AN AUSSIE NOVEL THAT CHALLENGES SOME OF OUR VALUES

The Unknown Terrorist by Richard Flanagan

I finally got around to reading this novel which was published in 2006. I really enjoyed it. It is a thriller with plenty of social and political comment. Set in post 9/11 Sydney it involves a Kings Cross pole dancer caught up in a whirlpool of murder, media hype and politically manipulated fear of terrorism. Readers will recognize the Australia that Flanagan portrays so clearly. The Australia where the ‘War on Terror’ has created all sorts of fears and uncovered the Australian racism that mostly lies dormant just below the surface of our fair go-tolerant-she’ll be right national persona. With disarming precision he taps into the Sydney psyche that we tend to ignore or at the least pretend is not really the Sydney we know and love: the obsession with real estate, the power of the radio shock jocks and the media, the disdain for the poor, the weak, the druggos, the Aborigines and the suspicion of all that is different from Muslims to Asians to those that only read either the Telegraph or the Sydney Morning Herald. Flanagan concentrates on the hard edge of Sydney and by extension Australia and there is little doubt that he attributes this hardening to the period since the election of the Howard government in 1996. When his hapless pole dancer walks past a street person getting beaten, the thugs ‘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’. Of course the government’s role in turning Sydneysiders and Australians inward, with all the xenophobia and paranoia that accompanies that, is aided by the media. Flanagan is caustic in his treatment of the media’s role in falling for the Governments agenda of fearmongering. His TV current affairs celebrity presenter is instantly recognizable and his contempt for Sydney shock jocks is palpable no less than through the name of his Sydney radio king, Joe Cosuk. Cosuk’s anagram is milked and its potentially abbreviated epithet adds to the readers’ distaste for this influential character.
Without doubt a major message in The Unknown Terrorist is that the terrorists have won. They won the moment those planes hit the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon. They unleashed their most pervasive and formidable weapon: fear. The fear that has been generated and exploited, especially in the coalition of the willing has resulted in extraordinary legislative curtailments of democratic rights; a legitimizing of prejudice among many; a deadly fiasco in Iraq; and the nightmare of Guantanamo Bay. In so many ways the baby has been thrown out with the bathwater. We have sacrificed so much of what we say we are protecting and in the case of Iraq, trying to export. Flanagan has shown us this in clear relief. Politicians, police, journalists, bureaucrats – those who are supposed to be the ‘goodies’ have succumbed and have compromised their own values to create an Orwellian world where the forest has been overtaken by the trees.

For Kerry O'Brien's 7.30 Report interview with Richard flanagan check the link opposite.

Connections with my novel, Kadaitcha.
It was interesting reading a post 9/11 Australian novel on terrorism. The first coincidence was early, on page 21, when there is a bomb scare at Sydney’s Olympic stadium. It is the threat of an explosion at the stadium that becomes the driving force for the fear and hype and hunt for the perpetrators that Flanagan weaves together in his novel. Where Kadaitcha gives considerable weight to the motives behind its main character blowing up the stadium at the Olympics Opening Ceremony, Flanagan does not touch on motive at all. He doesn’t have to because 9/11 and the ‘War on Terror’ have made terrorism a cause in itself. Mention terrorism and the fear, suspicion and the stereotyping will provide an automatic response that makes details of the cause irrelevant. Like Flanagan I tried to make comment on aspects of contemporary Australia. We run parallel on a few issues and vary our respective emphasis. Although I target the media I don’t do quite the hatchet job of Flanagan. My radio shock jock, Stan Dawes is not quite as big a prick as Joe Cosuck (forget the pun!). Where Flanagan and I are in complete synchronization is in our attack on the Howard government. My attack was focused on his treatment of Aborigines and his winding back of the Wik decision from the moment he was elected in 1996. I sat through debates in Parliament on the Native Title Act Amendment (remember his 10 point plan!) and was stirred to try and put this latest blow in the context of a disturbingly long history of repression. Of course Flanagan writing much later, when Howard had been in power nearly a decade, had more shit to deal with, especially when 9/11/2001 provided Howard the catalyst to take Australia into waters that many thought we had sailed away from forever.