The Tyrant's Novel

Starred review from May 24, 2004
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 cliché 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.

August 15, 2004
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

Copyright 2004 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 15, 2004
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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2004, American Library Association.)