The problem begins with Flanagan's heroine, Gina Davies, a.k.a. the Doll, a pole-dancer at a Sydney strip club. Cut off from her past, numb to any new relationships, Gina has dedicated herself to a single goal: amassing enough cash to start over. She would have reached her $50,000 mark long ago were it not for her shopping habit. "She became someone else," Flanagan writes of Gina and her beloved Versace. "No one would imagine that she had ever been other than beautiful, privileged, one of the elect."
Throughout the book, whenever Flanagan has an opportunity to script a genuine moment for Gina we wind up with something like this -- a sociologically apt but emotionally flimsy observation that gets lost in the updrafts of Flanagan's gusty descriptions of a society enthralled with terror.
In many of the novel's 95 chapters, advertising jingles and brand names are spliced into the text, along with newswire reports of other terror bombings, recalling not so much John Dos Passos as the message of Big Brother in George Orwell, who prefigured how a society with endless appetites could be manipulated: "You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves."
Like "1984," "The Unknown Terrorist" is a story about what happens when an individual's power of self-creation is trumped (or drowned out) by that of the state. Hopped up on drugs, tired of her lonely life, Gina hits the town after work and takes home a Middle Eastern man named Tariq, who turns out to be a suspect in a budding terrorism investigation. The next morning, while he is out, Gina turns on the television to discover footage of herself entering his building. Overnight she has become an infamous terrorist.
