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The Tyrant's Novel
by Thomas Keneally

9.0 based on 16 reviews read critic reviews how did we calculate this? based on 1 vote read user comments rate this book

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• Official Publisher Site

In a work reminiscent of the classic "Fahrenheit 451," Thomas Keneally has written a dazzling story of a man caught between the demands of his government and his impulse to run for his life. Provocative and possibly prophetic, The Tyrant’s Novel is a literary achievement inspired by recent history’s most intriguing events and characters. Here, Keneally once more combines, as he did in "Schindler's List," his fictional talent with his engagement in world politics. [Nan A. Talese]

Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 256 pages
06/2004
$25.00

ISBN: 0385511469

Fiction
General Literature & Fiction

All reviews are classified as one of five grades: Outstanding (4 points), Favorable (3), Mixed (2), Unfavorable (1) and Terrible (0). To calculate the Metascore, we divide total points achieved by the total points possible (i.e., 4 x the number of reviews), with the resulting percentage (multiplied by 100) being the Metascore. Learn more...

Booklist Brad Hooper

What begins as an intelligent but somewhat emotionally sterile story... 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.[15 May 2004, p.1579]

Boston Globe David Mills

One of the novel's strengths is that it is replete with riveting dilemmas. A novel with numerous "predicaments" can feel congested, but this plot breathes, allowing Keneally to detail grief's emotional architecture.

Kirkus Reviews

Brilliant, riveting, conscience-driven political novel: rank it with the greats.

Publishers Weekly

This is an exquisitely wrought study of moral corruption in a convincing -- and frighteningly modern -- political dystopia.

The New York Times Book Review Terrence Rafferty

The power of a novelist can be intoxicating too, and this sneakily profound book shows how even a writer as fundamentally unheroic as Alan Sheriff can avoid that sad habituality, the potentially lethal illusion of mastery.

The Spectator Caroline Moorehead

What gives The Tyrant's Novel its tense, edgy tone is the implicit understanding of the exile that is to come, the sense of being sucked without alternative towards flight.

The New Yorker

Though concerned with current events, Keneally takes care to give his tale wider resonance.[28 June 2004]

The Guardian Alfred Hickling

Whether intentionally or not, The Tyrant's Novel has the feel of a book written in a hurry. This enhances the urgency with which Alan wishes to put his story across, but it skims over the fine details that would give the account real credibility.

The Independent Ian Thomson

Ultimately, The Tyrant's Novel reads like a preliminary sketch, not the "Orwellian fable" the author claims. Nevertheless, the book lingers in the mind as a forceful essay on the corrupting tendency of power.

The New York Times Janet Maslin

Its most impressive aspect is Mr. Keneally's quicksilver way of switching moods, shifting from light to dark and back again, as he captures the utter precariousness of life subject to a tyrant's whims.

Los Angeles Times Brigitte Frase

A timely and deeply honest book.

Entertainment Weekly John Freeman

A story as timely as it is disturbing.

Chicago Sun-Times Allison Block

Keneally peppers his lean prose with vivid, sharply drawn characters.

Daily Telegraph Tom Payne

But the plot doesn't take a dramatic shape -- the ending adds nothing to the tale -- and worse still, the prose is crook.

Houston Chronicle Patrick Kurp

It's a pretty good book, never stupid or cynical and seldom boring, that could have been better had its author, the Australian Thomas Keneally, dared to confound us and jettison his desire to please right-minded readers.

Washington Post David Rieff

The greatness of Keneally's theme is not matched by his ability to turn that theme into fiction; and, as a novel, it is hard not to judge the book a failure.

The average user rating for this book is 9.0 (out of 10) based on 1 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

Stone J gave it a9:
"It's a truism almost embarrassing to repeat," begins Thomas Keneally's newest novel, "that a particular government might find it suitable to have an enemy-in-the-midst . . . whom they can point out to the populace as a threat. And from that threat, only this party . . . can save the innocent sleep of the citizenry." There has been a marked lack of solid fiction that directly concerns the twenty-first century. Aside from a passing reference to 9/11 in English author Iain Banks's Dead Air, major works of fiction set directly in this turbulent era have yet to be written. Keneally is the ideal novelist to bring such themes to life. The Australian author has never shied away from unsettling subjects in his decades as a writer, having tackled the destruction of aboriginal culture in The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, and Nazi atrocities in his Booker Award-winning Schindler's Ark (more popularly known as Schindler's List). In The Tyrant's Novel, Keneally brings his incise commentary and deep compassion to a fables of artistic freedom and moral uncertainty. Inspired by his visits to the Villawood refuge detention centre in Australia, Keneally exposes the humanity that exists under tremendous oppression, and more strikingly, the inhumanity with which refugees from such countries are treated. The Tyrant's Novel is largely set in an anonymous Middle Eastern country sweating under a ferocious dictator known simply as Great Uncle. He wishes to publish a book in the Western world that will display, as he says, "the suffering of my people, and their patriotic inventiveness in the face of sanctions." Conscripting a writer to pen the tale, Great Uncle allows him thirty days to deliver a novel that will "drive a stake through the American administration's embargoes on our oil and the imposed sanctions." The writer, grief-stricken after a personal tragedy, unthinkingly accepts the proposal, as he had been planning suicide in the near future. Yet as the enormity of the task sets in, his past complicity in Great Uncle's corrupt regime becomes apparent, as does the risk of death both he and his friends face should he fail. Keneally makes a bold decision, giving all the characters Anglo-Saxon names rather than the more expected Middle Eastern names. By striving to abolish any pre-conceived of notions of culture or attitudes, Keneally brings Western readers closer to the suffering of the characters, creating a familiar bond that heightens the tragedy of his story. This should not be dismissed as mere polemic. Using a precise, suspenseful plot worthy of a thriller, Keneally delivers both a condemnation of such regimes and a moving account of people trying to live as best they can. As the writer contemplates defection, Keneally skilfully underscores the absolute nature of such a step, the complete withdrawal from the life one knows to an existence completely unimaginable. The Tyrant's Novel is an altogether remarkable work, an important, raging story of Orwellian government and personal revelations. Touching on issues of love, loyalty, artistic compromise, and political ignorance on both sides, Keneally has crafted his finest work in years.

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