"The Unknown Terrorist" | A thriller stripped of the usual suspect

"The Unknown Terrorist"

by Richard Flanagan

Grove, 325 pp., $24

Gina Davies, aka "The Doll," pole dances at the Chairman's Lounge in Sydney, teasing men whose cash tips, after umpteen years, add up to near enough for a down payment on her own apartment — if she can just raise that last few hundred dollars. Then she'll only have to work part-time, she figures, and can fund a university education, learn a more respectable trade and start living a socially acceptable life.

After all, happiness, the Doll believes, is a reward for playing the system's game. And money buys contentment — or does it?

The Chairman's Lounge is a pole club of the slicker variety, attracting high-rolling politicos, mobster bosses and con men, and the Doll, alas, falls victim not only to their sexual fantasies but to their blended versions of truth and their mutual need for a scapegoat.

Result: One day she turns on the television to discover that she is wanted for terrible crimes she hasn't yet committed. Namely, a terrorist plot to blow up one or more of Sydney's landmarks — perhaps even that holy of holies, the Sydney Opera House.

A pole dancer as mad bomber? The news media thrills to the possibilities, especially anchorman Richard Cody, whose career depends on landing the big one — in this case, proving Gina is conspiring to blow Sydney to smithereens.

What's a person to do when she's suspected of being a terrorist with links to an Iraqi bomber with whom she has experienced intimate, if brief, contact?

In the Doll's fevered state, the obvious answer is: run.

A Tasmanian native, author Richard Flanagan ("Gould's Book of Fish") has concocted a page-turning thriller worthy of John le Carré, with a plot so credible a reader might feel it's nonfiction, except for a few too many coincidences. But even those can't dampen the chilling effect of the story, written in a fresh, exhilarating prose style in which the author makes each sentence a small work of art.