Keneally writes a novel which is all about the fate of intellectuals and artists in Iraq in the UN sanctions period. He then saddles himself with two very awkward conventions which do the book no favours at all. First, I guess if you're writing about a contemporary government, you cloak the country's real name and change all the names of the towns and rivers and so forth. Maybe this is to avoid the lawyers or an icepick in the back of the head. The ghost of Salman Rushdie must appear to writers at this point. So Saddam Hussain is called Great Uncle throughout. But furthermore, Keneally gives all his Iraqis Western names, such as Peter Collins, Matt McCloud, Sarah, Bernie, Alan Sheriff, and so on. This is because he wants to remove the otherness from his characters. "I would very much like to be the man you meet in the street. A man with a name like Alan. If we all had good Anglo-Saxon names...or if we were not, God help us, Said and Osmaa and Saleh. If we had Mac instead of Ibn." Thus says the narrator right at the beginning. This device, well-intentioned as it may be, unfortunately turns out to have the opposite effect. The Western reader is alienated even more from the peculiar situations and melodramatic twists and turns because stuff like this doesn't remotely happen in Western countries. (Stuff like visiting your country's supreme leader who could at any moment pull out a revolver and shoot you, and being forced to dress in a sterile surgeon's suit for the interview because of Great Uncle's health paranoia). So this naming convention saps a lot of the reality out of the whole thing. But even so, this novel reads like a cerebral exercise anyway, all about a guy who is given (by Saddam) an impossible deadline to write a novel exposing the Western sanctions as pointless and inhumane, and whilst the guy agrees with this argument he hates Saddam (naturally) and wants nothing to do with helping him, and conflicted loyalties and artistic compromise and blah blah blah. Oh, and the most beautiful woman in Iraq being the narrator's wife, and the second most beautiful woman in Iraq proposing to the narrator once the other one dies. And blah blah blah. I mean, really.
This book left me sad and unsure what to say about it. It’s a bit like Kafka, but far too real for that comparison to really work. I think the main thing about it is that the narrator’s voice is so infused with grief—for his wife, for his people, for the horrible things people do to each other and for the lack of any clear solutions to the horrors. Initially, I had trouble getting the narrative situated in my mind. Keneally has taken a fictionalized Iraq under Saddam Hussein and populated it with people bearing distinctly British names. I understand why he did that, why he interrupted the Western reader’s ability to distance himself from people in a place we’ve set aside as so very “Other,” and it works wonderfully well, but it did take me a few pages to get my bearings. Ultimately, I liked that effect, how it makes us realize how much we live in our own fictional narratives of how the world is and how certain people must be because of where they live. Even though the narrator is of a privileged class, his own awareness of the suffering of common people caused by the political machinations of their government and others infuses the book and the reading of it with a kind of hopelessness. He writes that for the poor of this country, the hardships and horrors (“children worth a dollar” selling themselves on the street, women drawing tainted water to feed their families because it’s all the water they can get) seem to come from God, not from other men. No matter who is in charge, the suffering continues. It’s a really hopeless feeling to read this, knowing how true it is. And, of course, Keneally gives no quarter for his “hero” either. Fleeing a gilded prison, he ends up in a bland, bureaucratic one. He sought to avoid serving a tyrant, but forever bears the mark of having done so. However much he wants to deny that he is guilty, the scars on his wrist indict him—but, unspoken, is the fact that we are all guilty. We are all complicit. We are all scarred. The book is bleak and beautifully written.
What do You think about The Tyrant's Novel (2004)?
A novel for our times - Keneally's story tells of an Iraqi asylum-seeker whose work brought him dangerously close to Great Uncle, a fictitious parallel of Saddam Hussein. Like many of Keneally's works, there is well-documented historical fact to support a tragic human story. For Australians, there is a sinister message, and an even more sinister question from this 10-year-old story: we have treated refugees incredibly badly - but why have we been doing it for so long? Nothing has improved in the way our country treats the stateless person.
—Russell
از این جهت که کاملا منطبق بر اوضاع سیاسی و اقتصادی ایران بود برام جالب بود. گرچه میتونه درباره‌ی هرکشور دیگه‌ای در خاورمیانه یا آفریقا باشه.این قسمت هم برام خیلی ملموس بود که باوجود نفرتی که آلن از عموی کبیر داشت، وقتی باهاش روبرو شد ناخودآگاه احساس احترام کرد. چیزی که گاهی خودم هم نسبت به بعضی دیکتاتورها در خودم احساس میکنم و برام خیلی عجیبه.
—Arghavan
