A minority report

You can find my San Francisco Chronicle review of Richard Flanagan's The Unknown Terrorist over here.

Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times loved the book, along with quite a few other reviewers. So far, only one other critic besides myself (James Buchan in the Guardian) found it over-determined and noisy, to say the least. Here's a paragraph from the Chronicle review:

"Flanagan has fleshed out the bones [of Heinrich Boll's The Lost Honor of Katherina Blum] as a suspense thriller with a heart of bitter satire. Flanagan is the author of three rich, vivid novels -- the third one, Gould's Book of Fish, is extraordinary, an illustrated novel about colonial Tasmanian prison life told, as its subtitle has it, "in 12 fish." His prose may be less mesmerizing here, his narrative more straightforward, but it's the thinking behind The Unknown Terrorist that is depressingly obvious, even ham-fisted."