The novelist and the despot

The Tyrant's Novel
By Thomas Keneally
Doubleday, 235 pp., $25

In 1865, publisher F. T. Stellovsky forced Dostoyevsky to write "The Gambler" in 30 days. If Dostoyevsky had failed, Stellovsky would have retained royalties to his work. Author Alan Sheriff, the antihero of Thomas Keneally's "The Tyrant's Novel" -- a geopolitical roman clef and psychological novel -- must complete a book in a month, too.

Sheriff has published a well-received short story collection, but he's currently in a "foreign" detention center. From here, retrospectively, he chronicles his life's spellbinding story:

He flees a totalitarian regime ruled by "Great Uncle" (an Orwellian nod, but if you read Mark Bowden's May 2002 Atlantic Monthly article, you would know this is a Saddam Hussein sobriquet).

Westernized, bourgeois, contracted to Random House, and married to a brilliant beauty, Sheriff leads a charmed life, except that he resides in a despotic fiefdom where capricious violence rules. Save nominal concessions, Sheriff lives "unscathed" until his wife dies of an aneurysm and his cocoon unravels. Reverentially, Sheriff buries his manuscript with her.

Great Uncle's apparatchik, and Sheriff chum, McBrien insists the tyrant needs to publish Sheriff's discarded novel. Increasingly besotted, and whisked before the ruler, Sheriff withholds that, even if his book weren't "eighty-sixed," he couldn't give Great Uncle work meant to disparage him.

Determined, Great Uncle demands Sheriff ghostwrite a propaganda novel assaulting Western sanctions (to be published, and hyped, by a US house, and Western PR) before an upcoming G-7 meeting. Sheriff believes that his buried novel is a paean to his wife that dignifies resisters of both tyranny and sanctions. His ideological opposition equals his psychological paralysis. As the clock ticks, the term "deadline" assumes new meaning for him: concede, flee, or . . . ?

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. Wondering if Sarah died of sudden adult death syndrome, Sheriff has her body exhumed. And after he sees her, his suicidal thoughts vanish: "I did not want to join her in that state." (Here, Keneally's Gothic description proves supernal.)

Judiciously, Keneally's sober prose employs unobtrusive humor, poetic beauty, and luminosity. The last is evinced as Sheriff repeatedly experiences the emotional ambivalence of a grieving yet sensual being as he is seduced by Louise James, a US journalist whom he had dumped years earlier for his wife.

Grief is this narrative's invisible piston, although the story's transparent engines are fear and paranoia. In Paris, emissaries mutilate prominent former citizens; from Frankfurt, Sheriff's friend Collins mails an epistle stating that he has received a package with his file manager's head enclosed. Cloistered, Sheriff is perplexed about whether this is Collins's handwriting: "The more authentic it looked, the more suspect."

The story's intricate narrative twists are matched by its richly drawn characters. Two secondary players -- Mrs. Carter and McBrien (who embodies the often thorny intersection between art and bureaucracy) -- figure prominently in Sheriff's sense of emotional duty. A huckster, McBrien lives to motivate Sheriff. He "suggests material like a healthy man rallying a starving one by himself devouring a meal." This fails. Harnessing guilt and fidelity, however, McBrien (whose wife becomes pregnant) proclaims the "newest citizen of our state lies under her heart [and] in your hands."

Whereas McBrien's child has not yet arrived, in an engrossing subplot, Carter's son has vanished. A veteran, Sheriff fought alongside him and knows he is dead. But for years he's been ordered to say the son was a POW. Emotionally frozen, Sheriff and Carter oddly mirror each other's grief: She's melodramatic; he's reticent. Obsessed, Carter badgers Sheriff to "visit."

Partially attempting to free himself from her psychological leash, and hoping to be punished by this dystopian regime, Sheriff tells Carter her son is dead. But in a narrative masterstroke Keneally creates a dilemma where Sheriff is "condemned to live a charmed life not even the military can hurt." Subsequently, the shadowy Carter tightens her tether. She then is involved in the antepenultimate plot point, and its richly ambiguous aftermath.

Most stories possess conflicts; some muster compelling dilemmas. And while Keneally maintains supreme control over this political allegory, the dilemmas of "The Tyrant's Novel" permeate and amplify each other.

Still, this contemporary masterpiece possesses curious shortcomings. Nearly all its presumably Semitic characters have Irish surnames. And throughout, other than "Great Uncle," no irrefutable information about Iraq surfaces. Also, although 95 percent of the tale is told as flashback, the narrative possesses an unfolding's inertia. Thus, when Sheriff "foreshadows" two crucial plot points it compromises the suspense.

That said, part of this work's genius is that Keneally takes a geopolitical agon, employs his penchant for giving voice to the voiceless, and mesmerizes with an intimate thriller. Sheriff is not merely caught between saving a nation or saving face. Keneally dissects his morality under a tyrannical, mind-boggling microscope. Finishing the novel, I contemplated a Sheriff truism: "Most humans are only brave in snatches." If they're lucky.

David Mills is a critic and poet from New York.