The Unknown Terrorist, Richard Flanagan

Let's say you set yourself up thusly: ice cold beer, hot summer day, an apparently well-reviewed thriller in your hands and let's say you embark on what you think is a jaunty summer's read.

And what if what you were reading were far closer to literature, far darker and more tragic than even the bloodiest thriller could ever be.

The Unknown Terrorist is a frustrating book if you dislike chase movies and The Fugitive and misunderstandings that could be easily cleared up if someone just SAID something and Kafka. I dislike all those things and so found this a wearing story. And this is what the story is about: Set in Australia, a stripper named the Doll happens to have incredible sex with a swarthy guy she's met at something along the lines of a Pride parade....coincidentally this same swarthy guy saved her best friend's kid from a riptide the day before. She wakes up the morning after this incredible sex and he's vanished and within moments it turns out he is a suspected terrorist and now so is she, as her image has been caught in the security camera of his antiseptic building. On the run she goes.

And then the political and philosophical intention of the book kicks in. She is thought to be a terrorist and all media and police and whatever they call homeland security are freaking out because my good heavens, a terrorist is loose in our beloved city. The venom and vitriol spew. We must protect the beauty and sanctity of our culture, our freedom!! and what is revealed is the repulsive thing we seek to protect, and how ridiculously fundamentalist we have become in our belief what our way is the only way.

I have always wondered what the boys who went to war in the first and second world ones thought they were fighting for. We know now of course, and what a noble cause it was. But the other side also went to war and thought they were fighting for something. What if this time what WE are protecting is the terrible and unworthy thing?

Here is a quote from the book, to give you a sense of its heft:
"Politics places a man at the centre of life, and in permanent opposition to the universe. Love, to the contrary, fills man with the universe......Love is never enough, but it is all we have."

Now, what could this possibly mean? I take it to mean, among other things, that the will to SURVIVE, to live, is a crass impulse. When in survival mode we are unthinking, unbelieving, unrefined. It is the worst of us, it is where the animal lives.

I am that reader who reads every word of a book, from the copyright page on through to the very end where the author is said to live in X with his X and X children. Some of the best words of this book lie in these pages. Flanagan says "Though art is mostly theft, larceny is no guarantee of worth. Whatever resonance this tale possesses, if any, it must be rightfully attributed to those men and women who have created our own times. As Shakespeare -- who rarely invented his own plots ...wrote in Henry IV, Part I: "Wisdom cries out in the streets, and no man regards it" -- a most beautiful line lifted from Proverbs. "

The meaning of this book is simply that. It is hardly a fiction. It is being created now, every day. As Flanagan says in these last pages you might miss, "I took this novel from everywhere -- ads, headlines, gossip, bar talk, along with the grabs of politicians and the sermons of shock jocks -- no-one, after all, was doing contemporary fiction better."

It's quite a book in the final analysis.

So, my friends, read it and weep.