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The Tyrants Novel

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Thomas Keneally's The Tyrant's Novel opens in a refugee holding camp of sorts in a Western nation. The initial narrator tells a brief story of meeting one of the refugees held there, Alan Sheriff, who is seeking political asylum and whose story makes up much of this enjoyable novel. Alan was a very successful novelist, with an American publishing contract, in a fictional country that is a thinly-disguised contemporary Iraq. His life is ideal, or as much as that can be when living under a despot's rule, when it pretty much crumbles in front of his eyes. His beloved wife dies suddenly and he is subsequently 'asked' by the Great Uncle, the tyrant of his country (and a dead ringer for Saddam Hussein) to ghostwrite a novel for him. The request is not just for any novel, but one which is so wonderful and moving, one which so exposes the effects that economic sanctions are having on his country that the world's superpowers will be convinced to removed those sanctions. Part of what makes Keneally's novel so wonderful is that it is both a politcal novel and a novel about writing and the creative process. Keneally masterfully, seamlessly blends these two genres into an enjoyable whole. The novel is at once a politcal allegory and a story of symbolic writer's block. It is an excellent, heart-breaking story, well-done and compelling. Enjoy.

In this novel within a novel, Australian author Thomas Keneally returns to the political themes which won him prizes for The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, Voices from the Forest, and Schindler's Ark. Keneally has always been at his best depicting ordinary people facing extraordinary pressures, especially from governments bent on totalitarian rule, and this contemporary allegory is no exception. Taking place in an unnamed oil-rich country in the Middle East ruled by a tyrant who calls himself Great Uncle, the novel centers on a man calling himself "Alan Sheriff," a short story writer given one month to write an "autobiographical novel" for which Great Uncle will take full credit. Sheriff, we learn in the opening chapter, is telling his story to a western journalist from a detention camp in an unnamed desert country, where he has languished for three years.

Keneally increases the impact and universality of the story through his clever use of western names. As Alan Sheriff tells the journalist, it is important for his credibility in the west that he be like a man you'd meet on the street, which is much easier with a name like Alan--"not, God help us, Said and Osama and Saleh. If we had Mac instead of Ibn." Alan believes his "saddest and silliest story" will interest Americans, despite the fact that his country and the US are now enemies.

Through Alan's story, the reader meets Mrs. Douglas, whose nephew, not careful enough of the pH level of Great Uncle's swimming pool, has been shot and hanged from the ramparts; Mrs. Carter, whose son has been missing for six years; Alan's beloved wife, Sarah Manners, an actress who has become unemployable; Matt McBride, another writer who becomes head of the Cultural Commission where he works for Great Uncle; and Louise James, an American who would like to get Sheriff to come to Texas as a visiting professor. All these characters contribute to a stunning conclusion as Sheriff tries to write the required novel.

Easily the best Keneally novel in over a decade, this serious and thoughtful novel has significant political ramifications. The characters are "ordinary people," much like the rest of us, caught in extreme situations, and Keneally builds up enormous suspense as the long tentacles of the tyrant grab everyone in their path. Though most readers will recognize the unnamed country and the tyrant, it is a tribute to Keneally that their specific identities are totally irrelevant to his themes and plot. The author makes it clear that a government's manipulation of the people's perceptions through staged events is not limited to the Third World. Mary Whipple

Allan Sheriff, circled by wire in a desolate place, has a story to tell. Actually, he has two stories: one, his own, describing the life of a writer in Hussein's Baghdad and the other with the same theme. The difference is that the first tells the story of the second. Why is Sheriff fenced in at a remote location of almost indescribeable desolation? What abominable crime has put him there? In answering these questions, Thomas Keneally has returned to the top rank of novelists. He excels again with this modern tale of international politics, survival in an oppressive regime, and personal tragedy. This is among the finest of Keneally's works.

Sheriff, a reputable writer, is recruited by Iraq's Great Uncle to post a message to the world. The "sanctions" imposed by the victors of the First Gulf War have brought poverty, lack of food and water and depleted medical facilities to their country. The whims of an arbitrary government, the absolutist nature of the leaders - already a dynasty in the making, and needless casualties from a meaningless war are minimal when contrasted to the universal suffering caused by curtailment of the oil exports. Great Uncle wants Sheriff to expose this injustice through a novel depicting conditions. Sheriff, who might have been willing and able to perform this feat, is afflicted by a more personal crisis - the loss of his wife Sarah.

"Alan"? "Sarah"? This couple is close friends with Matt McBrien and Andrew Kennedy. Are these names typical of a Middle Eastern people? Keneally deftly arabesques away from pigeon-holing these people and their circumstances as "Arabs" or even Muslims. In depicting Sheriff's relations with "Mrs Carter", for example, Keneally shows the universality of a mother's grief, the shameful machinations of a government engaged in useless and costly war, and the mixed feelings of soldiers. He doesn't want to distance his characters from the reader - and the use of Anglo-Celtic names in a novel about a suffering people brings us closer to their realities.

With his vivid, expressive style, Keneally uses Sheriff to guide us through the harsh world of a despotic regime. Whatever his faults, Hussein's Iraqi people was the true victim of a higher level of despotism - trade embargoes and external demands by international agencies. Keneally describes a nation living on the edge of survival. The people may have the Great Uncle's Blue Overalls at their doorstep, but they know it wasn't the Great Uncle that cut off their drinking water or intercepted the medicines.

The reader can always rely on Thomas Keneally for stories of intense feeling and wide interest. He surpasses many of his earlier works with this modern story. That the "Coalition of the Willing" have launched a crusade against the Great Uncle doesn't reduce the value of this book. Keneally uses Sheriff to expose many facets of Iraqi life. His wit and sardonic humour are more pointed here than any previous work. Keneally's sense of justice is monumental. It's a sense to be admired - better, to be emulated. He knows there are no simple answers to human questions, and he displays that view in this exemplary book. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]

THE TYRANT'S NOVEL is at once ingenious and innovative in its ability to mirror recent world history events without disclosing vital identities. While reading it is difficult to not think of current geopolitical events. When we first meet protagonist Alan Sheriff he is being held as a political prisoner in an undisclosed Western nation. While being interviewed by journalists Sheriff explains his tale of how he ended up in his current predicament and his former life in an anonymous nation suffering from U.S.-led oil embargo and is ruled by a ruthless dictator. As the narrative unfolds the similarities between Sheriff's home country and Saddam Hussein's Iraq is quite uncanny and difficult to overlook.

Sheriff was once a member of the elite middle class largely unaffected by the devasting economic repercussions of the oil embargo. But despite his social standings he has created a reputation for his literary skill he is ordered by the tyrant to write a novel about the chaos that has burdened his country to be published under the tyrants name and released in time for a forthcoming G7 summit. Sheriff's been provided a very short deadline and in order to complete this unthinkable task he must battle personal demons that plague him.

Thomas Keneally performs a superb job in creating this fast-paced thriller that failed to lose steam at any given time. I was immediately hooked by the opening paragraph and couldn't wait to reach the end. Recommended.

In this novel within a novel, Australian author Thomas Keneally returns to the political themes which won him prizes for The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, Voices from the Forest, and Schindler's Ark. Keneally has always been at his best depicting ordinary people facing extraordinary pressures, especially from governments bent on totalitarian rule, and this contemporary allegory is no exception. Taking place in an unnamed oil-rich country in the Middle East ruled by a tyrant who calls himself Great Uncle, the novel centers on a man calling himself "Alan Sheriff," a short story writer given one month to write an "autobiographical novel" for which Great Uncle will take full credit. Sheriff, we learn in the opening chapter, is telling his story to a western journalist from a detention camp in an unnamed desert country, where he has languished for three years.

Keneally increases the impact and universality of the story through his clever use of western names. As Alan Sheriff tells the journalist, it is important for his credibility in the west that he be like a man you'd meet on the street, which is much easier with a name like Alan--"not, God help us, Said and Osama and Saleh. If we had Mac instead of Ibn." Alan believes his "saddest and silliest story" will interest Americans, despite the fact that his country and the US are now enemies.

Through Alan's story, the reader meets Mrs. Douglas, whose nephew, not careful enough of the pH level of Great Uncle's swimming pool, has been shot and hanged from the ramparts; Mrs. Carter, whose son has been missing for six years; Alan's beloved wife, Sarah Manners, an actress who has become unemployable; Matt McBride, another writer who becomes head of the Cultural Commission where he works for Great Uncle; and Louise James, an American who would like to get Sheriff to come to Texas as a visiting professor. All these characters contribute to a stunning conclusion as Sheriff tries to write the required novel.

Easily the best Keneally novel in over a decade, this serious and thoughtful novel has significant political ramifications. The characters are "ordinary people," much like the rest of us, caught in extreme situations, and Keneally builds up enormous suspense as the long tentacles of the tyrant grab everyone in their path. Though most readers will recognize the unnamed country and the tyrant, it is a tribute to Keneally that their specific identities are totally irrelevant to his themes and plot. The author makes it clear that a government's manipulation of the people's perceptions through staged events is not limited to the Third World. Mary Whipple

This is a nightmarish novel obviously set in Saddam Hussein's Iraq in the mid-1990s, though the country is never named and all the individuals, for some reason, are given British names. It's all there: the regime is headed by a tyrant, nicknamed Great Uncle; he has many palaces, is paranoid, expects impossible and sometimes entirely whimsical demands to be promptly fulfilled, visits terrible punishments on those who fail him in any way, and he has a son even more brutal than himself. There are horrific descriptions of the recent war against the neighbouring state in which chemical weapons were used by one side and fanatical martyrdom by the other; and there are references, under other names, to the Shia minority in a Sunni state.

The story is told by Alan Sheriff, a writer, who belongs to a group of intellectuals - authors, film and television people, an architect - some trying to keep their distance from the regime, some ambitious enough to serve it. Alan belongs to the former group; but Great Uncle wants him to write, inside a month, a novel, to be published under Great Uncle's name, which exposes the sufferings of the country under the sanctions imposed on it. For both personal and political reasons Alan does not want to write it. Political reasons include his knowledge that the United Nations' Oil-for-Food programme never reaches the poor for whom it was intended, but is being used to enrich the governing clique. Personal suffering in his private life had already driven him to a quixotic action which he meant to follow with suicide, so he is not all that frightened for his life; but Great Uncle has made it clear that Alan would not be the only person to suffer if the book does not appear: so would a friend of his who was to supervise the work, and the friend's wife also.

Could Alan engineer his own death at the hands of the regime in such a way that he does not compromise the life of others? The method he chooses is itself one of terrible cruelty (and, I think, out of character) - grotesquely, it does not work. So will he deliver the book?

We can perhaps guess one aspect of the end; and the introduction, which has Alan a prisoner - but now in an inhuman camp for asylum seekers in Australia - has told us more; but there are still some unexpected twists in the last few pages. They are, I think, not the best pages in the book: those are the many earlier on which etch into your mind the horrors of Saddam's Iraq.

Keneally vividly conjures up the dilemmas that the artist in a repressive regime faces. "The Tyrants Novel" alows the reader to fell the vise closing in on Alan Sheriff as he is forced to work with the regime that is destroying his homeland.

"The Tyrants Novel" avoids the stereotypical scenes of repression - physical abuse, direct threats - in order to spin a web of gnawing anguish. A few scenes in "The Tyrants Novel" will remain with me for years to come - not because they are rendered so graphically, but because they are presented in a plausible manner that makes them even more disturbing.

One thing that Keneally does is to give all of his characters - in what is clearly Iraq - Englich and Irish names. At first, this seems bizarre, but the sad fact is, westertn readers will more readily identify with characters named "McBrien", "Sarah" and "Andrew" than they will with "Abdul" and "Mohammed".

A great novel and one that has sent me serching out Keneally's other books.

Intentionally or not, Thomas Keneally has written a novel justifying the overthrow of Iraq's Saddam Hussein and gives one reason to wonder why so many leftists enthusically support the rule of tyrants.

This is a story of life in an anonymous nation where Great Uncle, his family and satraps rule with an iron hand. A custodian responsible for one Great Uncle's palace swimming pools is hanged because the chlorine isn't properly adjusted. Great Uncle's son is depicted as a sadistic monster. Does all this sound familiar?

Alan Sheriff has Anglicized his name while he sits in a refugee detention camp. Bit by bit, he tells his story to a writer who has befriended him.

Once noted as an upcoming writer in his native land, Sheriff tells the story of life under Great Uncle. He and his wife, a successful film and television actress, keep company with a salon of the nation's artists and writers. Great Uncle tells the producer of his wife's soap opera that her role must change to glorify the sacrifices of the nation's war dead, a war that Great Uncle pursued at all costs. Sherriff's wife quits instead, fearing the wrath of Great Uncle and the government he controls.

Sarah, Sherriff's wife dies of an untimely stroke. Perhaps this could have been prevented had not other nations imposed an embargo on Great Uncle's nation because of his invasion of a neighbor and suppression - with chemical weapons - of internal dissidents.

Sherriff has just completed a new novel when Sarah dies. His American publisher's advance and expected royalties would have supported he and his wife for a long time, perhaps even allowing them to escape the country.

In grief, Sherriff buries the manuscript with his wife. It is hers, he thinks. He cannot share the effort the world.

Great Uncle calls upon Sherriff to ghostwrite a novel for him . . . and that's where the story really begins and I will not describe it.

Fear permeates every page of this tragic story. The fear of not knowing what any day will bring. The fear of saying the wrong word to the wrong person and dying for the mistake. This is a story of what it is like to live everyday in a prison. Diplomats cluck-cluck and ythe people suffer.

Keneally has a knack like Orwell's for putting the reader into an asphyxiating environment. You cannot make it through this novel without having your chest tighten . . . and then thinking of how horrible it must be to live in such a country. I don't know what Keneally's intent was, but he definitely makes the argument that allowing tyrants to remain unmolested is a crime against humanity.

Jerry