If you're looking for an excellent fictional look at the paranoid, media-addled, security-obsessed post-9/11 state that the terrorists and their enablers in the West have wrought, you can do no better than Richard Flanagan's blistering new novel The Unknown Terrorist. Torn seemingly from tomorrow's headlines, the book is an intense, unremittingly grim, and wholly compelling account of a few days in the life of an Australian woman whose world is turned upside down, not by an actual act of terror, but by the specter of terror itself: by the image of terror, by fears of terror, and by a government and media's coldblooded manipulation of terror as a political tool. Intrigued? You'd better be! Learn more after the jump....
The Unknown Terrorist tells the story of one Gina Davies, known mainly as "the Doll," an exotic entertainer (read: pole dancer) in Sydney, Australia. Relatively comfortable in her cynical shell of late-capitalist consumerism, the Doll lives mainly to make money, to buy expensive, high-end name-label clothes, and hopes one day to buy a home, to settle down, to make good: to belong. Her dreams take an unexpected turn soon after she meets Tariq, an enigmatic man she first meets at the beach, and with whom she hooks up on a wild night during Carnival. It's only after a night of passionate sex that the Doll realizes that Tariq is wanted by the Australian government as a suspected terrorist, and that she--caught on a grainy security video kissing Tariq outside his apartment--is wanted too, as his lover and accomplice, an unexpected, "unknown," homegrown Australian terrorist sympathizer and possible mass murderer. Her frightening realization that she is now a target of the massed power of the Australian paramilitary police, its crusading anti-terror politicians, and its rabid, sensationalist, bloodthirsty media, plunges the Doll down a rabbit's hole of fear, flight, and Otherness. She's now officially One of them, through the postmodern looking-glass: Alice in Terrorland.
The Unknown Terrorist succeeds dazzingly well on a number of levels, not least that of the page-turning, potboiling, what-happens-next thriller: from the moment the Doll begins her terrifying odyssey throughout the underbelly of Sydney, searching desperately for a way out from the ever-tightening dragnet, I literally could not put the book down, my own frenzied reading mimicking the Doll's frantic efforts at survival. But far more than being this summer's hip book du jour-cum-escapist genre thriller, The Unknown Terrorist reaches heights seldom attempted in today's overcrowded, terminally self-aware and ironic fiction market: it's satire, as frightening and as enraged and as necessary as Swift or Orwell or Terry Gilliam at their best, a relentlessly scathing scorched-earth FUCK YOU to our so-called "liberal democracies," busily fighting terror abroad while sowing it at home, shrilly espousing liberty and freedom for all while destroying the civil liberties of most, and chugging headlong, addicted to the new holy trinity of money, power, and fame, into total breakdown and chaos, if not outright oblivion. Flanagan reserves the best of his biting scorn for the politicians and the media, the talking heads and members of the technocrat chattering classes, all of whom conspire to demonize the innocent Doll, and manipulate the fake threat they've made into a monster of nightmarish proportions. Worst of them all is Richard Cody, a washed-up TV anchorman who latches onto the Doll's story, inflating her threat as a wholly cynical means to his career's salvation. Witness the Doll on the run through a shopping mall, looking up to see a video of one of her dances (as "the Black Widow" she dresses in a burkah, which she strips to reveal her dancer's near-nakedness and racy lingerie: a nice sendup of both radical Islamic misogyny and Western zenophobia) plastered across an enormous video screen:
The escalator was now falling down the side of the massive grid of plasma screens; taking her past the journalist, Richard Cody. He too was huge, his face monstrous, he was saying something, she was sliding past his mouth, his lips, his obscene tongue, she felt he might swallow her. She turned her head away, tried not to look, but it was unavoidable, and still the escalator kept falling and the Doll with it, while on the screen she had now appeared dressed as the Black Widow. . . . The Doll felt she was journeying into hell. She was ripping off her dress and then her veil, she was heavily made up, and the bad quality of the video accentuated the whorish look, the plasma grid throwing a mesh over the image that somehow added a final slutty layer. The Doll felt that they had turned her into a murderous porn star.
Rarely have I seen the panoptic, 24/7 mediasphere portrayed with such wide-eyed lucidity: the scene is reminiscent of Fascist cinema, Big Brother, the omnipresent telescreens of Fahrenheit 451, and that groovy 1984-style Apple ad, all rolled into one.
In addition to being a nail-biting rollercoaster thriller and a vicious political satire, The Unknown Terrorist is also a profound study of contemporary alienation, of what happens when our everyday verities--job, money, friends, a protective state and nation--are stripped away, revealing the uncaring cruelty at the heart of our modern world. Here's my favorite passage in the book, when the Doll, who once was a shopaholic as indefatigable as Paris Hilton, briefly takes refuge on a swanky street in downtown Sydney:
Nothing was as it had been. Martin Place, where once she had happily browsed fine designer shops, now appeared to her as empty and strange as the ruins of an ancient city that somewhere, sometime long ago, stopped making sense. For a moment she stood surrounded by colorful bunting and beautiful images that communicated nothing. Dolce & Gabbana. Louis Vuitton. What did any of it mean? On vertical banners pushing a designer label, models, no more than kids, were reproduced with their strange unfocused gaze, as if they had witnessed a massacre or horror they still could not comprehend. Versace. Gucci. Armani. The Doll had the fleeting sense she was looking at the remnants of some great lost civilization that had become indecipherable, like the temples at Angkor Wat . . . extraordinary places, magnificent buildings, beautiful objects, wonderful art that only had purpose and meaning as long as everyone agreed it had purpose and meaning.
I love this for so many reasons: its deft manipulation of past and present, the overlaying of the ruins of vanished societies upon the wreck of the now; its affectless, tuned-out enumeration of the brand-names; its conflation of the child models with shocked terror survivors; but primarily for its shocking empathic insight: Who among us hasn't felt, in the hearts of our fragile, buzzing, frightening cities, this terrifying frisson of strangeness, this mixture of uncanny dislocation and nostalgic longing, here on the shore of our Brave New World? Like all good fiction The Unknown Terrorist gives us a roadmap to both our present and future; like all great fiction, it does so with both an unsparing lack of sentimentality at our fallen state and an unblinking embrace of our fearful, striving human condition. You must read it.
Oh, yeah, and the ending's an absolute blast. :P Enjoy!