Biografi (31 page)

Then, on 5 September the dinghy duly went over the falls. Margaret Driscoll reviewed the book for the
Sunday Times,
confessing that she was ‘enthralled' by the tale but telling her readers that Petar Shapallo was a concoction—something she had established with a few phone calls, one of them to Jones himself. ‘This spoils an otherwise extremely praiseworthy book,' she wrote, ‘beautifully written, evocative and deft in its weaving of Albanian history through the villages and byways of the shattered country it is today.'

Jones's piercing act of imagination was made to seem like a grubby hoax rather than a Chatwinesque triumph. Confronted, the author conceded that Shapallo was a metaphor.

It was one thing to understand that
Biografi
was a literary travel book. Jones alone—he had not given anything away even to Michael Gifkins—had known the truth all along. Petar Shapallo was a complete fiction. If Hoxha ever had a double, Jones never met him. In this sense not only is much of
Biografi
made up, but the thing that makes us turn the page, the quest to find the shadow man, is fictional. The narrative drive of the book is wholly invented from the moment of its wonderful opening sentence: ‘I was looking for Petar Shapallo but the face that had been Petar Shapallo's had vanished under a surgeon's knife.' The Deutsch blurb aptly described it as a ‘highly original travel book' and ‘a classic quest…mysterious, shocking, poignant, sometimes grimly funny.'
Biografi
was not, however, as the blurb also asserted, ‘a gripping true adventure story'.

Deutsch stood by Jones—‘We've marketed this book as a travel book, not an investigative scoop'—while wishing he had told them the whole story. The axe, however, fell in New York. Declaring that Jones had misrepresented the nature of his work, Farrar, Straus & Giroux took the devastating step of cancelling his contract. When word of this filtered back to New Zealand's literary world, Jones became a momentary figure of scandal, and sales of his book fell away, despite the approval of local reviewers.

Jones found the whole episode ‘an awful gut-wrenching experience'. He had whooped for joy at the news that Farrar, Straus & Giroux wanted to publish him. Now
Biografi
might be about to make him notorious. But the book was too good to fade away. Harvest, the classy paperback imprint of Harcourt Brace, offered to buy the US rights, and asked Jones to placate its legal department with a summary of what he had done. He gave them this statement on 27 March 1994:

Biografi
is a traveller's story of a journey through Albania. There are areas of fiction-making interfaced with factual reporting and description.

At the heart of the journey is a quest to find Petar Shapallo. This is make-believe biography after the spirit of the old regime which was in the habit of creating false dossiers. There are other literary reasons for Shapallo, namely he provides a metaphorical device around which the journey is made.

The bulk of the book has been accurately observed. Particularly where political exiles or political prisoners are concerned. A huge effort under very trying conditions was made in order to ensure that I got down their stories correctly.

Two major figures, however, Shapallo and Cliff Dalziel are fictions. Necessary fictions, of course. Cliff Dalziel is based on a real person who has a different name and lives in a different location.

Shapallo is my imagined biography of a person rumoured to have lived in Albania.

Those are the only fictions in the book.

However, there are moments when Shapallo, a fictive character, is transposed onto events or journeys which actually took place and involved real people. (This is more Albanian than you can ever imagine.) For example the interpreter Kadris and the chauffeur Mentor and the political exile Leila are real people with real names and who, in my book, come into contact with Shapallo. Descriptions of Leila and Kadris are recognisably accurate. I haven't gone into the same detail with Mentor. In the case of Kadris and Mentor I have not included their surnames.

There is an aid worker called Bill in the book. I have pretty much drawn him as I found him. However, toward the end of the book he drives me and Shapallo to Kukës. Bill doesn't have a surname. Nor have I popped words into his mouth, except once when makes a non-consequential reference to Shapallo and also he shakes Shapallo's hand.

Also, in Gjaza, an impression is given that the Agolli brothers (real people) came into contact with Shapallo.

As for the rendering of history, again I like to think that I have been rigorously attentive to the sources listed at the end of the book.

One final thing. The word ‘biografi' refers to the Albanian system of files kept on every citizen during the Hoxha years. Frequently, false constructions were made where none had been intended. Files were also ruthlessly falsified to fit the official line. More importantly, over time the word ‘biografi' had come to be synonymous with another word, fabrication. I hope this is helpful.

Biografi
was successfully (and uncontroversially) published in the US in October 1994.
The New York Times Book Review
called it ‘a gem of the genre'. It was serialised in the literary journal
Grand Street
, was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, and was named as a Best Book by
Publisher's Weekly.
Hanser in Germany, undeterred by all the fuss, published
Biografi
as a travel fable, to glowing reviews.

It may seem surprising that nobody asked how it was that so mysterious and significant a figure as Enver Hoxha's double had remained unidentified until a visiting writer from New Zealand tracked him down in the space of a few weeks. Perhaps; but it is not surprising that many expert readers were compelled by Jones's creation and believed that Shapallo was as real as the other Albanians in
Biografi
. Readers of the book now will have no trouble understanding how that happened.

But what did Jones think he was doing? Why did he, by mixing up fiction and non-fiction without letting on, invite Driscoll's attack? One answer is that the left hand of the writer ignored what the right hand was doing. The impulse to invent was as powerful as the urge to take notes. For Jones these seemed to be complementary rather than contradictory activities. He had crossed a line, but on the other side of it he could glimpse the mature novels he was yet to write. He could not go back.

Biografi
might have almost destroyed its author but it made Jones as a writer. Albania taught him how the novel could not only contain facts without being constrained by them, but it could invent details that would come to have the authority of facts. This is, for instance, how
The Book of Fame
, Jones's novel based on the triumphant 1905 All Blacks rugby tour of Britain, works.
The Book of Fame
, a novel based on the idea of travel, makes liberal use of clippings, sports reports, team lists, diaries, shipping notes and the like.

A parallel dynamic creates the sombre truths of
Mister Pip
. Jones's lost world of Bougainville begins in his Albania, a place of misapprehended stories, mistaken identities, and of invented people coming to life. Petar Shapallo—a fictional character with the job of pretending to be someone else—is the progenitor of Mr Watts, whose tragic destiny is to be confused with another fictional character, Pip from
Great Expectations
. Pip, in turn, seems more real to Matilda than her own mother.

The Book of Fame
and
Mister Pip
are novels. We believe their worlds are real because we know they are made up. Perhaps we should do
Biografi
the same honour, and read it as a novel in the form of a travel book, a book including verifiable facts but with an appeal to the higher truth of fiction, which tells us not only how things are but how they might be too, if only we could imagine them.

Michael Heyward is the Publisher at The Text Publishing Company.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The letter offering Lord Inchcape the Albanian throne (pp 94–5) is reproduced from
The men who would be King: a look at royalty
in exile
, by Nicholas Shakespeare, 1984.

Rose Wilder Lane's description of Tirana (p. 25) is drawn from
Dorothy Thompson and Rose Wilder Lane: forty years of friendship
letters 1921–1960
, edited by William Holtz, 1991.

Other works consulted include:

Julian Amery,
Sons of the eagle: a study in guerrilla war
, 1948

Jon Halliday (ed.),
The artful Albanian: the memoirs of Enver Hoxha
, 1986.

Bernd Jurgen Fischer,
King Zog and the struggle for stability in
Albania
, 1984.

Harry Hamm,
Albania—China's beachhead in Europe
, 1963.

Gwen Robyns,
Geraldine of the Albanians: the authorised biography
, 1987.

Joseph Swire,
Albania: the rise of a kingdom
, 1929; and
King Zog's
Albania
, 1931.