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The Unknown Terrorist by Richard Flanagan is a very angry book. The Australian writer has turned his back on the playfully sophisticated structure of his last work, the excellent Gould’s Book of Fish, and taken a jaundiced look at contemporary society. He doesn’t like what he sees.." This is a bitter polemic brimming with a disbelieving contempt for the cynical maneouvring of those in authority. You wouldn’t exactly describe it as a happy-go-lucky read. The central character in this bleak tale is a hapless pole-dancer, Gina Davies (aka ‘Krystal’, or ‘The Doll’) who performs in a seedy club on the borders of Sydney’s red-light district. After sleeping with a stranger she meets at the Mardi Gras festival, she awakes to find him gone. Later that day, he’s named as a suspected Islamic terrorist. CCTV footage that captures the couple together prompts the media to name her as the accomplice of the wanted man (a small-time drug mule with nothing to do with Islam or terrorism). Gina finds herself at the epicentre of a gathering storm of hysteria as the media, prompted by government agencies, gleefully hijack and hype the story of the pole-dancer turned terrorist. That not one word of their tale bears any relation to the truth matters not: the sheer momentum of misinformation is enough to isolate the innocent woman. The Sydney Flanagan depicts is a febrile place. The narrative occurs over four days as a heatwave gathers and breaks, instilling the city with a sense of apocalypse. The atmosphere reaches boiling point as tabloid headlines scream about the Doll, radio "shock jocks’ whip up the hysteria and a television current affairs show presents an exclusive on Gina that is a tissue of smears, innuendo and sheer bullshit. While Flanagan casts his net wide to depict the cast of characters that exploit Gina’s situation for their own ends, he reserves particular venom for Richard Cody, the narcissistic TV reporter whose self-regard and craven social climbing the writer depicts with relish. Flanagan has acknowledged that the inspiration for his plot is taken from Heinrich Boll’s 1974 novel The Lost Honour of Katherine Blum. Compared to the complex and erudite form of his past fiction, The Unknown Terrorist is a blunt work, often flawed. But the flaws, I think, are the point. As well as the Boll, he states in his "Note on Sources" that his novel was prompted by "ads, headlines, gossip, bar talk, along with the grabs of politicians and the sermons of shock jocks—no-one, after all, was doing contemporary fiction better." With the circulation of great and powerful fictions, motivated by ideologues and disseminated by an overbearingly omnipresent media, the question Flanagan poses is: where does this leave the novel? In this exasperated, despairing and wrathful novel he enacts one possible stance available to the contemporary writer: that of Old Testament prophet, charged with energy, mouthing confrontational truths, but shouting very much in the wilderness. — By arrangement
with The Independent
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Richard Flanagan’s
new novel launches a stinging attack on the powers that foster and
prosecute the so-called "war on terror", writes John
Tague