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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN num: 9780802143549
ISBN number: 0802143547
Label: Grove Press
Manufacturer: Grove Press
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 336
Printing Date: January 21, 2008
Publishing house: Grove Press
Sale Popularity Level: 172077
Studio: Grove Press
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Product Description:
From the internationally acclaimed author of Gould’s Book of Fish comes an astonishing new novel, a riveting portrayal of a society driven by fear. What would you do if you turned on the television and saw you were the most wanted terrorist in the country? Gina Davies is about to find out when, after a night spent with an attractive stranger, she becomes a prime suspect in the investigation of an attempted terrorist attack. In The Unknown Terrorist, one of the most brilliant writers working in the English language yesterday turns his attention to the most timely of subjects — what our leaders tell us about the threats against us, and how we cope with living in fear. Chilling, impossible to put down, and all too familiar, The Unknown Terrorist is a relentless tour de force that paints a devastating picture of a contemporary society gone haywire, where the ceaseless drumbeat of terror alert levels, newsbreaks, and fear of the unknown pushes a nation ever closer to the breaking point.
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Rated by buyers 
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I was looking forward to reading this book based on the reviews I'd read and the reputation of the award winning author. It was too unbelievable and steeped in paranoia for my tastes. Flanagan develops his main character, the Doll, as a somewhat uninformed and rather dull stripper whose following some ill defined plan to create a new life for herself. She gets caught in the crossfire of a TV "journalist"(trying to hang on to his fame and fortune) and the government (trying to keep the public scared in order to stay in power) in their efforts to find a terrorist cell. The Doll is transformed in a matter of days into a cynical, disillusioned and yet somehow enlightened creature. The way the characters are all interconnected, you'd think Sydney was the size of Peyton Place. It didn't work for me and I felt more depressed for slogging through the book than I did for the unsatisfying ending. Still, I think Flanagan is a good writer and I plan to give his other books a look.
Rated by buyers 
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Flanagan turns sunny Sydney into Blade Runner's urban wasteland. Though it starts out with good writing, deft plotting, snappy dialogue and a tantalizing vivisection of the life and aspirations of a pole dancer, in the last hundred pages, the book morphs into a boring, repetitive screed against a Murdochian Australian media with
a predictable deadly finale. . . thank the Lord, it ends.
Rated by buyers -
Aside from a lame, implausible plot that turns on coincidence and a case of cosmic grief that makes Strindberg seem like Neil Simon, this book groans under the weight of character stereotypes, relentless moralizing and gag-me symbolism. And, ohhhh (no spoiler here), the unknown terrorist is us.
Did those A-list reviewers read the same book I did?
Rated by buyers -
Never having read anything by Richard Flanagan, I picked this up on the strength of the very positive reviews printed on the cover of the paperback edition. What a disappointment! It reads like a slightly elaborated outline for a book. There is much moralizing and a whole lot of bad writing. The characters are poorly developed and one dimensional. Entire sections read like notes a screenwriter might write advising an actor how he should play his character and what his character's motivations are. The prose is awkward and unconvincing. There are pages and pages of "sly" and "ironic" observations with little connection to the characters. In short, the author tells us what we are supposed to think rather than letting us discover these things through the characters' actions and words.
I am sympathetic to the theme of the novel, which is the absurdity of Bush's endless "war on terrorism," and the State's eagerness to compromise basic civil liberties in its hunt for the bad guys. Unfortunately, Flanagan doesn't make me care about the characters.
The Jacket compares Flanagan's effort to le Carre, but a more appropriate comparison is to the most middling of graphic novelists.
Don't waste your time with this drivel.
Rated by buyers 
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The most exciting thrillers I've read in the last few years --- Peter Temple's Identity Theory, Charles McCarry's The Tears of Autumn and now this nail-biter from Richard Flanagan --- all have politics at their center.
There's a reason. Unlike far too many novels, they're about something that matters.
For Temple, what matters is digitized information, and who gets their hands on it, how they acquire it, and what they use it for. For McCarry, it's who really killed Jack Kennedy, and why. And for Flanagan, it's the terrorist threat --- just perhaps not the one you think.
Richard Flanagan? Don't fault yourself for not recognizing the best writer who ever left Tasmania for Australia. His very first novel won major Australian literary prizes; his second sold 150,000 copies and was, unsurprisingly, named the Australian Booksellers Book of the Year; his third was also a smash. And long before "The Unknown Terrorist" made many "best of 2007" lists, it was snatched up for a film by DreamWorks.
So you get a bonus in this thriller --- it's a seriously good piece of writing. Better to think of it as a novel that just happens to be thrilling, for right off, Flanagan violates all the traditions.
Start with the dedication: for David Hicks. Another name you don't recognize? Hicks was the Australian who --- before 9/11 ---trained with Al Qaeda. He was captured in Afghanistan in December of 2001, detained at Guantanamo under conditions that led him to think seriously of suicide, and, in 2007, allowed to plead guilty to meaningless charges so he could finish the final months of a sentence that had, by then, been mostly suspended. Reality check: You don't dedicate a novel to a convicted terrorist if you think he actually did something.
And then, right in the introduction, Flanagan reveals that the character known as "the Doll" --- his main character --- will die. Name another thriller that blows what's traditionally a surprise and thus turns the exciting questions into why and how and who. Reality check: The only one that comes to mind is "The Day of the Jackal", in which, as we already know, Charles de Gaulle does not get assassinated.
And, just to top it off, there's not much to know about the main character. The Doll --- Gina Davies, but she's so isolated only a few people could tell you her name --- works the pole in a Sydney men's club. Mother dead, father long gone, she's a product of the dreary modern world quite familiar to her clients and everyone reading these words: the world "of the house, the job, the possessions and the cars, the friends and the renovations, the resort holidays and the latest gadgets." The Doll is, in her way, happy in this world; she accepts it, she considers herself a realist. Defined thus: "Realism is the embrace of disappointment, in order no longer to be disappointed."
The day the novel begins, there's a terrorist bomb scare --- three bombs found in backpacks --- at the Olympic stadium. Richard Cody covers the event for his TV station, an easy task, for no one knows anything and all he has to do is dispense fear on cue. After, he goes to a posh lunch in a mansion "refurbished in the contemporary manner of a corporate foyer," where he trades gossip in that all-too familiar "aggrandizement of self, as necessary as a bull elephant seal's bark." Then his boss demotes him.
At this end of this bad, bad day, Richard Cody wanders into the men's club. He has two "private shows" with the Doll, then wanders off into the night. The Doll has a more unusual evening. Though she usually goes home alone and counts her money --- she's close to the $50,000 she needs for the down payment on an apartment, which she plans to furnish just like the flats in the shelter magazines --- she runs into Tariq, a cute guy she's just met.
She spends a lubricious night with Tariq. In the morning, he's gone. But not forgotten --- he's the only suspect in the attempted bombing at the stadium. And when a mundane security video shows Tariq with the Doll, Richard Cody knows he has the story that will return him to prominence: the pole dancer as the terrorist's accomplice, the Doll as "the unknown terrorist".
In his notes on sources, Flanagan acknowledges "the grabs of politicians and the sermons of shock jocks --- no one, after all, was doing contemporary fiction better." He's a gifted student. His portrait of the inner workings of TV news is pretty much the way you probably imagine how it goes down at Fox. And as for the way politicians use "terrorism"....
But those are easy targets. Flanagan looks beyond them --- to you and me. His question is a simpler one: Why do we like fear? Why do we want to be frightened? Why do we need someone to tell us how to live? And, finally, why do we care so little about our freedom and our rights?
All of this, I emphasize, occurs ... Read More
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