The Unknown Terrorist: A Novel

From Publishers Weekly Starred Review. A life quickly flames out in Flanagan's firebrand follow-up to 2002's acclaimed Gould's Book of Fish . Gina Davies, a 26-year-old nightclub pole dancer (referred to throughout as "the Doll"), leads a provincial life in Sydney, Australia, spends $2,000 a month on clothes and is given to the occasional racist rant. But after a one-night stand with a man named Tariq, she turns on the TV and learns she's been pegged as the accomplice in an attempted terrorist attack on Sydney's Olympic stadium. She's instantly the most-wanted woman in Australia and the source of a raging tabloid media feeding frenzy led by sleazy TV journalist Richard Cody. The fast-paced narrative builds to a fittingly bloody crescendo, and Flanagan drops astutely cynical observations along the way (the Doll, for instance, "realized that her life was no longer what she made of it, but what others said it was"). A true page-turner as well as a timely, pithy critique of celebrity culture and the politics of fearmongering. (May) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. From AudioFile How could a pole dancer be mistaken for a terrorist? Richard Flanagan makes a pretty convincing argument in his novel, THE UNKNOWN TERRORIST. It's a harsh story about the power of the Aussie media and a government determined to keep its people scared and compliant. Despite the sad story of Doll, the misunderstood stripper, narrator Humphrey Bower delivers an engaging performance with words that are delightfully unfamiliar. Doll's body is "at sixes and sevens with itself." Her boyfriend listens to "duff music." When she gets scared, she says, "Fix me up with a butamine," a medicine used for heart attacks. And c'mon, who doesn't enjoy an authentic Aussie accent? M.S. © AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. From Booklist Gina Davies, or the Doll, is a pole-dancer in Sydney who meets a guy, sleeps with said guy, finds out the guy might be a terrorist, and then finds out that apparently she is also a terrorist. Merely being photographed with a man whose name is Tariq and who has dubious ties to a radical Islamic cleric serves to implicate the Doll in the court of public opinion, where outrage that a homegrown Australian woman could become such a nefarious killer sends the country into a tailspin of hysteria. Never mind that no one, most of all the counterterrorism officials hunting after the Doll, seems to want to know that, really, she is just a stripper. Although the lesson may be poignant, the story never quite becomes as thrilling as it intends, and Flanagan's opaque interiors and repetitive digressions fail to mask an awfully thin plot. What remains is a timely work of almost pathological anger directed at the stupidity and vileness of society driven to hysteria by a fearmongering media whose fanaticism is neck-and-neck with religious fundamentalism itself. Ian Chipman Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. "A great book . . . visionary and squalid, apocalyptic and confessional." -- Chris Lehmann"A paean to the imagination . . . Brilliantly conceived . . . Ýa¨ meditation on fantasy and reality and the holy powers of the written word." -- Gail Caldwell"A work of significant genius." -- E. William Smethurst, Jr."An astonishing masterpiece." -- Brad Zellar"Darkly funny and brilliantly sad . . . In prose that dances and sizzles and bleeds." -- Karen Sandstrom"Flanagan's Inventiveness . . . is prodigious." -- John Banville"Gould's Book of Fish is a novel about fish the way Moby-Dick is a novel about whales, or Ulysses is a novel about the events of a single day." -- Michiko Kakutani --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. From The Washington Post Reviewed by David Masiel The standard model of good and evil is simple if not simplistic: Everybody on our side is good, and everybody on their side is bad. For anyone in the post-9/11 world who still believes this, Richard Flanagan's The Unknown Terrorist should be required reading -- with eyelids pinned open, if necessary, and forced to look. Flanagan, whose previous works are set in his native Tasmania, turns his unflinching gaze toward modern-day Sydney, in the aftermath of a terror bomb scare. Over three scorching summer days, we follow a dissolute cast: an exotic dancer, an opportunistic journalist and a populace blinded by the politics of fear. The dancer is a mysterious girl trying to remake her life following personal tragedy. Though she has a full name -- Gina Davies -- she is known simply as the Doll. Objectified and alluring, she lives her life in a semi-robotic attempt to reject romantic dreams and embrace life's hard realities. Life is something she can and will control, the way she controls a man by making him want her, and then slipping away, unattainable. Her circumstances are nothing like ours, yet her tastes are all-too familiar. She hungers for the Versace this and the Prada that, pops Zoloft and Stemetil, designer labels and designer tranquilizers melding into the same illusion of meaning and security. She saves to buy a house, the Australian dream, a $50,000 down-payment almost in her grasp. She keeps her savings in cash, ill-gotten gains that will be used against her in ways she can't imagine. Nightly she engages in an outlandish routine, covering her naked body in $100 bills, as if the money or the ritual itself can somehow shield her. Despite these and other eccentricities, the Doll is emotionally fragile and utterly human. But not to Richard Cody, an on-camera reporter for a Fox-like news station, yellow journalist to the core. Cody isn't evil, but he is desperate. His job in television news is not about truth, but about "the art of making a sow's ear out of a silk purse." He faces demotion within a conglomerate that produces news by the credo that "people don't want the truth." People want a story, and Cody's looking for that story even as he pays the Doll to take her clothes off. He finds it after the Doll meets a handsome young Arab named Tariq. They run into each other at Mardi Gras, amid an evening of parading excess, of "Dykes on Bikes" and "Scats with Hats." When they sleep together, the Doll is unexpectedly moved. But after a passionate one-nighter, Tariq disappears, and the Doll glides through the next day on the fringes of police barricades and storming SWAT teams, a terrorist search that brings Sydney to the brink of hysteria. Then, on television, she sees grainy security-camera footage of herself with Tariq, entering his apartment building, beneath a strident voice-over: "Terrorist suspect . . . with a female accomplice." Tariq is obviously a terrorist -- or is he? After he is fingered by ASIO, Australia's version of Homeland Security, his guilt slides along runners well-oiled by ethnic prejudice and faith in authority. When Cody sees that video, he not only recognizes the Doll, he sees his professional salvation, and the inexorable train-wreck begins. Flanagan ushers us through a modern-day looking glass, with Cody "piecing together not so much the truth of Gina Davies' life as rehearsing the story he would present about it." The mysteries that once made the Doll inscrutable and even successful become the lies that make her Australia's "Unknown Terrorist." Shock-jocks rant, spies manipulate the truth, terror experts pontificate, and the entire nation cries for blood in a thunderstorm of fear. The Doll's fate is as inevitable as it is horrible, grinding toward a bloody end -- or so it would seem. Flanagan's tightly crafted narrative is akin to the oppressive power of Kafka's Trial, or Capote's In Cold Blood, stark realism revealing underlying sickness. His prose glitters and shrieks with spare vitality: "Anyone not working had retreated indoors and taken refuge near their air con vents and in cold beer and chilled wines. Some watched something on television and afterwards couldn't remember whether it was sport or reality tv or a documentary on Hitler. Some surfed the net looking at porn or eBay. . . . Most did nothing. It was difficult to sleep, yet almost impossible to move. It was easy to be irritated about everything that was of no consequence, yet care about nothing that mattered." Here lies Flanagan's real point: In a world of terror and the ensuing decay of personal liberties, the fault lies not in remote devils or political adversaries, but in ourselves. He moves his plot at a thriller's pace, and we can't take our eyes off it. It's about us, after all, and our new realities, a disturbing gaze at the social and psychological mechanisms of terror. In this world, violent necessity dominates, and someone -- maybe anyone -- must be tracked and killed for people to feel safe for a little while longer. Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. From Bookmarks Magazine Richard Flanagan's stock-in-trade through four novels ( Gould's Book of Fish , Death of a River Guide , Sound of One Hand Clapping ) has been intense, often surreal, set pieces. Such disconcerting snapshots drive The Unknown Terrorist to its inevitable conclusion. Flanagan's latest effort turns a jaundiced eye on one city's reaction to 9/11. The result is chilling and plausible. At least one reviewer criticized the book's "simplistic moral"; to be sure, readers rarely doubt where Flanagan stands on the issues at hand. Still, The Unknown Terrorist is a powerful commentary on a society that, the author suggests, gorges itself on paranoia as readily as it seeks truth. Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. RICHARD FLANAGAN was born in Longford, Tasmania, in 1961. His novels— Death of a River Guide , The Sound of One Hand Clapping and Gould’s Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish (winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Overall Best Book)—have been published in 26 countries. He also directed the feature film of The Sound of One Hand Clapping and most recently collaborated with director Baz Luhrmann ( Moulin Rouge ) on the screenplay of Luhrmann’s forthcoming epic, Australia . --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. Read more