The Unknown Terrorist was published during the War on Terror, led by President George W. Bush in the years after the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon in 2001. It was a war that made everyone familiar with the Taliban, a religious group in charge of Afghanistan before the American invasion: with Osama bin Laden, a rich Arabic leader who instigated the attacks on America and would later be assassinated by a team of US Navy SEALs in 2011 at the direction of President Obama; and with the term WMDs, or Weapons of Mass Destruction. America’s intelligence indicated that Saddam Hussein, the leader of Iraq, was manufacturing and stockpiling WMDs. The Second Gulf War resulted in the defeat of Iran, the capture of Saddam Hussein and regime change. But no WMDs or the capacity to make them were found. The intelligence, in hindsight, was a convenient untruth that provided a major justification for the invasion.

The Unknown Terrorist is Richard Flanagan’s fourth novel. Except for the theme of terrorism, there would seem to be little to link it to the War on Terror being waged in the Middle East. Set in Sydney over the course of four days, it only briefly mentions the 9/11 attacks and the wider conflict. The issues of the war are mostly characterised by attitudes against Islamic people expressed in the street, on buses and talkback radio. Backpacks with explosives have been found in Homebush Bay, the site of the 2000 Olympics, and there is a heightened level of awareness and fear in the community which is being stoked by the saturation coverage the media is giving the story. Coupled with this is the inevitable racist taunts and violence provoked by the reporting. Everywhere, Islamistic people are under suspicion, but the animosity overflows and is directed at Lebanese, Asians, even homeless people who are simply easy to target.

Meanwhile, there is ‘the Doll’, a name adopted by an erotic dancer, Gina Davies, who works at one of the strip clubs in Sydney’s King’s Cross. She also uses the name ‘Krystal’ while working, and even ‘Black Widow’, after a dance she has previously performed dressed as a sexy Islamic terrorist. The Doll – it is the name most frequently applied to her throughout the novel – is smart and entirely focussed upon one thing: saving money. She wants enough cash to pay the deposit for an apartment, but she also likes buying expensive designer clothes and handbags which project the kind of lifestyle she one day hopes to achieve. Unlike people caught in conflicts in the Middle East whose lives are defined their history, the Doll’s personal history is mostly effaced by a superficial past defined by Soap Operas and the expendable consumer products by which she has come to define herself. Her parents’ broken marriage and the details of her estrangement from her father are rarely allowed to disturb her conscious thoughts. To others, she ostensibly appears as an object of desire, and few know her as well as her friend, Wilder.

But this life quickly falls apart after the Doll enjoys a brief love affair with Tariq, a man who speaks enthusiastically about his job in raster graphics. Tariq goes missing. Then he is linked to the terrorist activity in Homebush Bay. Then the Doll is linked to Tariq and the terrorist plot after she rejects advances from a high-profile television journalist, Richard Cody, who later recognises her in security footage screened on air, hugging Tariq. At first, neither the Doll nor her friend, Wilder, feel too concerned. All she needs to do is to go to the police and clear up the misunderstanding. But opportunities are missed, the media begin to construct an entirely new ‘truth’ about Gina Davies, and the situation progresses beyond the point where she believes the police can afford to step back from the case they have constructed, or are even likely to take her alive.

Yes, Flanagan’s narrative reads a lot like the plot of many thrillers. But there is a lot more flair to Flanagan’s story than we expect from many thriller writers. First of all, there is the writing. Flanagan won the Booker Prize in 2014 for his novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North. Flanagan knows how to write a sentence, knows how to set up a story, but also how to encourage his reader to see a broader moral and philosophical underpinning to his subject. That consumer culture may be shallow or meaningless and the nightly news merely a vehicle to keep the population fearful and compliant is not a new idea, but in Flanagan’s hands we sense how it feels to live with that insight: that life is possibly meaningless when the appurtenances of consumption and the promise of a reinvented future are stripped away; when all we become is what others say we are. The sense of meaninglessness this entails It is an abyss stared into by all characters in this novel in one fashion or another, whether it be through the threat to a valued career, a marriage, or hopes for a future. If all we are exists within the parameters of a system we cannot control, then all our lives are vulnerable.

This is a reality implicit in the title of the novel, itself. The tradition of the Unknown Soldier since World War I has been to commemorate unidentified and missing soldiers with the interment of an unknown soldier at a place of national significance to honour the war dead. The idea of an ‘Unknown Terrorist’ is not just a good title for the television special the journalist Richard Cody hurriedly puts together about the Doll. It parodies the idea of the Unknown Soldier, suggesting it is possible that any one of us might be villainised and our lives destroyed through an overzealous need to create avatars of social fear. Flanagan moves beyond the tenets of the traditional thriller here. The Doll has become a site for the expression of contempt and vitriol. Her body is the reification of a nebulous threat, and so is easier to identify and defeat. Like Iraq’s WMDs, she has been constructed and defined, as essentially something that is other to her reality: she is the focus of hate and anger, the rationale for action, and the means by which fear can be controlled. But Flanagan’s story is not just a representation of misplaced fear, but also of a loss, since Flanagan couches the scenario as a concomitant loss of love – of connection – in society. The idea that it is the loss of love – “that love is not enough” – is essentially the true existential threat we face:

… for reasons that were not clear to her they would not let her love. Whatever it was – life, the world, fate – it had not let her love the father she had wanted to love. It had not let her love the son she had wanted to love. It had not let her love Tariq whom, perhaps, she would have liked to love. Then they lied to the world that she was hate, and deserving only of hatred. Hate was to be hunted with hate and, when found, destroyed.

That society creates its own enemies is implicit in the Doll’s situation. Flanagan portrays the impulses of terrorism, not as evil, but as the product of exclusion: exclusion from the promise of a future and the means by which a future is possible: “… she had been shut out of this world, so she had made another world? That when love is not enough, what else can someone do?” It is a situation easy to sympathise with in the plight of Palestinians, for instance. The destruction of the Doll is ritualistic and necessary, it seems, like the ritual killings in prehistory of people who now turn up in peat bogs, their throats cut and hands tied, their crimes, if they existed even, long forgotten.

Richard Cody, who constructs the story around the few facts of the case – essentially the misleading video footage – has little faith in his narrative. In fact, he knows he has previously destroyed the career of a police commissioner who was innocent of the allegations made against him. But Richard’s career is in retrograde and he needs something to bring it back. The Doll reasons that the ‘terrorism question’ has become a fad, like fashion or Botox that hides the truth: that there was a class of people who were “building careers, making money, getting power, and it really wasn’t about making the world safer or better at all.” Cody is one of those people, but there are others like Siv Harmsen, an ASIO spook, who equally believe “The little cunt getting shot might just be the best solution all round.”

Flanagan’s narrative is basically constructed to make these arguments. It is an insightful psychological portrait of its protagonists, and it raises legitimate concerns about fear, racism, the power afforded governments, and the means by which they conduct themselves in the name of protecting us. But it is not a balanced narrative. That is not the point. It represents a point of view that rarely receives empathy and so elements of the narrative present an extreme. The media is corrupt and self-interested, in Flanagan’s Sydney, the powers given government officials under the ASIO Act encourage unfair treatment, and the degradation of society and its underworld is hyperbolic. The rot has begun at the head but it is infecting every aspect of Sydney life: a world of dead rats, syringes, sticky bitumen and ice addicts; “a place that had once been a community, in a country that had once been a society.” Flanagan’s response is one of anger and frustration, and there is nothing to suggest that the problem of the War on Terror might be anything other than degradation and the end of days.

A large reason for this, I believe, is suggested in the book’s dedication. It reads simply, “For David Hicks”. David Hicks is an Australian who was captured in Afghanistan in December 2001 and held in Guantanamo Bay. I am uncertain how much coverage Hicks’ story received in the media of other countries, but it was a major story in Australia, geographically removed from the conflict, with few newsworthy connections to help humanise it from a local perspective. Initially, the only photo of Hicks was of him in Afghanistan holding a weapon. It was reported that he was a terrorist. Hicks’ father did a lot of media appearances over the years to tell a different story and to help humanise his son. Hicks had nominally converted to Islam, although he later abandoned it. He had even met with Osama bin Laden. He was eventually charged with providing material support to terrorists, although he claimed he was unaware of the true nature of the group he had joined. He pleaded guilty to charges in 2007, which his legal representation said was done to get out of Guantanamo Bay. He served nine months in an Australian prison before he was finally released. In 2012 a United States court of appeals ruled that the charges against Hicks were invalid since they were applied retrospectively. There is a lot more detail to the story, of course, which is not possible to include here. The point is that whether David Hicks was a bad guy or just misguided is open to question. I don’t know. But he certainly was not the complete innocent that Flanagan creates in his character of Doll in order to make his point, which is clearly inspired by his anger over the detention of Hicks. As a political statement, The Unknown Terrorist is, itself, a misrepresentation, for that reason. But its truth remains valid. Justice denied to anyone or any group through expedience or fear is a threat to us all. As a piece of fiction, The Unknown Terrorist is a nicely written, well characterised and taut. It is a well-paced thriller that builds to a satisfying conclusion and reveals an essential truth, that our rights cannot be waived in order to protect us.