URBAN FABLE: Flanagan’s heroine fits his infernal vision of the modern city, overrun as it is with scabby beggars and casual cruelty. |
Everybody loves an outlaw, and Richard Flanagan is no exception. In Gould’s Book of Fish, the Tasmanian author reimagined the real-life imprisonment of 19th-century forger William Buelow Gould in a hellish island penal colony during which he did indeed illustrate a guide to the area’s sea life. That historical novel, published in the US in 2002, set up an intriguing counterpoint: the lushness of Gould’s paintings, and of the half-mad convict’s inner life, against the inhumane deprivations of his imprisonment, and, by implication, of society itself. It was social satire at its finest, timeless and captivating with flashes of redemptive beauty.
There’s nothing of such beauty in Flanagan’s latest, shorter novel, The Unknown Terrorist, though its anti-heroine protagonist, Gina Davies, is quite attractive. An old-fashioned looker, her body and movements “rounded and full,” Gina, better known as the Doll, is a top stripper at Sydney’s Executive Lounge. At 26, claiming to be 22, she knows she’s aging out, but she’s so close to her goal that she keeps on dancing. Her ambition is simple: if she can earn enough to cover herself in $100 dollar bills, she’ll have enough to purchase an apartment. But even as she seeks to disappear into middle-class life, she can’t resist what she sees advertised around her, and she keeps dipping into her savings for Gucci bags, La Perla underwear, and Versace jeans. When she meets an attractive stranger, Tariq, her aching need is briefly forgotten. But then Tariq vanishes, and one of her clients, an aging television newsman, turns on her with deadly repercussions.
Vain and bitter, still smarting from a demotion and a sexual rejection, TV anchor Richard Cody gravitates to the Executive Lounge to reassert his place in the world order. “Isn’t it humiliating?” he asks the Doll during a private show, a question she throws back at him about his own work. When she then turns down his blunt proposition, the die is cast. Although the sagging celebrity is only dimly aware of his own motivations, he manipulates circumstance into a story that will resuscitate his career and put the pole dancer in her place. He casts the Doll as a terrorist, and fear- and sex-crazed Sydney is soon baying for her blood.
The Doll is not a nice person. “I like to think I’m equally racist about everybody,” she says, “but slimy Lebs [Lebanese Australians] I really hate.” She fits perfectly into Flanagan’s infernal vision of the modern city, overrun as it is with scabby beggars and casual cruelty. In his sharp prose — every action intercut with ads that blare from the omnipresent TV and radio — the hunt for the Doll becomes deadly fast, and desperation pushes her into a late self-discovery, as she realizes “she had never cared or wondered or questioned.” But if the Doll repents, few others do.
Despite vivid writing, Flanagan’s latest is little more than a simplistic fable. Sin is commensurate with wealth and power: Moretti, the Doll’s rich weekly client, collects genocide memorabilia and the Doll’s buddy Wilder, a lesser mortal, relies on a Candide-like denial to shield her from responsibility. Even our heroine’s name underlines the objectification in this consumerist world where fear and self-interest rule.
“There was no redemption, no resurrection,” the Doll realizes, voicing the author’s cynicism. With so little subtlety, all Flanagan leaves us with is dread, and appreciation for his descriptive skills. The Doll, when she reaches this level of enlightenment, “was already dead.”
RICHARD FLANAGAN | Brookline Booksmith, 279 Harvard St, Brookline | May 9 at 7 pm | 617.566.6660
