Richard Flanagan’s The Unknown Terrorist shows a side to Australia that I hadn’t expected.
The warm and welcoming Aussies as portrayed in films (and frequently found behind the bar in UK pubs) is nowhere to be seen. Gone too is their generally laid back, easy going attitude to life. In its place we find a population hostile towards “outsiders” and easily whipped up into xenophobia when they feel the Australian way of life is threatened.
They won’t integrate you know.
The target of hostility in the novel is a 26-year-old pole dancer who gets swept up in the hysteria that ensues after bombs are discovered at the Sydney’s Olympic stadium.
Gina Davies — stage name “The Doll” — dreams of the apartment she will buy with the lavish tips from the property developers, mining executives and dot.com entrepreneurs who frequent a upmarket Sydney night club. She obsessively counts the money she’s accumulated, ritually covering her naked body with bank notes “overlapping each note like fish scales.”
Those dreams come to an abrupt end after a cocaine-fuelled fling with Tariq, a handsome computer programmer she met on the beach. The following day he is named as the prime suspect behind the unexploded bombs. Gina is stunned when all the TV news channels begin broadcasting security camera images of her entering Tariq’s apartment — and identify her as his accomplice.
From this point, The Unknown Terrorist is devoted to the search for these suspects and the ensuing media frenzy with every news outlet keen to be the first to identity the woman they nickname “The Black Widow”.
The manhunt gives the novel the flavour of a thriller — an unusual choice of genre for Flanagan — that speeds along rapidly and cinematically to a dramatic conclusion.
Yet this thriller element is not the main focus. Flanagan’s underlying theme deals with the way politicians and the media manipulate the truth to serve their own purposes.
Broadcast journalist come television celebrity Richard Cody is one step ahead of the media pack having recognised Gina as the dancer who insulted him one night at the club. He plans a media coup that will bolster his fading career— a prime-time special in which he will expose “The Doll” as the dangerous “unknown terrorist.” He’s given a helping hand by an insider within the Australian special intelligence service, a man for whom conjecture and hints substitute for the truth.
Together they connive to create fear in the population that they too are targets for the kind of terrorism attacks experienced in the USA. The fact that Gina is innocent is irrelevant — she’s just a nobody who fits the national security narrative the authorities want people to believe.
Sure, she’s not Muslim …. Sure, she’s Australian. But she’s a loser and she wants to settle scores and prove something, and she fell in with the wrong crowd who have shown her how to get back at the world.
If this was my first encounter with Richard Flanagan’s work I wouldn’t be champing at the bit to read any more. The Unknown Terrorist is too heavy handed with its messaging about media manipulation and political maneuvering and doesn’t have anything really fresh to say about those issues.
The book also relies too much on stereotypes. A TV journalist without a conscience. An intelligence operative acting as puppet master. A troubled police officer who believes in the truth. A bearded man in Arabic dress. And a stripper who has a late epiphany that everything in life is a deception. It’s hard to feel affinity for any of them.
I missed the complexity and multi dimensional characters of the two other novels by Richard Flanagan’s that I’ve read: The Sound of One Hand Clapping and his Booker-prize winner The Narrow Road To The Deep North. From his back catalogue it doesn’t appear as if he ever attempted the thriller genre again which is a relief because I own five more of his novels and would be disappointed if they were on a par with The Unknown Terrorist.
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