The tyrant's novel /

An imprisoned man tells the story of his misfortune. In an unnamed land that can only be interpreted as Iraq, the lives of the citizenry are completely dominated by Great Uncle, who is a very thinly disguised Saddam Hussein. The prisoner was formerly a writer married to an actress; then one day, one of those days that not so much shades as blackens the rest of one's life, he is summoned to Great Uncle's office and asked--told--to write a novel to be published in the U.S. under Great Uncle's name. The novel must show how Great Uncle's people have suffered under the international sanctions imposed on the country. The intended eventual result of the novel would be, of course, the lifting of the sanctions. Thus the writer becomes the tool of the tyrant, and Keneally's disturbing but ultimately very riveting novel becomes the story of the writer's enslavement to Great Uncle. What begins as an intelligent but somewhat emotionally sterile story (even the writer's telling of his love for his beautiful wife at first seems to lack heart) grows in tension, becoming an absolutely breathtaking demonstration of dictatorship: how it works, but more importantly and resonantly, the strategies necessary to live under it. Keneally is a very popular Australian novelist, and will be heavily requested. --Brad Hooper Copyright 2004 Booklist

In this gripping political allegory, the author of Schindler's List examines a more contemporary instance of people trying to survive in the ethical quagmire of totalitarianism. The protagonist is Alan Sheriff, a writer living in a nameless desert country ruled by a despot who styles himself the "Great Uncle" and who bears an uncanny resemblance to a certain recently deposed dictator. A member of the Westernized cultural elite with a fat book contract from Random House, Alan feels himself immune from the political pressures and poverty surrounding him. Then one day he is whisked off to receive a commission from the tyrant himself: to ghostwrite a novel for Great Uncle that will undermine support for sanctions in the West-on a quite literal one-month deadline. Fearing for himself and his friends, torn between remaining in his gilded cage or striking out for a precarious existence abroad, Alan must make agonizing compromises with the truth and his art. Keneally treats this potentially lurid scenario in a realistic and enthralling fashion that fully humanizes all the characters, secret police goons included. In his hands, the clich? of the suffering artiste struggling to avoid selling out takes on real depth and pathos. This is an exquisitely wrought study of moral corruption in a convincing-and frighteningly modern-political dystopia. Agent, Amanda Urban. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Keneally does Orwell. Somewhere, off in some future (echoes of the present not coincidental), one writer begins conversing with another. The interviewee is Alan Sheriff, detained three years in a camp, a refugee from a situation resembling Iraq. His country's brutal dictator, "Grand Uncle," wanted Sheriff to ghostwrite a book for U.S. distribution about his beneficence and his peoples' struggles under sanctions. Sheriff begins to crumble under the impossible four-week deadline, pressure from Uncle and his two fake artiste sons, the odious nature of the text, and grief over the death of his actress wife, and eventually he spends $5000 to escape on a tanker, inside an oil drum. He finally arrives, say, in Australia (home of Keneally, an outspoken critic of its detention policies), where he is in limbo because being sent back to Uncle's rule would mean death or worse. While lacking the visionary precision of Schindler's List or the apocalyptic local color of Woman of the Inner Sea, this is still a cautionary tale from a major writer. Recommended for most collections.--Robert E. Brown, Minoa Lib., NY (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. All rights reserved.

Australia's Keneally (Office of Innocence, 2003, etc., etc.) offers the most significant American novel of some time, much as Graham Greene in 1955 with The Quiet American. The setting isn't Saigon but the capital city of a Middle Eastern state tyrannized by "Great Uncle" and his secret police, the "Overguard." Any doubts that Iraq is meant dissipate quickly as we learn that poison gas was used in a recent war (against the "Others"), that Great Uncle's nation is under Western economic sanctions that cripple the poor and hurt all--or that one of Great Uncle's sons shot dead two leaders of the national soccer team after they'd lost the World Cup. Desolate and corrupt, both city and nation are bled dry, oppressed by tyranny from within and sanctions from without--and Keneally brings it all to life with a gritty, uncompromising vividness equal to Greene's Saigon or Winston Smith's London. The central figure is Alan Sheriff, author of a highly praised book of stories drawn from his experience as a young soldier in the war against the Others. Indeed, life holds promise for Alan, whose first novel is almost finished, with already a lot of money in the bank from it. But calamity visits when an aneurism kills Sarah, Alan's beloved and nationally famous actress-wife. In his grief, he deep-sixes his computer, then buries with Sarah the only remaining copy of his novel (it was for her, after all). Soon afterward, a summons: Alan is arrested, blindfolded, and taken to an audience with Great Uncle himself, who gives Alan an offer he can't refuse: one month to write an emotion-arousing novel to be published in the West under Great Uncle's name to stir up world opposition to the sanctions, all this before the coming G-7 meetings in Montreal. And so Alan wrestles with time, conscience, grief, desire, despair, and the blank page in ways no reader--certainly no American reader--will easily forget. Brilliant, riveting, conscience-driven political novel: rank it with the greats. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.