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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Another Kind of Terror,
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,
By
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.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Disappointing,
By
This review is from: The Unknown Terrorist: A Novel (Paperback)
Never having read anything by Richard Flanagan, I picked this up on the strength of the very positive reviews printed on the cover of the paperback edition. What a disappointment! It reads like a slightly elaborated outline for a book. There is much moralizing and a whole lot of bad writing. The characters are poorly developed and one dimensional. Entire sections read like notes a screenwriter might write advising an actor how he should play his character and what his character's motivations are. The prose is awkward and unconvincing. There are pages and pages of "sly" and "ironic" observations with little connection to the characters. In short, the author tells us what we are supposed to think rather than letting us discover these things through the characters' actions and words.I am sympathetic to the theme of the novel, which is the absurdity of Bush's endless "war on terrorism," and the State's eagerness to compromise basic civil liberties in its hunt for the bad guys. Unfortunately, Flanagan doesn't make me care about the characters. The Jacket compares Flanagan's effort to le Carre, but a more appropriate comparison is to the most middling of graphic novelists. Don't waste your time with this drivel.
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