review | Steven Lang

SLUMMING IT

• Andrew McGahan: Underground (Allen & Unwin, $29.95, ISBN 1741149312)
• Richard Flanagan: The Unknown Terrorist (Picador, $32.95, ISBN 0330422804)

IT IS A FINE LINE between protecting the citizens of a free state from attack and, by the means employed, oppressing them. We each have individual rights which might not, in Australia, be codified in a Bill of Rights, but are still defensible through the law of precedent. And while those rights, such as the freedom to associate, to say and write what we want, are seen as axiomatic to our culture, we also expect our government to protect us from discrimination and from becoming the victims of a terrorist attack. Generally, it appears, we are prepared to let the government do pretty much whatever it thinks is necessary to ensure that terrorism doesn’t happen.
    That line quickly becomes very fine indeed. History, and not just old history, shows us that those who attain powers are generally unwilling to relinquish them, that, in fact, they will use them to seek more power. Government can quickly become tyranny.
    One of the other axiomatic values of Australian culture is that such a thing could not happen here, that the civil strife in African, South American, South East Asian nations is somehow inherent to the kinds of people who live there. We wouldn’t be quite so outrageous as to suggest that it was because of their skin colour, but we might put it down to their different cultural backgrounds. This, of course, becomes harder when civil strife breaks out in Eastern Europe and we see on our televisions people who look remarkably like ourselves, rounding up other people who look, also, like ourselves. When they start massacring each other we can still distance ourselves, because clearly the Balkans have long been a place of conflict, and then, of course, some of those involved are Muslims. But how do we differentiate ourselves from Germany in the 1930s? That nation which in the previous hundred years most nearly represented the flower of human culture. How was it that those people became so barbaric?
    Could it be that what we’re observing is a human trait and not a national one? That when the circumstances are right, people will behave abomin­ably: Americans, English, Irish, even Australians, just as much as Cambodians or Rwandans. That our society, for all its wealth and comfort, will not protect us from who we are when things fall apart?
    These, I think, are the questions at the heart of both of these novels. Using different scenarios they suggest that the strength and comfort of our society has led to a complacency about politics which is in itself very dangerous, that we have reached a point of disconnect in the workings of our democracy so radical that we are inviting abuse of power by our politicians.
    It would, at this point, probably be advisable to stop talking about these two books as a pair, because they are very different and succeed in different measures at what they have attempted. Yet they are linked by this sense that both were written with a common purpose in mind. Furthermore their authors, both significant figures in Australia’s literary landscape, have chosen a similar genre to work in.
    McGahan’s narrator in Underground is Leo James, a boom-and-bust developer on the bust curve of the cycle, who also happens to be the estranged brother of the Prime Minister. We’re in an Australia only a very few years in the future, and a couple of terrorist acts have given the government the excuse it needed to turn the country into a police state. When, during the first few pages, our narrator is kidnapped, he finds himself being tossed between a range of shadowy groups, all of whom have their own agendas.
    Insurgent, counter-insurgent and counter-counter-insurgent groups vie with one another for his possession. The action is fast and furious. James is unashamedly from the white-shoe brigade that McGahan had in his sights in Last Drinks. James likes women, he likes a drink and he likes to win. Whatever else he is, he isn’t a god-botherer. McGahan gives him plenty of rope. The novel is an entertainment and it succeeds because it doesn’t try to be too much more than that. Event rolls into event so quickly that we are hardly given time to let the suspension of disbelief collapse. McGahan, we sense, is enjoying himself, and there is a pleasure in that alone.
    Flanagan, however, takes his book more seriously. His protagonist, his ‘unknown terrorist’, is a stripper who gets very briefly involved in someone else’s plot. She is entirely innocent of politics, has never given it a thought. She has her own dreams, her own plans to escape from Kings Cross and her pole-dancing life, but her brush with a certain criminal element occurs at just the wrong moment and she becomes a scapegoat, a pawn in various other people’s plans for personal advancement.
    If it is McGahan’s wit, his lightness as he casts his eye over what might become of Australia, that makes Underground a success, then it is Flanagan’s lack of it which makes The Unknown Terrorist so hard to bear. The narrative is split between several different characters, a weave of stories which surround our dancer, but the development of the threads is cursory at best. There is a sense that this is a short story unwillingly drawn out into a novel, or the first draft of a novel waiting to have its themes teased out. Flanagan shows so little sympathy for his characters that one wonders how he could live with them for the time it took to write the book. Richard Cody, for example, is a television presenter desperate to find a successful story to boost his career. His character is essential to the structure of the novel, yet Flanagan finds him entirely distasteful: venal, hypocritical, narcissistic; prey to jealousy and petty rage, racist and misogynistic and above all, cynical. Which might well be an accurate analysis of certain parts of Sydney broadcast media, but surely the job of the author is not simply to catalogue human frailty but to find in the characters that which we can recognise in ourselves, and so bring them to life.
    Flanagan, we suspect throughout the novel, is slumming. He is a fine writer capable of a lovely turn of phrase; even in this pot-boiler, he surprises with the occasional beautiful analogy. But we sense that he has chosen to write a popular novel only in order to communicate something to the non-literary community which he thinks they need to know and which he thinks they will find easier to take if it’s given to them in the form of an airport novel about a stripper. He hasn’t quite managed to escape the hectoring tone. For a plot-driven novel, there’s an awful lot of comment.
    The only problem with McGahan’s novel is that there is reason to suspect the same might be true about him – that Underground is a vehicle for ideas he wants average Australians to think about and so he’s trying to talk to them in a language they will understand. McGahan is ten times more successful than Flanagan but even then one feels he has judged the art of the blockbuster a little too easy to master. For much of the centre part of the novel Leo James seems to cast off his white shoes and become a much more astute observer of Australian culture than he initially promises to be, a narrator possibly closer to McGahan himself. Matthew Reilly, for all the ludicrousness of his plots, the impossible escapades of his characters, delivers what the punters want: a story in which something happens on every page, a story about which they do not have to think. Both of these authors want it both ways, they want to widen their audience base to include Reilly’s punters, but they want them to be entertained and think. It’s a worthwhile idea, but it is not at all clear from either of these examples that using the novel to get a point across, no matter how worthy, is a good idea.

Steven Lang, author of An Accidental Terrorist (UQP, 2005), is a writer and bookseller; he lives in Maleny.

© Steven Lang

Overland 186–autumn 2007, p.18