, a blank confession form, and regular shifts in time, space, and setting. Throughout the book we are continually reminded of the image of an author at his typewriter—the one constant–even as, quite humorously, the protagonist does a range of things that generally are not possible to do while typing at a typewriter, such as having sex, running for his life, telling his story to the police, and even changing gender and identity. Binaries like guilt and innocence, desire and compulsion, knowledge and ignorance to name a few, are all messed with. There is a meta-fictional aspect to the story which continues to break the fourth wall, bringing us back to process:

Fear wakes you up. It makes you think clearly. At least for a time. Then it wears you out. It’s the adrenaline rush. Suddenly I’m exhausted. I don’t even know why I’m typing any more. I guess it has become a form of thinking. (27)

So what is More Lies? It is really not a classic thriller, a coherent narrative, or a story that goes through the standard hero’s journey towards closure. Above all, it is a thought-provoking, humourous, entertaining, and occasionally disturbing story that will unhinge the reader, leaving more questions than answers. You’ll be all the richer for it.

– Magdalen Ball, Compulsive Reader

For me, there is always an exciting air of anticipation whenever I learn that Richard James Allen has committed his vivid and articulate imagination to ‘paper’ (or I guess it could be some smart device as well). More Lies is Allen’s latest venture in literary writing, having written several anthologies of poetry prior to this work. He has an exquisite talent for throwing us right into the heart of the action but without necessarily explaining the context at the outset. Rather, Allen respects the intelligence and sensitivity of the reader to work at discerning where they are, what is at stake and whose voice is framing each scene. And that would be highly appropriate for a novel that apparently positions itself playfully walking a tightrope between comic thriller and literary wit.

More Lies employs various conceits in its particular manifestation of the central character-narrated story. However, the delight of this novel is that it doesn’t become constrained by convention. Allen constantly surprises and delights us with his stream of consciousness explosions that compel us to savour almost every sentence for its unique combination of flavours. Each concise chapter offers itself as a distinct course within a degustation menu of desire, intrigue, absurdity, philosophical musings, memory and melancholy.

Like an orchestral concerto, as one moves through each chapter, various recurring ‘voices’ and ‘motifs’ emerge that may trigger meaning-making to attempt to contain the experience of reading (and imagining). There are significant stylistic breaks from chapter to chapter as the narrative shifts between being ‘in the story’ and various commentaries or musings about life beyond and outside of the narrative.

I especially enjoyed the occasional typographical play with italics and the page layout of texts (a visual device Allen has used across several of his poetry anthologies) in different chapters – for example, in Chapter 21, entitled The Homeless, until I turned to the next page, I felt the very layout of the words worked in parallel with the theme of the chapter, as a symbolic representation of the inevitable powerlessness of so-called ‘pawns’ of society who have no home, no secure place of power – but maybe that’s just in my imagination too, and not verifiable, as this is the overarching challenge of More Lies.

More Lies is a playful, engaging and potentially confronting exploration of our desire for truth, our familiarity with lying and selective memory, and our need for the apparent continuity of trust. At the heart of this book, there is a kind of self-righteousness about needing to know everyone else’s ‘truth’ while maintaining the legitimacy of one’s own right to lie that is put under interrogation by Allen. He deliciously wins us over and then flips all that we might assume in our place of privileged knowledge as we sit outside the narrative. Is he lying to us, or is it we who lie to ourselves by selectively choosing what to make sense of and forgetting what doesn’t ‘fit’ our assumptions of how things ‘just are’? More Lives is a very special and singular meal – but take your time to savour and digest it.

– Mark Seton, FemAsia