Hard to get over the use of western names for middle eastern characters. ( )

In the opening pages of this novel a man visiting a refugee camp in Australia meets a refugee called Alan Sheriff who, over a period of weeks, tells his story, how he came to be where he is.

Alan was a writer living in some unnamed country that was run by a cruel despot known as Great Uncle. There is much corruption, oppression, and violence, and the lives of the people are very grim due to sanctions imposed by the west. The parallels with Iraq are obvious, but Africa is also a possibility..

The ruler summons Alan and asks him (ie orders him) to write a novel painting the ruler in a favourable light – and gives him one month to do it. Throughout the month Alan is under constant surveillance and pressure – not meeting the deadline is not an option.

The novel is delivered on time but Alan realizes that the ruler will never allow him real freedom and organizes his own escape. He flees on a boat and seeks asylum; the book closes with Alan in the Australian refugee camp talking to his visitor.

I found the multiple layers of the story confusing and laborious – it has stories within stories. The names are also confusing. Everyone has Western names so it is not easy to tell who the ‘good guys’ and the ‘bad guys’ are. I understand this was a very conscious decision - Keneally doesn’t want us to fall back on easy cultural stereotypes - but it didn’t quite work for me.

I think Keneally has written many better books. I fully support the purpose of the book – to portray the reality of how people become refugees and their grim plight in Australian detention camps – but I think the message dominates at the expense of the novel. The characters begin to look a little like marionettes. Perhaps, like Alan Sheriff, Keneally was up against a deadline and had to get this novel in circulation while the issue of refugee detention was still such a hot and painful issue in Australian culture. ( )

The protagonist of this story could have come straight out of a Kundera novel for all the existential angst he had going on. Very well written, gripping and insightful. Good stuff. ( )

A strange political fable narrated by a writer who lives in a deliberately ambiguous geographical location (with elements of both the Middle East & Africa) under a brutal dictator, who commissions the writer to ghostwrite a novel drawing attention to the injustice of the sanctions imposed on the country by the U.S. Ingenious but not as compelling as Office of Innocence. ( )

“It’s a truism almost embarrassing to repeat,�? begins Thomas Keneally’s newest novel, “that a particular government might find it suitable to have an enemy-in-the-midst . . . whom they can point out to the populace as a threat. And from that threat, only this party . . . can save the innocent sleep of the citizenry.�?

There has been a marked lack of solid fiction that directly concerns the twenty-first century. Aside from a passing reference to 9/11 in English author Iain Banks’s Dead Air, major works of fiction set directly in this turbulent era have yet to be written.

Keneally is the ideal novelist to bring such themes to life. The Australian author has never shied away from unsettling subjects in his decades as a writer, having tackled the destruction of aboriginal culture in The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, and Nazi atrocities in his Booker Award-winning Schindler’s Ark (more popularly known as Schindler’s List).

In The Tyrant’s Novel, Keneally brings his incise commentary and deep compassion to a fables of artistic freedom and moral uncertainty. Inspired by his visits to the Villawood refuge detention centre in Australia, Keneally exposes the humanity that exists under tremendous oppression, and more strikingly, the inhumanity with which refugees from such countries are treated.

The Tyrant’s Novel is largely set in an anonymous Middle Eastern country sweating under a ferocious dictator known simply as Great Uncle. He wishes to publish a book in the Western world that will display, as he says, “the suffering of my people, and their patriotic inventiveness in the face of sanctions.�? Conscripting a writer to pen the tale, Great Uncle allows him thirty days to deliver a novel that will “drive a stake through the American administration’s embargoes on our oil and the imposed sanctions.�?

The writer, grief-stricken after a personal tragedy, unthinkingly accepts the proposal, as he had been planning suicide in the near future. Yet as the enormity of the task sets in, his past complicity in Great Uncle’s corrupt regime becomes apparent, as does the risk of death both he and his friends face should he fail.

Keneally makes a bold decision, giving all the characters Anglo-Saxon names rather than the more expected Middle Eastern names. By striving to abolish any pre-conceived of notions of culture or attitudes, Keneally brings Western readers closer to the suffering of the characters, creating a familiar bond that heightens the tragedy of his story.

This should not be dismissed as mere polemic. Using a precise, suspenseful plot worthy of a thriller, Keneally delivers both a condemnation of such regimes and a moving account of people trying to live as best they can. As the writer contemplates defection, Keneally skilfully underscores the absolute nature of such a step, the complete withdrawal from the life one knows to an existence completely unimaginable.

The Tyrant’s Novel is an altogether remarkable work, an important, raging story of Orwellian government and personal revelations. Touching on issues of love, loyalty, artistic compromise, and political ignorance on both sides, Keneally has crafted his finest work in years. ( )