Books |
The Unknown Terrorist
Richard Flanagan
By
Published: Aug 20, 2018
Category:
Fiction
Richard Flanagan won the Man Booker Prize — the most prestigious literary award in England — for The Narrow Road to the Deep North. Richard Flanagan? Don’t fault yourself for not recognizing the best writer who ever left Tasmania for Australia. His first novel won major Australian literary prizes; his second sold 150,000 copies and was, unsurprisingly, named the Australian Booksellers Book of the Year; his third was also a smash. And long before “The Unknown Terrorist” made many “best of 2007” lists, it was snatched up for a film by DreamWorks (which then dropped the ball).
So you get a bonus in this thriller — it’s a seriously good piece of writing. Better to think of it as a novel that just happens to be thrilling, for right off, Flanagan violates all the traditions. Start with the dedication: for David Hicks. Another name you don’t recognize? Hicks was the Australian who — before 9/11 —trained with Al Qaeda. He was captured in Afghanistan in December of 2001, detained at Guantanamo under conditions that led him to think seriously of suicide, and, in 2007, allowed to plead guilty to meaningless charges so he could finish the final months of a sentence that had, by then, been mostly suspended. Reality check: You don’t dedicate a novel to a convicted terrorist if you think he actually did something.
And then, right in the introduction, Flanagan reveals that the character known as “the Doll” — his main character — will die. Name another thriller that blows what’s traditionally a surprise and thus turns the exciting questions into why and how and who. Reality check: The only one that comes to mind is The Day of the Jackal, in which, as we already know, Charles de Gaulle does not get assassinated. [To buy the paperback from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]
And, just to top it off, there’s not much to know about the main character. The Doll — Gina Davies, but she’s so isolated only a few people could tell you her name — works the pole in a Sydney men’s club. Mother dead, father long gone, she’s a product of the dreary modern world quite familiar to her clients and everyone reading these words: the world ”of the house, the job, the possessions and the cars, the friends and the renovations, the resort holidays and the latest gadgets.” The Doll is, in her way, happy in this world; she accepts it, she considers herself a realist. Defined thus: “Realism is the embrace of disappointment, in order no longer to be disappointed.”
The day the novel begins, there’s a terrorist bomb scare — three bombs found in backpacks — at the Olympic stadium. Richard Cody covers the event for his TV station, an easy task, for no one knows anything and all he has to do is dispense fear on cue. After, he goes to a posh lunch in a mansion “refurbished in the contemporary manner of a corporate foyer,” where he trades gossip in that all-too familiar “aggrandizement of self, as necessary as a bull elephant seal’s bark.” Then his boss demotes him.
At this end of this bad, bad day, Richard Cody wanders into the men’s club. He has two “private shows” with the Doll, then wanders off into the night. The Doll has a more unusual evening. Though she usually goes home alone and counts her money — she’s close to the $50,000 she needs for the down payment on an apartment, which she plans to furnish just like the flats in the shelter magazines — she runs into Tariq, a cute guy she’s just met.
She spends a lubricious night with Tariq. In the morning, he’s gone. But not forgotten — he’s the only suspect in the attempted bombing at the stadium. And…
She put some music on loud and the TV on low. There was an ad for the new Toyota Prado. Everything in the ad—men, women, roads, and skies—looked beautiful and at peace. It calmed the Doll.
She went and cleaned her bathroom. When she came back a quiz show was on. A reality show. A sports show. She dozed off. She woke to see the screen filled with armed police taking up position around Tariq’s apartment block. The Doll grabbed the remote and turned up the volume.
The newsreader was talking about a failed police stakeout of a notorious Islamic terrorist. “To assist with their inquiries in regard to yesterday’s attempted bombing of Homebush Stadium, police have tonight released security camera footage,” the newsreader said, “showing the terrorist suspect entering an apartment building last night with a female accomplice.”
The grainy images showed a couple hugging each other as they entered a building. The footage slowed down so much that she could see the frames clicking through. In contrast with their dark surroundings, they had used some digital effect to spotlight the couple’s faces.
“It is not yet known,” continued the newsreader, “who the woman is, or if she is part of a terrorist cell.”
The Doll felt her mouth go dry. The man was Tariq. The woman was her.
And when a mundane security video shows Tariq with the Doll, Richard Cody knows he has the story that will return him to prominence: the pole dancer as the terrorist’s accomplice, the Doll as “the unknown terrorist”.
In his notes on sources, Flanagan acknowledges “the grabs of politicians and the sermons of shock jocks — no one, after all, was doing contemporary fiction better.” He’s a gifted student. His portrait of the inner workings of TV news is pretty much the way you probably imagine how it goes down at Fox. And as for the way politicians use “terrorism”….
But those are easy targets. Flanagan looks beyond them — to you and me. His question is a simpler one: Why do we like fear? Why do we want to be frightened? Why do we need someone to tell us how to live? And, finally, why do we care so little about our freedom and our rights?
All of this, I emphasize, occurs in a novel you can’t put down. A novel that makes you care a great deal about a character whose fate you’ve known from page three. A novel that leaves you wrestling with disquieting questions rarely aired in the media. (Gee, why is that?) A novel that is, in a word, nothing but trouble — as a teacher discovered in an Irish pub in the Queensland, Australia city of Cairns. He sat down at the bar, opened “The Unknown Terrorist” and was soon asked to leave. Why? “Several customers had complained about the literature I was reading.”
Put a plain brown wrapper on it, if you must. But do read this novel. And then ask yourself: Who is the unknown terrorist? If you get the answer I did, you have every reason to be scared.
EXCERPT
This is Chapter One. When was the last time a thriller started like this? (Answer: never.)
The idea that love is not enough is a particularly painful one. In the face of its truth, humanity has for centuries tried to discover in itself evidence that love is the greatest force on earth.
Jesus is an especially sad example of this unequal struggle. The innocent heart of Jesus could never have enough of human love. He demanded it, as Nietzsche observed, with hardness, with madness, and had to invent hell as punishment for those who withheld their love from him. In the end he created a god who was “wholly love” in order to excuse the hopelessness and failure of human love.
Jesus, who wanted love to such an extent, was clearly a madman, and had no choice when confronted with the failure of love but to seek his own death. In his understanding that love was not enough, in his acceptance o the necessity of the sacrifice of his own life to enable the future of those around him, Jesus is history’s first, but not last, example of a suicide bomber.
Nietzsche wrote, “I am not a man, I am dynamite”. It was the image of a dreamer. Every day now somebody somewhere is dynamite. They are not an image. They are the walking dead, and so are the people who are standing round them. Reality was never made by realists, but by dreamers like Jesus and Nietzsche.
Nietzsche began to fear that what drove the world forward was all that was destructive and evil about it. In his writings he tried to reconcile himself to such a terrible world.
But one day he saw a cart horse being beaten brutally by its driver. He rushed out and put his arms around the horse’s neck, and would not let go. Promptly diagnosed as mad, he was locked away in an asylum for the rest of his life.
Nietzsche had even less explanation than Jesus for love and its various manifestations: empathy, kindness, hugging a horse’s neck to stop it being beaten. In the end Nietzsche’s philosophy could not even explain Nietzsche, a man who sacrificed his life for a horse.
But then, ideas always miss the point. Chopin could offer no explanation of his Nocturnes. Why the Doll was haunted by Chopin’s Nocturnes is one strand of this story. In listening to what Chopin could not explain, she heard an explanation of her own life. She could, of course, not know that it also foretold her own death.
