Fiction: Ask any writer what they need to make a book and they'll tell you - story and voice.
In The Tyrant's Novel, Thomas Keneally tells a story that bears the universality of fable and the intensity of an individual life. And, in telling this story, he has found a painfully true voice for his central character, Alan Sheriff, a voice that is sometimes awkward, sometimes angry and sometimes heartbreakingly poignant, a voice that constantly rings the bells of truth.
Most importantly, Keneally has dared to tell a simple story simply. He hasn't been lured by the false promise that complexity equals importance. Nor has he avoided the fact that neither lives nor dictatorships are one-dimensional. When he takes us into the presence of Great Uncle, we meet a man capable of warmth, an apparently humane individual who is also a savage tyrant, controlling the heartbeats of life and death among his people.
Keneally makes contemporary Iraq the page on which his story is written. But, in doing so, he takes a simple and daring step. His characters have western names. The suburbs in which they live have the comfort and menace of the everyday. The books they read and the films they watch are western works. Keneally will allow nothing to come between the reader and familiarity with his characters and the places they call home. He permits us no excuses for turning away. There are no islands, he reminds us, and if these people are pricked it may be that our blood will run.
The Tyrant's Novel opens in an Australian refugee holding centre. There, Keneally meets Alan Sheriff, a man "without documents and stateless". Over a number of weeks, Sheriff tells his story, one which he prefaces with the claim that it's "the saddest and the silliest" we'll ever hear. And he's right. It's a story that is staggering in its plainness, distressing in its normality and shocking in its cruelty. Most of all, it's frightening in its credibility.
The story is littered with average people who have suffered the awful indifferences of loss: Mrs Carter, with her "daft, lips-parted smile", who clings to the hope that her son has survived as a POW; Sarah Sheriff, who has given up a lucrative acting career rather than sacrifice her talents to the knife of propaganda; Matt McBrien, who has done the opposite. Sheriff knows these people and lives with them and with the possibility that "hope is travelling to meet hope".
Life goes on for him and his friends because it has to. And, anyway, the constraints under which they live are not all the responsibility of Great Uncle. There are the sanctions imposed by the United States. There is the war with the Others. There is the patriotism that holds them to the land they love. There is greed. There is fear. And there is hope.
Between these great moral boulders, Keneally has dropped the even more disturbing pebbles of day-to-day living, such as Great Uncle's homeliness - "a man of such restrained gestures" - and the effects of gas on soldiers:
He sat red-faced at the bottom of our trench, and began sneezing. I saw a blister forming on Carter's cheek. I stopped rubbing my hands since it made skin come away. Private Carter raised his welted face to me. His eyes had swollen closed. Flesh had begun to fall away like a beard from his blistered cheeks.
Finally, Sheriff has to confront a loss so great and so sudden that we can only assume nothing can ever be more cruel. But if, as he says, "irony is the life-blood of good writing", personal tragedy is the precursor of a decision that reduces him to unimaginable depths of self-loathing. This, followed by his witnessing an act of almost casual violence against a friend, finally provokes a decision that takes him to the holding centre where The Tyrant's Novel opens and closes.
That Keneally has melded simplicity, complexity, humanity and cruelty into such an unaffected yet hugely affecting novel is a tribute to his literary brilliance and courage. He makes the unthinkable chillingly prosaic. He writes with tenderness and pathos, as in Sheriff's view of a recently exhumed young woman: "She was tucked back into her winding sheet, so that we could only see her face, the temples, the ruin of her hair." But he writes, too, with necessary savageness, as in his account of the death of another young woman - her "body had now begun to shudder furiously. I had in part lifted her and held her tightly by the shoulders, a man promising to hold her together. She urinated on the pavement, the first indignity of death".
Thomas Keneally has written a brutal, honest and magnificent book. Read it and then give it to someone else to read.
• John MacKenna's most recent book was Shackleton: An Irishman in Antarctica (Lilliput Press), co-written with Jonathan Shackleton. He is currently working on a collection of short stories