>>REVIEW
THE UNKNOWN TERRORIST
Richard Flanagan
HarperCollins Canada, 325 pp.
In The Unknown Terrorist, a 26-year-old stripper known as The Doll has a one-night stand with a man authorities believe is a terrorist and becomes Australia’s most hunted woman.
The Doll is not a terrorist mastermind and is in reality just a stripper who is painstakingly trying to save up $50,000 for a down-payment on an apartment so she can begin a new life. She’s obsessed with the goal and every time she comes home from work, she drapes the money over her naked body as a way of reminding herself how close she’s come to her dream. Soon she finds herself on every TV screen and in screaming headlines on front pages, images of her stripping career interspersed with frightening footage of terrorist attacks.
Her fate is partially determined by a desperate TV anchor, Richard Cody, who is struggling to stay on top of his profession and who seizes upon her story with elated vengeance. Cody doesn’t let the facts get in the way of a sensationalist story, and he turns her into a villain without any concrete evidence. The public laps it up without analysis.
The novel is set amid the backdrop of the sinister so-called War on Terror. Under the guise of hunting terrorists, civil liberties and basic tenets of democracy are jettisoned. This novel is full of scathing critique of the current state that western democracies find themselves in and how citizens are willing to accept any state and police action as long as it keeps them "safe." It makes the reader think about how the media has become complicit with the state, in some cases essentially producing spoon-fed propaganda to keep people frightened and to justify the ongoing War on Terror. The public is willing to sacrifice truth and freedom for security while those in power can exploit that fear to stay in power. The Doll tells her friend Wilder, "People like fear. We all want to be frightened and we all want somebody to tell us how to live and who to fuck and why we should do this and think that." Later, The Doll thinks, "People chose not to care and not to see and not to think."
The Unknown Terrorist is an excellent novel that skewers an affluent, decadent society in which people care little about others. The Doll witnesses a beggar being beaten by a group of young "hottie gym junkies." "They kept on for a few minutes more, kicking him as if he were to blame for everything in that dirty, dead decade they were all condemned to live through, a sack of shit that had once been a man, in a place that had once been a community, in a country that had once been a society." The author adds, "Love is never enough, but it is all we have." |
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