The Autumn of the Tyrant

Sad

dam Hussein — Remember him? Thomas Keneally does. In The Tyrant's Novel (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday; 235 pages), Keneally has produced an Orwellian fable about an unnamed nation that is unmistakably Iraq, one ruled by a whimsical killer called Great Uncle. He likes Tommy Hilfiger cologne and fears germs so much that he obliges visitors, before they come near, to change into sterile surgeon's robes and submit to an anal probe. All the same, this is a clown with a cocked pistol in his belt, so sometimes the laughs come hard. When a pool tender at one of his many palaces lets the pH level of the water climb too high, Great Uncle has him shot.

Keneally, the Australian writer best known for Schindler's List, has said this novel began in his feelings of "grief and shame and outrage" at the treatment of the mainly Middle Eastern refugees seeking asylum in his home country, which is why Great Uncle is not his main focus. He's merely the malign spirit who hangs over his story, a nutty potentate who comes onstage just twice, always preceded by the efficient sadists of his elite guard, each of them enclosed in his own cloud of Tommy Hilfiger. Keneally's main concern is with the trials of Alan Sheriff, a refugee at a bleak detainment camp in a nation that is plainly Australia. Sheriff has made his way there from Great Uncle's beleaguered country, where he was a writer with a budding reputation in the West and an advance from Random House to produce a novel. The flashback story he tells to a sympathetic Westerner becomes the main part of Keneally's novel.

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What Sheriff had at home was a comfortable life, an actress wife he adored and a passionate thing on the side with vodka and Scotch. Then his wife suddenly dies, and in despair he buries with her the manuscript and all the computer discs of his novel. Soon after, he is drafted by Great Uncle to produce a novel — in just 31 days — that will be published in the West under the dictator's name, all to dramatize the suffering of his nation under Western-imposed sanctions. Driven half-mad by the assignment, which he knows is the ultimate command performance, the brooding, ironic Sheriff is led to question the "profoundly placed markers as to who I was in the first place." The answers, like the laughs, don't come easy.

Keneally keeps his characters close to home with a brilliantly simple sleight of hand. Though most of his story takes place in the Middle East, he gives his people Anglicized names. Turn the Salims and Adinas into Alans and Louises, and what might have been a tale of the mysterious Other becomes a story of very familiar bureaucrats and professionals seeking to secure a place for themselves. They just happen to be doing it in a world subject to the bloodthirsty caprices of Great Uncle and his cokehead offspring Sonny.

The Tyrant's Novel was written, sagely, sinuously, under the spell of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Mario Vargas Llosa and their mad generalissimos. There is everywhere a whiff of Graham Greene, with his moral skirmishing in the gray areas. The current Iraq war is one of those. Keneally, who knows something about lies and hypocrisy, could have told you it would be.