The Unknown Terrorist: A Novel (Paperback)

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Editorial Reviews

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 out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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 out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: Grove Press (January 21, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0802143547
• ISBN-13: 978-0802143549
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (29 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #626,434 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Another Kind of Terror, May 19, 2007

By	Mike Fazey (Perth, Western Australia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Unknown Terrorist: A Novel (Hardcover)

Richard Flanagan's new novel (released in Australia in December 2006) is about terrorism. Not the kind that involves suicide bombings and religious fervour; the kind that involves mass paranoia and the abuse of power. The second kind is the more insidious.

The unknown terrorist of the title is Gina Davies, a young woman from the suburbs, pretty much alone in the world and focused entirely on achieving material dreams. She's a stripper and pole dancer, a pill-popper and, on the whole, rather a shallow person. Not the kind of character you'd normally feel for as a reader. Yet Flanagan succeeds in making us sympathise with her completely, to feel outrage and pity for the monumental injustice she suffers at the hands of the authorities, the media and the society she inhabits.

A chance encounter and a one-night stand with a suspected terrorist (who, as it turns out, probably isn't a terrorist after all) transforms the rather naive Gina into public enemy number one. Frightened, confused and mistrustful of authority, she becomes a fugitive. Fuelled by hysterical media coverage, Gina is hunted down as a dangerous home-grown terrorist. The ending is not happy.

Certainly, The Unknown Terrorist is emotionally gripping. As we follow Gina's mental and physical unravelling, it's very hard to remain detached. It's hard because it's all so absurd. Surely no sane society could put two and two together and get five in such a disastrous, unjust way.

Of course, it's a highly political novel, and as such, its purpose is to arouse, to question, to jolt. It succeeds handsomely in this regard. It's also guilty of being melodramatic at times, and some strands of the storyline are a little too contrived. However, judging a political novel purely on its technical merit would be to miss the point completely. Flanagan has set out to make a powerful statement and has succeeded.

I hope lots of people read it and talk about it. I hope someone makes a film of it. It's not an uplifting book by any means - it's pessimistic and downright depressing, in fact. But it's an important book for our times, such as they are.

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Hard Truths, May 27, 2007

By	Michael P. Maslanka (dallas, texas United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The Unknown Terrorist: A Novel (Hardcover)

Auden told us that "we must love one another or die." Like a zealous D.A ,Flanagan hammers away on this theme, arguing that we have failed on the first and are now reaping the second. There is no brief for the defense. He drapes his argument on the narrative of the Doll, a stripper whose one night of pleasure with a supposed terrorist leads the cops and the media to treat her as one. An innocent caught up with larger events, bigger trends---the constant fear triggered by 9-11, the maw of the media, ever needing to be fed.
The best parts: Flanagan nails the inner life of a lap dancer and her clients; is pitch perfect on how the media ,on few facts, creates a story, with experts twisting facts to suit the story(the writing of the Big Show on the Doll revealed is savage in its accuracy); illuminates the lies that governments tell for no better reason to keep power for power's sake; is dead on in his erotic descriptions of sex and of stripping.
The worst parts: he introduces a police character late in the novel for no reason other than to show how easy a choice it is to forgo doing the right thing when all the rewards are elsewhere; he plops all sorts of ideas in the book---overwhelming it---we live in a consumer driven society(the Doll loves to shop and read design zines), the government is just not to be trusted but is evil enough to manufacture false terrorist threats,etc; and, worst of all, takes the lazy way out of any narrative jam with unlikely coincidences.
Why a 4? For all its flaws, he writes about things that matter a lot and matter now. He is a truth teller. We need as many as we can get.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Contemporary and disappointing, July 4, 2007

By	Corey (Fairfax, VA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Unknown Terrorist: A Novel (Hardcover)

This book is ambitious in that it is a thriller where most of the action occurs inside the unappealing central character's mind. That mind turns out to be little more than a cipher that the author, Flanagan, uses to wax exhaustively on the decay at the core of contemporary Australian values and American values by proxy one could argue. There are some bright points; the drug squad cop, Athens Loukakis' sub story about his crumbling marriage was handled with a depth that made this minor character interesting. Also a well executed sex scene between the Doll and Tariq on which the main plot of the book turns excuses the inflated Christ/Nietzsche as dreamers pap. However, the book does not work as a thriller because to be thrilling the plot turns have to be equal parts believable and shocking not just shocking. The book tries unsuccessfully to build some vague sense of dread at what could happen in an extreme case of mistaken identity but how is this possible with such an unsympathetic character as the Doll? It might have worked better as a summer blockbuster by cropping out the more believable bits which are used here as just a setup for the next implausible plot turn or internal monologue.