The Unknown Terrorist (2006)

There’s a deliberately retrospective tone to this novel with Flanagan anticipating the future with such phrases as ‘I knew all her stories. Ferdy would say later to the newspapers’. Along with the risky nature of being a pole dancer at a Kings Cross club, this sort of comment makes the reader sense that the Doll or Gina Davies will come to a sticky end. Interesting that Flanagan always calls her the Doll rather than her actual name – it seems to make her real self seem less substantial and her façade about as much as the public is going to get.

As the book gets underway, though, you do discover more about Gina – and we find her a comparatively simple person, initially at least not very intelligent, something Flanagan has to establish in order to make her response to being mistaken for a terrorist seem at least feasible. Personally I found it unconvincing that she didn’t get a lawyer and turn herself in right away and I found the plot just too contrived around this mid-section of the book, what with her being too frightened at the police station to remain when there was a kerfuffle going on and then later just happening to go down a stinky alley, find an unclosed car boot and discover Tariq in there – talk about a needle in a haystack. All this increases the sense of dispiriting inevitability that pervades this novel. Of course, I should have realised this would be the tone if not by gloomy titles of Flanagan’s other novels (‘The sound of one hand clapping’ or ‘Wanting’ come to mind) then by the dedication to the unfortunate David Hicks who’d have been banged up by those totally immoral Americans in Guantanamo Bay at the time of this book being written.

Still, I feel an accord with where Flanagan is coming from. It all reminds me of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Everybody Knows’ where he sings about the inevitability of bad things happening. Flanagan’s society is crassly and emptily materialistic with Gina not only being scornful of the rich clientele she has but also becoming increasingly disillusioned by her dream of owning an upmarket apartment, realising that the more she buys, the less satisfied she is. Clearly Flanagan is showing what a spiritually bankrupt society we are.

In the end, though, he overdoes his theme. He ascribes to a more enlightened Gina all the thoughts that he has about many aspects of society and how unconnected individuals are. The last seventy odd pages of the novel were more of a rant with Gina wandering around Sydney in order to allow Flanagan lots of time to make observations about society. Yes, a lot of the Australian media is sick, yes, there are unscrupulous people in high places and yes, it's a sad, bad world, but I felt Flanagan would have achieved more with less. ( )

Very boring. ( )

Feeling somewhat cocky that I owned a copy of our f2f book for this month I was more than happy to finally get a chance to read THE UNKNOWN TERRORIST by Richard Flanagan. No matter that it turned out that the book club book was another one altogether (might make a note of that book later on), I really really really enjoyed THE UNKNOWN TERRORIST.

This book beautifully illustrates the way that somebody's reputation, life and future can be trashed comprehensively by one little mistake compounded by somebody else's blatant personal interest. Not wanting to give away too much, basically the story is about a young woman, with a bad start in life, who has a plan and an aim and is working her way towards that. Okay so the job (exotic dancer / stripper / whatever you want to call it) might not be the sort of job that everyone would be comfortable doing, but our central character, Gina does what she does well - with the aim of putting away enough money to buy a house and make a life for herself. A trip to the beach, a brief encounter with a young man who saves her best friend's little boy from the surf, and long story short, Gina ends up spending the night with him. Waking up the next morning on her own, wandering across the road to get a coffee, looking back to find her one night stand is the target of a massive intelligence / police raid, Gina's life rapidly spirals downwards. Not helped by the CCTV footage that shows her kissing him - a man she quickly comes to know is a suspected terrorist. Enter the slimy self-serving and rather revolting journalist, and Gina's suddenly a wanted woman - you'd swear one of the most dangerous women in Australia.

There's absolutely nothing subtle about the scenario being explored in THE UNKNOWN TERRORIST - but there is a lot of subtlety in the outcomes. The journalist's behaviour is, unfortunately, not hard to envisage. Gina's not quite as predictable - whilst it would have been possible to hammer an agenda a little too strongly, Gina's sympathetic but at the same time she's stupid and frustrating and contributes just a little to her own fate - early on when she could have just gone to the authorities and surely had a hope of sorting out the whole mess, she dithers and dives and goes into hiding and from that point on, you know that things are getting worse and worse for her. Having said that, there's room for a reader to feel real sympathy for her decisions (bad and good), there's a real feeling of the powerlessness of being a nobody, slightly on the fringes of "polite society" up against the tide of media influence, public reactivity and hysteria.

One of the blurbs on the back of this book really caught my eye ... an excerpt of which deserves to be repeated: "THE UNKNOWN TERRORIST should be required reading - with eyelids pinned open, if necessary, and forced to look..." David Masiel WASHINGTON POST. I suspect there will be some whose will find the scenario in this book difficult to swallow (and I wouldn't be at all surprised to find accusations of certain political sympathies on my own part). Regardless of where you stand on the issue of terrorism and the treatment of terrorists, THE UNKNOWN TERRORIST is surely a poignant reminder of the concept of "innocent until proven guilty" and a stark example of the ills of trial by media. ( )

Disapointing. I expect more of this author. ( )

Infuriatingly stupid book that relies upon its protagonist, who had a one night stand with a man who turned out to be a terrorist, making one stupid decision after another to keep the plot going. Flanagan insults his readers intelligence time and time again. There are good points to be made about post-911 paranoia, but Flanagan isn't the writer capable of making them. ( )