Books |
Go to the archives |
By
Published: 2008
Category: Fiction
The most exciting thrillers I've read in the last few years --- Peter Temple's Identity Theory, Charles McCarry's The Tears of Autumn and now this nail-biter from Richard Flanagan --- all have politics at their center.
There's a reason. Unlike far too many novels, they're about something that matters.
For Temple, what matters is digitized information, and who gets their hands on it, how they acquire it, and what they use it for. For McCarry, it's who really killed Jack Kennedy, and why. And for Flanagan, it's the terrorist threat --- just perhaps not the one you think.
Richard Flanagan? Don't fault yourself for not recognizing the best writer who ever left Tasmania for Australia. His first novel won major Australian literary prizes; his second sold 150,000 copies and was, unsurprisingly, named the Australian Booksellers Book of the Year; his third was also a smash. And long before “The Unknown Terrorist” made many “best of 2007” lists, it was snatched up for a film by DreamWorks.
So you get a bonus in this thriller --- it's a seriously good piece of writing. Better to think of it as a novel that just happens to be thrilling, for right off, Flanagan violates all the traditions.
Start with the dedication: for David Hicks. Another name you don't recognize? Hicks was the Australian who --- before 9/11 ---trained with Al Qaeda. He was captured in Afghanistan in December of 2001, detained at Guantanamo under conditions that led him to think seriously of suicide, and, in 2007, allowed to plead guilty to meaningless charges so he could finish the final months of a sentence that had, by then, been mostly suspended. Reality check: You don't dedicate a novel to a convicted terrorist if you think he actually did something.
And then, right in the introduction, Flanagan reveals that the character known as “the Doll” --- his main character --- will die. Name another thriller that blows what's traditionally a surprise and thus turns the exciting questions into why and how and who. Reality check: The only one that comes to mind is The Day of the Jackal, in which, as we already know, Charles de Gaulle does not get assassinated.
And, just to top it off, there's not much to know about the main character. The Doll --- Gina Davies, but she's so isolated only a few people could tell you her name --- works the pole in a Sydney men's club. Mother dead, father long gone, she's a product of the dreary modern world quite familiar to her clients and everyone reading these words: the world ”of the house, the job, the possessions and the cars, the friends and the renovations, the resort holidays and the latest gadgets.” The Doll is, in her way, happy in this world; she accepts it, she considers herself a realist. Defined thus: “Realism is the embrace of disappointment, in order no longer to be disappointed.”
The day the novel begins, there's a terrorist bomb scare --- three bombs found in backpacks --- at the Olympic stadium. Richard Cody covers the event for his TV station, an easy task, for no one knows anything and all he has to do is dispense fear on cue. After, he goes to a posh lunch in a mansion “refurbished in the contemporary manner of a corporate foyer,” where he trades gossip in that all-too familiar “aggrandizement of self, as necessary as a bull elephant seal's bark.” Then his boss demotes him.
At this end of this bad, bad day, Richard Cody wanders into the men's club. He has two “private shows” with the Doll, then wanders off into the night. The Doll has a more unusual evening. Though she usually goes home alone and counts her money --- she's close to the $50,000 she needs for the down payment on an apartment, which she plans to furnish just like the flats in the shelter magazines --- she runs into Tariq, a cute guy she's just met.
She spends a lubricious night with Tariq. In the morning, he's gone. But not forgotten --- he's the only suspect in the attempted bombing at the stadium. And when a mundane security video shows Tariq with the Doll, Richard Cody knows he has the story that will return him to prominence: the pole dancer as the terrorist's accomplice, the Doll as “the unknown terrorist”.
In his notes on sources, Flanagan acknowledges “the grabs of politicians and the sermons of shock jocks --- no one, after all, was doing contemporary fiction better.” He's a gifted student. His portrait of the inner workings of TV news is pretty much the way you probably imagine how it goes down at Fox. And as for the way politicians use “terrorism”....
But those are easy targets. Flanagan looks beyond them --- to you and me. His question is a simpler one: Why do we like fear? Why do we want to be frightened? Why do we need someone to tell us how to live? And, finally, why do we care so little about our freedom and our rights?
All of this, I emphasize, occurs in a novel you can't put down. A novel that makes you care a great deal about a character whose fate you've known from page three. A novel that leaves you wrestling with disquieting questions rarely aired in the media. (Gee, why is that?) A novel that is, in a word, nothing but trouble --- as a teacher recently discovered in an Irish pub in the Queensland, Australia city of Cairns. He sat down at the bar, opened “The Unknown Terrorist” and was soon asked to leave. Why? “Several customers had complained about the literature I was reading.”
Put a plain brown wrapper on it, if you must. But do read this novel. And then ask yourself: Who is the unknown terrorist? If you get the answer I did, you have every reason to be scared.
To buy “The Unknown Terrorist” from Amazon.com, click here.
To visit “The Unknown Terrorist” web site --- and see a hot, remarkable video --- click here.
To read the transcript of a fascinating Australian Broadcasting Corporation report about David Hicks, click here.