The Unknown Terrorist, by Richard Flanagan. Published by Picador, 2006. ISBN 0 330 42277 4 (hb)$45; 0 330 42280 (pb) $32.95.
The author of The Sound of One Hand Clapping and Gould’s Book of Fish has come up with a veritable novel "for our times". So much so that real recent events, that are more current affairs than history, have walk-on roles or close contextual significance. Here is a gripping tale of Australia (well, Sydney at least) in the midst of a terror campaign.
The hunt is on for those responsible for planting three unexploded bombs around the harbour city. Gina Davies, alias the "Doll", is an erotic pole-dancer who spends the night with a client (Tariq) of Middle Eastern origin and prime suspect, and is then caught with him on CCTV footage at his apartment entrance. From here onwards, she is at the centre of a police and media hunt, in which the true fragments known about her are threaded into a story that suits the needs of a society under threat.
Flanagan succeeds in creating an atmosphere of fear, together with the sadly almost inevitable reactions of societies under threat from terrorism. The paranoia and prejudice, the need of governments and their police forces for rapid results, and the role of the media in fuelling these and applying pressure to get them, are all vividly shown here in both character and plot. The Doll has shady underworld, media and police connections, and these all play a part in constructing her nightmare and its final and inescapably tragic end.
Anyone who has lived in places that experience a random terror campaign will know that it is very hard to maintain the decency, humanity and justice system of any country in these conditions. Those who lived through the mainland IRA bombing campaign in the UK of the '70s and '80s will be forever embarrassed to find that the main convictions, that made them feel a bit safer at the time, were later to be known as those disgraceful miscarriages of British justice, the Guildford Four and the Birmingham Six.
One of the main characters (Richard Coady) is a television journalist who makes a documentary about the Doll, and it provides a scary narrative of just how easy it is to add two and two to make five. That the unscrupulous journalist also becomes a victim is both poetic and ironic. There is a