A is for Autobiography, Fake.
Twenty-Six Lies/One Truth is billed as the autobiography “of a man who has been nowhere, done nothing, and met nobody.” This is not exactly true, as one of the standard assumptions behind an autobiography is that no matter how hopelessly biased and self-serving, it is at least supposed to be a work of non-fiction. Mr Peek doesn’t care for that.

B is for Ben Peek.
Judging by the, uh, lively correspondence that swirls around Ben Peek’s LiveJournal, it sometimes seems to me that I am one of the very few people who can talk to Mr Peek for longer than five minutes without wanting to punch him in the face. Of course, as Mr Peek points out in his novel Twenty-Six Lies/One Truth, Charles Bukowski was as unpleasant as drunken bullies can get and still his best books were magical. In the event that the reader is probably not going to spend five minutes in Mr Peek’s company and is therefore not going to snot him in righteous disgust, the only important thing is the book.

C is for Characters.
Apart from Mr Peek and historical figures such as Bukowski and Orwell, all the characters are referred to by a letter rather than by name and their physical descriptions vary from perfunctory to absent. Except one. Yep. One character slips in a full name. Just for a moment. I’m not telling where.

D is for Demidenko/Darville.
Why was Helen Demidenko a literary sensation when she was believed to be of Ukrainian extraction, and then a pariah when she turned out to be Helen Darville, average suburban white girl of no genealogical interest? Her book The Hand That Signed The Paper was submitted as fiction, not fact. She lied about herself to give the book credibility, but it is hard to understand why the literary community fawned over it when they thought her parents were Ukrainian refugees and then vilified it when they found out the truth. Helen Demidenko, it seems, wrote a nuanced book about the crushing effect of totalitarianism on social norms. Helen Darville, on the other hand, wrote a dangerous anti-Semitic screed. And yet these two books are exactly the same; not even a comma separates them.

E is for Encyclopedic Structure.
This is a typical entry in Twenty-Six Lies/One Truth:

Kujau, Konrad — Konrad Kujau, born in 1938, and dead in 2000, was the forger who created the sixty-two volumes that comprised the Hitler Diaries.

F is for Fraud.
At least a third of the entries are not in narrative form at all, but are editorial musings on the history of literary frauds and hucksters and noms des plumes.

L is for Language.
Bad language. Blue language. Cursing. Cussing. Dirty talk. Malediction. Parental Advisory. Profanity. Not in bulk, but what’s there is not for the squeamish. Crude, raw, and true to life. Ben Peek’s life, that is.

N is for Non-Linear Narrative.
Twenty-Six Lies/One Truth is a novel in its own fashion. It is made up of encyclopedia entries, much like this, in very nearly alphabetical order. Mr Peek has shown himself to be an inventive writer. A recent short story, “Johnny Cash”, is told in extract from an interview in which only the answers and never the questions are given. Twenty-Six Lies/One Truth is even less linear.

O is for Observational Humour.

Identity — ‘No one would ever guess you were a genius,’ R says to me. We have just had sex, but it hasn’t gone well. Her hand got caught on the door. I slipped on the sheets. The condom broke. She isn’t on the pill. The phone is ringing. It is my phone. I have no idea where it is.

Q is for Qualifications.
In Australia, doctors have the qualification MB, BS. This is short for Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery, and may once have made sense back in the era of shillings and guineas and when three scruples made a drachm. MDs come from America.

S is for Story.
You would think an encyclopedia would not the most obvious way to tell a story, but the narrative entries are marvels of economy and sinew:

Molestation — Between the ages of six and eleven. She had the same name as my mother.

T is for Truth.
To make matters more complicated, Mr Peek is writing about truth and deception in fiction. Mr Peek is admirably unconcerned about asking, “What is truth?” — a question that ought to be retired from fiction for the foreseeable future. Instead, Mr Peek is fascinated by the way readers respond to perceptions of truth.

W is for Why Does It Work?
It ought to fail miserably. But, curse his eyes, Mr Peek has written a fantastic book. And despite its structure, Twenty-Six Lies has a powerful narrative drive. Mr Peek has deftly woven a story into his encyclopedia, complete with character development, unfolding themes, and a hard shock of an ending.

Z is for The Last Letter of the Alphabet.
Some of Twenty-Six Lies is true. Some of it is false. I happen to have enough personal knowledge of Mr Peek’s circumstances to know this for certain. It would be easy to challenge the reader to work out what is true and what isn’t, but that would be beside the point. Mr Peek even identifies one of the more glaring lies at the end. Don’t read this book to question truth. If you want to do that, pick up any old Phillip K. Dick. Don’t worry about the truth. You know coming into this book that Mr Peek will fudge facts and not give a toss about it. The reason to read this book is to ask yourself how much you care about the truth. Or maybe you prefer the comfort of deception? And why exactly do you care about a group characters of varying degrees imaginary, whom you will never meet?

(Buy Twenty-Six Lies/One Truth by Ben Peek at Wheatland Press | Amazon.com.)