THE UNKNOWN TERRORIST by Richard Flanagan (2006)
In the first half he creates trash and in the second half of the book he throws the trash into your face. The two pages of Praise for The Unknown Terrorist all enjoy this facial treatment very much, much like the notorious Austrian playwright Peter Handke who literally abused his audiences in his eponymous play Offending the Audience – with most of the liberal-bourgeois audiences loving it. There’s nothing like looking in the mirror and seeing an ugly monster. Flanagan holds the mirror up for Australian society to see itself naked, in the way that men see the pole dancers at the Chairman’s Lounge in Sydney’s sleazy Cross. Metaphors, straight and mixed, abound. As the protagonist, the Doll, aka Gina Davies cries her death-cry “Fuck you, fuck you all”, we, the liberal-bourgeois readers are addressed. As a savage critique of Australian society – Sydneysiders in particular – this works very well.
There are, however, some problems: one, Flanagan himself does a double entendre by teasing the male readership with graphic sex, guaranteed to sell copies, while throwing shit at them and at himself. Flanagan should read Reich’s The Mass Psychology of Fascism to at least offer a hint of what a liberated sexuality might look like instead. His main philosophical cum psychical dictum being that “Love is not enough” is exactly the point Reich makes, namely when ‘love’ is denigrated by fascism (and religion) as deviant and dangerous sex, then we descend into the fascist mass hysteria so well described by Flanagan. Flanagan’s good women like Gina and Wilder are capable of true love and as punishment they have to sell their bodies for sex. Flanagan is not the first to use this theme, e.g. Berthold Brecht’s play The Good Person/Woman of Szechwan explores a similar conundrum, implying that the capitalist economy creates such a deviant morality. Flanagan does this by inserting the endless advertisements, naming the corporates without fear – I am surprised he didn’t get sued – that are financing the media frenzy to continuously up the ante. Flanagan’s Richard Cody as the somewhat clichéd TV journalist cum celebrity, may well resemble the corporate media world in Australia, except that they might be slightly more cunning than a dumb-ass like Cody – who of course deserves the bullet in the end. Portraying the elites as witless arseholes, driven by greed, celebrity fame and right-wing (fascist) propaganda is not serving the anti-capitalist aim of the novel, if indeed it has one.
Which brings me to the second caveat: as the aforementioned ‘praise’ by literary critics from the mainstream, corporate media – who else? – cleverly subverts the aim of the novel as a ‘brilliant meditation’, ‘a political and social satire’, ‘stark realism’, ‘thriller and tragedy’ and ‘passionate concern’ dishing out all the literary bon mots, in order to make sure that this is a novel and not a real life documentary. For if it were the latter, it would be simply incredible, for things like this do not happen in Australia – we all know that! As such we can rest assure that Flanagan’s wicked world will continue to feed the writer with material to make up more outrageous stories we’ll love to read. Were it some sort of Brechtian manifesto, Flanagan would be swiftly accused of Marxist tendencies and mainstream book publishers and the literature industry would put the brakes on. No agitators please!
A third concern: while writers routinely get into the heads of their protagonists about whom they know next to nothing in reality, so they must make it up the best they can. Is the pole dancer capable of inner monologues that speak of profound philosophical, social and political concerns? As Chomsky says, nothing is impossible, but many things are unlikely, and I think this proposition belongs to the latter category. Brecht at least splits his ‘good woman’ into good female and bad male, while Flanigan dives deep into the female psyche only. Can this be done? Freud famously (or infamously) based a whole new field of study on it, called psychology. Perhaps women are more interesting than men? I have a female protagonist in one of my manuscripts and my wife says that sometimes I don’t get it. Maybe men should be banned from writing novels altogether. Does Flanigan do a service to womanhood? I kind of doubt it.
In general I dislike the literary technique of Deus ex machina (or if you prefer Diabolus ex machina) or Olympic point of view of the narrator, first because, as the phrases suggest, a god-like point of view is ridiculous as much as any god is, and second , while it may be an acknowledged art form to be able to be inside the heads of all your characters in a novel, it renders the whole enterprise equally ridiculous because in reality this is not possible – i.e. I prefer a good story to be believable, e.g. as in social realism where only the narrator’s point of view is on display. As in real life ‘one’ can, of course, always speculate what goes on in the heads of other people but a writer should leave it at that. One can tie ‘oneself’ in knots when for example speculating about what goes on in Flanagan’s head when he takes on the personae of Gina Davies, Wilder, Richard Cody, Moretti, Tariq, Athens, Ferdy and a few more. Does such a writer suffer from multiple personality disorder? Probably not when you can use this technique as a writer who scores a hit when doing so. Is that what readers enjoy so much? That Cody conjures up the lurid idea that a clueless Aussie stripper turns into an Islamic terrorist? That she finds the murdered Tariq in the boot of a car during a walk-about? That she can walk into her strip club and shoot Cody when Sydney is crawling with police looking for her?
Having lived for a while in Sydney myself, in the neighbourhood of Darlinghurst, in the early 70s, there is of course a certain fascination with it. My wife’s auntie owns a small flat in Kings Cross where we stayed, when on holiday many years later with my wife and daughter. I don’t remember the sleaze described by Flanagan in such great detail – certain readers might be encouraged for a bit of sex tourism – but of course we didn’t frequent Kings Cross at night. Sydney, then and now as a metropolis and melting pot of many ethnicities – somewhat clichéd by Flanigan in portraying Greeks, Italians and ‘Asians’ in minor roles – makes a great backdrop for The Unknown Terrorist outdoing the American genres of Chicago and New York. Portraying the Doll as a European-type ‘darkie’, playing the fair dinkum Aussie who sees Sydney as the universe, what with the beautiful Bondi beach and the great ocean, and the mansions in Double Bay, Mosman and Vaucluse, the Opera House and the high-end shopping centres where Gina buys branded luxury clothes, bags and accessories – all that has an allure that Flanagan’s mastery prose brings to life. Still, I prefer Auckland to Sydney, with the former having fewer rednecks than the latter. An interesting sideline is that neither Sydney, nor Australia as a whole, ever had any Islamic terrorist attacks to speak of. The recent lethal stabbings at the Bondi shopping centre were the random work of a local psychopath. New Zealand, of course, has the Christchurch massacre carried out by an Australian neo-Nazi. There is a hint in the novel that the bombs left in the Homebush Olympic Stadium may have been planted by ASIO to whip up anti-Islamic sentiment. One wonders if any of the ASIO spooks read the book and filed away Flanagan as a potential threat. Since the book was published nearly 20 years ago, one can safely assume that no untoward action was taken, especially as Flanagan was able to increase his public profile ever since as one of the icons of contemporary Australian literature (see my review of his latest offering: Flanagan, Richard (2023). Question 7, also on this blog – I consider this book as so much better because the narrator just speaks with one voice, his own).
