The Unknown Knowns
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- £5.99
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
Jim Rath's wife has grown tired of his hobbies: his immaculately maintained comics collection, his creepy underwater experiments, and his dreams of building a museum based on the Aquatic Ape theory of human evolution. On the night that she leaves him, Jim thinks he has spotted an emissary from a lost aquatic race called the Nautikons.
In truth the man is Les Diaz, a low-level agent of the Department of Homeland Security who has been mentally unstable since his wife's drowning. The department has relegated him to an underfunded project, inspecting hotel swimming pools and water slides for terrorist vulnerabilities, a mission Diaz embraces with fervour. When he realises that he's being tailed by Jim Rath, his intelligence instincts are awakened. Agent Diaz feels certain that Jim Rath is a domestic terrorist.
The Unknown Knowns is the story of two delusional and quixotic men who stalk one another toward a bloody showdown - a spectacularly moronic act of terrorism at an ageing water park. With its frequent evocations of Donald Rumsfeld's language and posturing, it is also a Swiftian expose of the hypocrisy and incompetence of the Homeland Security apparatus. It is fresh, original and very, very funny.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Jim Rath has an unusual set of ambitions: "My goal was a thorough understanding of water," he says. "But not on a chemical level. Not in any way you could test.... I wanted to know why the water is always calling to us, what it wants to tell us." In this ambling adventure, he attempts to find out. Combining Rath's story (including the predictable dissolution of his marriage) with that of Homeland Security agent Les Diaz, Rotter, in his first novel, weaves a semisuspenseful tale of (possible) international terrorism and, uh, water parks. Parading from a Colorado Springs, Colo., Hilton all the way to the Prospector's Bend theme park outside of Denver, Rath and Diaz engage in a battle of something like wits; Diaz thinks Rath is a jihadist, while Rath at best a dreamer, at worst a psychopath thinks Diaz is a merman from an imaginary underwater city. While Rotter makes a solid effort, the fantasy element of the book remains half-baked and, despite the timely and biting humor throughout, the thrill of the goofy 320-page chase isn't quite enough.
