I have been a fan of Richard Flanagan for a while, and would rate Gould's Book of Fish as one of my top ten Australian novels. However, I read Wanting, his latest, late last year and started to feel a bit uncomfortable about his writing. Not that I didn't enjoy it, I think it developed into a very solid and almost profound novel, too short to be a masterpiece but definitely a powerful example of speculative historical fiction. It was more that it felt too speculative, with too much of the writer's presence, too didactic. Which is precisely the problem with The Unknown Terrorist, and in this case I would have to say I didn't enjoy it.Flanagan's intentions are forgivable - he dedicates the book to David Hicks and it is a precise snapshot of metropolitan Australia during Howard's reign of terror - but he manipulates his characters and episodes in an almost Machiavellian way and thus, I had no sympathy for any of them. I suppose the book is really a thriller, so the characters are meant to be cardboard; or any fleshing out is used merely to explain their actions, usually after they have committed them, which doesn't help. The frustration for me came in Flanagan choosing to interlock the lives of his main six or seven characters, in increasingly unlikely circumstances. You just don't believe some of the coincidences and this distracts from the sincerity of the message.
And even the message starts to wear thin. This feeling was weird for me as a fervent opposer to Howard and his post September 11 actions, and particularly as a believer in intellectual freedom. Flanagan does manage to capture the temper of the time: the paranoia, the doublespeak, the teflon-coating of the police and other agencies, and the time deserves to be documented as a part of our history. But did he have to make it so simplistic, so pat? A pole dancer called the Doll with great expectations has a one-night stand with a swarthy man who may or may not be a terrorist and as a result of their tryst she is mercilessly hounded and pilloried by the press. A pole dancer? A dark, handsome lover? An unethical and sensationalised media? Surely Flanagan is kidding if he thinks we haven't moved on from these predictable plots and configurations. It gets worse - there's an adulterous but otherwise incorruptible drug squad detective, a megalomaniacal TV presenter, a Chinese triad big boss, a suspect nightclub owner, even a deluded wheelchair-bound millionaire who collects artefacts from world terrorist hotspots! And they all end up mingling together in one breathy, titillating, and ultimately unbelievable mess.
But even less forgivable is Flanagan's need to flex his God-like muscles, looming over his story with conclusions, judgements, and protestations that may be interesting in a op-ed piece but are tiresome and repetitive and incongruous in a work of fiction. Flanagan even starts and ends the novel with short essays on love, as if we need to have the impossible story located in our own sensibilities if we are to accept the actions of its characters. The novelist intrudes elsewhere also with the frustrating definition of brand names, labels, and corporations used on almost every page. The notion that we are swamped by capitalism, advertising and product placement? Got it Richard! Had it already, didn't need to be reminded of it. And the utter bastardry of the media? Also an admittedly regrettable but cliched complaint about modern society.
So with these familiar three targets - big business, the media, and over-governance - Flanagan assures himself a ready audience, poised to rail at the severe treatment of the Doll, dreading the possibility that they too may fall foul of "them". I agree with this position, but it could have been presented with so much more subtlety, grace and originality. Flanagan is a very good writer, I enjoyed many of his sentences, presented as they are with an old-school instinct for careful construction, but this novel is too conscious, too self-conscious, so easy to read and understand that it almost feels like a "young adult" novel. Perhaps Flanagan's anger at Howard's government and all its correspondent horrors blinded him to the fact that many of his readers didn't need to be convinced of his position, and that others wouldn't be convinced by such an exaggerated storyline.
A great novel about the early years of the twenty-first century in urban Australia needs to be written, and this isn't it.
The wrap-up:
Australian themes - This novel could possibly relate to many other conservatively-governed populaces of the world, especially the UK and the US, as it reads like a film script, albeit a Hollywood-funded one.
Australian characters - Yes, the characters are all Australian, but so am I, and I didn't recognise many of them at all. See above.
Australian settings - The novel is set exclusively in Sydney, but a documentary-style, simplistic Sydney peopled only by bums, erotic dancers, cops and robbers. Its recognisably Sydney but even the social criticism of our true Capital is two-dimensional.
Australian voices - The dialogue in this book is just plain bad. The only believable voice is the author's and that's the one we don't want.
Australian focus - As I've said, this is an Australia that needed to be documented but the situations, characters and settings don't ring true. I hope he sells it to Hollywood and they set it in New Jersey or San Francisco or some other flawed seaside metropolis.
