The Secret Life: Three True Stories by Andrew O’Hagan review – The Guardian

An unreliable narrator but a reliable narcissist: Julian Assange speaks to the media from the balcony of the Ecuadorian embassy last month. Photograph: Jack Taylor/Getty Images

The internet has changed us, our means of communication, what we believe to be true, our identities and sense of self. That is a statement of such obviousness that we rarely stop to think about what it all actually means. But Andrew OHagan explores these themes with great depth and originality in three long essays originally published in the London Review of Books that make up his new collection, The Secret Life.

The first, entitled Ghosting, concerns that pathologically divisive figure, Julian Assange. The founder of WikiLeaks is awash with fictional potential. So much so that characters based on him regularly turn up in novels (Jonathan Franzens Purity) and TV dramas (Homeland).

OHagan, though, was commissioned to write ghostwrite Assanges autobiography. On the surface, it was aninspired choice of author and subject. OHagan, a vivid and meticulous writer, was sympathetic to Assanges cause, and he has the talent and staying power to draw even the most enigmatic characters out intotheopen.

But as becomes apparent in the essay, things didnt go according to plan. This is partly because Assange is an unreliable narrator but a reliable narcissist. Its also because hes spent his life hiding in online shadows, where myths grow like fungus.

The Australian is caught between wanting to promote himself and maintain a secretive control of his image. It makes for a fascinating portrait of a prickly character who affects an egalitarian stance while awarding himself exceptional status, in which anything he does, however questionable, is by definition good because hes the one doing it.

As OHagan becomes steadily more disillusioned, he cant ignore the massive hypocrisy in which Assange indulges. For example, he makes WikiLeak employees sign contracts that threaten them with a 12m lawsuitif they disclose information about the organisation. As OHagan writes: He cant understand why any public body should keep a secret but insists that his own organisation enforce its secrecy with lawsuits. Every time he mentioned legal action against the Guardian or the New York Times, and he did this a lot, I would roll my eyes.

OHagans eyes come in for a lot of exercise as he carefully documents a man whose ego invariably triumphs over his conscience. Gradually, the relationship comes apart as Assange attempts to play everyone off against one another. Although OHagan manages to get together a 70,000-word draft, Assange then wanted for questioning in Sweden on a potential rape charge thwarts his own book, forwhich hes been handsomely paid, by refusing to sign off the manuscript.

Eventually the book comes out as a whole new genre: the unauthorised autobiography. This is not a hatchet job, but rather the best and most finely nuanced journalistic profile that this reviewer has read this century.

In the pantheon of internet celebrities Satoshi Nakamoto is not nearly as famous or infamous as Assange, but he is certainly more mysterious. Nakamoto is the inventor of bitcoins, the so-called cryptocurrency that has helped the illicit darknet flourish, and which, now legally traded, could one day prove the end of banks and money markets.

Nakamoto is a pseudonym that was a presence on the net during bitcoins development and release in 2009. Then it and its owner disappeared, prompting in their wake a search for the real Nakamoto that has turned him into the abominable snowman of the digital age.

In late 2015, OHagan was approached by an intermediary to write the life story of Nakamoto, who he was told was one Craig Steven Wright, another Australian who was about to become a fugitive fromjustice.

Intrigued but wary, OHagan decides to spend as much time as possible with Wright in an effort to get to the elusive truth. But in The Satoshi Affair we see that Wright is a frustratingly complex character who conceals every bit as much as he reveals. He shows OHagan a wealth of documentary evidence, much of it extremely technical and layman-unfriendly. Yet he stops short of providing conclusive proof that he is Nakamoto. Is this because he is a conman he gets involved in a multimillion dollar business venture that is dependent on his being Nakamoto or because hes reluctant to give his true self up? The answer to that question remains, like so much that concerns the internet, enticingly out of reach.

Squeezed between these two compelling character studies is a relatively short essay entitled The Invention of Ronald Pinn. This Nabokovian-sounding figure is a dead man of around OHagans age whom the author reanimates online, creating a series of supporting fake identities on social media.

Its a strange, slightly haunting voyage into digital life that reads as much like a short story as an essay. It ends with OHagan encountering the dead mans mother. And suddenly, at the core of this excellent collection, weglimpse the unbridgeable difference between the real and theinvented.

The Secret Life: Three True Stories by Andrew OHagan is published by Faber (14.99). To order a copy for 11.24 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over 10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of 1.99

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The Secret Life: Three True Stories by Andrew O'Hagan review - The Guardian