A Writer Under Siege

...The work progresses intermittently, but Sheriff finds the task dissatisfying...

...Soon Sheriff is rushed off to an audience with Great Uncle...

...A morning's entertainment...

...McBrien is horrified, and reminds Sheriff that his own life is not the only one on the line...

...At this point the plot takes its first turn toward the ridiculous: "Very authoritatively, he said, 'Saveus, Alan!'" Recognizing his responsibility for the lives of others, Sheriff instead recommits to the new novel...

...But it soon becomes clear to him that he cannot raise it to the level of his expectations...

...Sheriffhad recently told the woman the unhappy truth after the government had lied to her to nurture her hope that the son might still be alive in enemy hands...

...Sheriff is given a month to produce it...

...Like the book Sheriff publishes in Great Uncle's name, The Tyrant's Novel is intended both as an indictment of tyranny and a treatise against the side effects of Western sanctions meant to deter it...

...With help, he manages to get to the European detention camp where the unnamed visitor finds him...

...Whether Keneally is addressing the United States or Iraq or some unnamed Western or Middle Eastern country, his core theme is suffering, which "in the eyes of those who go through it, is often an apolitical experience...

...The unfortunate truth is that it is neither the saddest nor the silliest, nor superlative in any category whatsoever...

...The truth being, of course, that they cemented Great Uncle in place, gave him an outside force to blame for the country's condition...

...Sheriff's friend Matt McBrien, a government functionary, is appointed to support him and to ensure that the new novel is completed on time, even if quality is lacking...

...But Sheriff feels his soul has been compromised and resolves to seek asylum...

...If he considers full refrigerators to be the guarantee of a despair less honorable than material deprivation, his impoverished characters ought to be thanking their lucky stars for the sanctions that have taken food out of their mouths...

...Begun in 1995, "The book was intended as a paean and an elegy for the valor of those who maintain the dignity of their hunger in the face of crazy international measures, aimed to undermine Great Uncle, but cutting like abuzz saw through less elevated people, whose chief politics were . endurance...

...His heart isn't in it...

...Et cetera...

...The book seems even to have anticipated, in its detention center, the abuses at Abu Ghraib: "For the guard and the prisoner, you see, for both of them, boredom is the great problem...

...Their passion rekindles...

...If I wanted to be a citizen of a pre-Fascist country," declares a detainee, "I'd rather be a citizen of a big, dramatic, baroque pre-Fascist country like the United States than of a little, puissant, head-stuck-up-thearse pre-Fascist country like this...

...The book begins and ends with short sections narrated by an unnamed visitor to a European detention camp in the summer of 2001, who has come to interview detainee Alan Sheriff, a writer...

...Keneally's motives are admirable, but his writing, too often tangled in "awful melodrama" and facile philosophizing, fails to satisfy them...

...He therefore buries it with her, and casts his laptop into the water...

...To his immense relief, he receives generous praise and is assured lifelong comfort for his efforts...

...For the guards, blows, and what you'd call the theater of blows, are a great opium...

...This is a cheap snicker on the author's part...

...Meanwhile, a former lover from his bachelor days who had escaped to the West, Louise James, interviews Sheriff during a visit to her native country...

...The old novel rescued, Sheriff manages to complete it before the deadline...

...The novel closes with Alan Sheriff asking the unnamed narrator, "And you see, isn't that the saddest and silliest story you ever heard...

...Then, in another of Keneally's far-fetched twists, she is stabbed to death by the mother of a friend of Sheriff's killed alongside him during a war with a neighboring country...

...One day, however, without warning, Sarah collapses in their kitchen while she is preparing tea and dies of an apparent aneurysm...

...His life devastated, Sheriff manages to find some solace in a new job—improving the subtitling of classic American films shown on his country's national television station...

...The novel Sheriff buried with his wife, though subtly critical of Great Uncle's regime, might fit the bill, but retrieving it would amount to sacrilege...

...Since his life without Sarah is not really worth living anyway, he decides to give up on the project and dedicate his brief final days to relaxation...

...The result, The Tyrant's Novel, is a quick read, clever, plot-driven and not without entertaining moments...

...At McBrien's urging, he consents to have his wife's coffin disinterred under the pretext that her cause of death has been called into question...

...Great Uncle is not a particularly literary man, and besides, "the critics will be disposed to see any broad strokes, any primitivism, as a post-colonial legacy...

...A thoroughgoing anti-Americanism pervades this work...

...The nearly completed manuscript becomes a victim of Sheriff's grief: "There was really no sense to those or any other words I wanted to place on paper, in a world from which she had been removed" His novel belonged to her, and he had to remove all trace of it from the world, just as she was taken...

...Reviewed by Eric Motylinski Freelance writer and critic Seven months after the September 11 attacks, and 11 months before the U.S...

...Sheriff's passion for writing is exceeded only by his attachment to his gorgeous wife, for whom he is writing the novel...

...That the tyrant is Saddam is barely disguised, as is the nation's identity (though all the names are Westernized...

...invasion of Iraq, the Atlantic Monthly published an exhaustive journalistic examination of Saddam Hussein's regime by Mark Bowden, entitled "Tales of the Tyrant...

...He finds this absorbing and artistically satisfying, but mostly it distracts him from the absence of his wife...

...that in our world survival is the difficult achievement, and in America human intimacy is...

...It's as if they [Americans] believe what is normal and human are all some unachievable magic...

...Et cetera...

...So is McBrien's, and his wife Soma's, and their unborn child's...

...Keneally's anti-Americanism, or at least that of his characters, goes beyond other foreign policy to matters cultural and literary: "If you live in the United States, it's astonishing how those books of Updike's get the essence of the experience, all the desperation beneath the gestures of affluence...

...The rest is given over to Sheriff's account of a dramatic month in the summer of 1998 in a country "led by a man whose name was a synonym for gratuitous tyranny," dubbed "Great Uncle" by the people...

...And all the sexual despair...

...If you don't have to despair about your life, if the refrigerator's full of food and you're going to live to 70 or more, I suppose there's leisure to think about these things...

...Would you say...

...Their combined oppression reduces people to denouncing "the grotesque sanctions the West somehow thought would make the people aggrieved enough to overthrow Great Uncle...

...But I still could never understand why Sarah didn't pause in midstride, self-stunned...

...Australian author Thomas Keneally, winner of the Booker Prize for Schindler's List, read it and found inspiration for his 23rd work of fiction...

...His objective is to demonstrate the plight of his country's people and thus illustrate the cruelty of American-led sanctions...

...But it is ultimately dragged down by the weight of Keneally's consistently dull language and his reliance on absurd devices...

...When Sheriff's story opens, he is finishing his latest novel...

...Great Uncle wants it out before a G-7 summit meeting...

...It is a mediocre effort that would be a failure in any case, but especially so in light of Keneally's grand intentions...

...Suddenly he receives a summons and is taken to see Great Uncle, who requests—but it is something firmer than a request, of course—that Sheriff write a novel in Great Uncle's name, to be published in the West...

...In a culture of suffering, he goes on, "we can't get anywhere by comparing evils...

...I know the clichés about how those beautiful folk who live for their own splendor are destroyed by its passing...

...The sobriquet is merely one of many details, facts and circumstances lifted directly from Bowden's article...