Former US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld famously said:

There are known knowns. There are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we do not know we don’t know.

He’s right of course, but his tortured attempt at expressing something we all ought to intuitively understand saw him widely slated in the media for communicating so poorly, and fortunately gives Jeffrey Rotter the title for his debut novel, a tale about the ‘War on Terror’ (inverted commas essential) that functions both as a madcap tale of two equally delusional misfits, and as an allegory for the collective insanity that overtook public policymakers in the US and other countries (including my own) in the aftermath of 9/11.

Jim Rath is a classic nerd: a comic collector with few social skills. On the night the action commences his most peculiar hobby has driven his wife to leave him: Jim believes in the aquatic ape therory of human evolution, and has combined this with his fetish for superhero comics to invent a complete underwater civilisation: Nautika. Every available moment is dedicated to Jim’s dream of opening a museum about Nautika – he sketches out weapons and buildings, imagines customs and invents stories. He even spends hours standing on the bottom of swimming pools with a snorkel, trying to achieve the trancelike state known to Nautikons as ooeee. For Jim, once he imagines something about Nautika, it’s tantamount to it being fact, and we also get several extracts from Jim’s imagined history of Nautika, replete with preposterous sexual imagery and B-movie melodrama (for more of a flavour of Nautika, check out the book’s website: The Museum of the Aquatic Ape).

It’s Jim’s obsession with swimming pools that brings him in to contact with another water-fixated misfit: Les Diaz works for the Department of Homeland Security, and since his wife tragically drowned he too has cultivated an obsession with water – so his bosses have relegated him to inspecting hotel swimming pools and water parks for “terrorist vulnerabilities”. Diaz passionately believes that the enemies of his country could reach out and poison a hotel swimming pool or bomb a water park at any time, and his sections of the book, which take the form of retrospective testimony to a Congressional committee investigating the events at the climax of the tale, are the true indictment of the fallacy behind American security thinking post-9/11. As Diaz explains, po-faced:

There are a lot of creeps out there, and recreational waters have long been a potential point of entry for extremists. This isn’t some fantasy. It’s the real deal. And it’s some scary stuff. We’re out there taking the pulse and scripting Die Hard scenarios to test the emergency response plan.

Of course, it was this awful combination of turning unfounded prejudices and implausible possibilities in to near-certainties for public consumption that led to America’s involvement in Iraq, and Diaz’s assertions are his own version of the notorious claims about WMDs ready to launch in 45 minutes.

There are shades of Tom Sharpe in The Unknown Knowns – the same sense of dysfunctional characters building up to a grand climax of mayhem and harm -  but there’s also a strong central core of satire running through the book that is central to its success; there are also echoes of the classic American comedy novel A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole, in the existence of the uttery self-deluding central characters. The Unknown Knowns sets out to make a point about America, and it succeeds admirably – but it also succeeds as a comedy drowning in pathos (pun intended). Recommended.

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