Review Post 44 - Pain and Suffering in the Eastern Suburbs

For those considering reading a book by Christos Tsiolkas, whose most recent novel, The Slap, was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize this year, a few friendly words of advice.  Do not read any of his novels if you:
- Are homophobic
- Are easily offended by frequent sex, drugs and bad language
- Feel faint at the mention of blood, let alone the sight of it
- Are eating your dinner
- Believe Neighbours is a realistic depiction of life in Melbourne's Eastern suburbs

Still with me?  Then let's get to it...

*****
The Jesus Man is Tsiolkas' follow up to his debut novel Loaded, and it again takes us into the heart of Melbourne and its multicultural, ethnically and sexually diverse inhabitants.  The story is related through the voices of several characters, central among them the three Stefano brothers.  Dom, Tommy and Lou are half-Italian, half-Greek Australians growing up against a background of social deterioration and global history, struggling to find a suitable identity, each falling in turn into a world of cheap, sordid sex, pornography and drug abuse.  As we hear from each of the brothers, we see the similarities in the choices they make, but also the differences: for one of the brothers, these differences have tragic consequences.

Tommy is the cursed one of the family (although, if you believe the stories about the crow, said to follow the males of the family around, all of them are cursed), a middle child who struggles to cope with reality.  Unable to get on properly with his elder brother, on the verge of unemployment because of a downturn in the economy (and working in an obsolete profession) and with severe body-image issues, he begins a long, slow spiral down into self-abuse, addiction to pornography and an inability to cope with daily life.

World news, filtered through the flickering television screen in his apartment, combines with the events of his personal life, leading up to an unavoidable culmination of events.  Stretched so far, it is clear that, sooner or later, Tommy will crack.  The final catalyst for his ruin comes when Tommy meets a crazed, born-again Christian, who tells him that the Apocalypse is coming.  With the fall of the Berlin Wall, Nelson Mandela's release from prison, the war in the Gulf (and Collingwood winning a Premiership!), it's no wonder Tommy starts believing in the End of Days...

While Tommy's story is the centre of the book, the section narrated by Lou, his little brother, is equally fascinating.  Through the first few parts of the novel, Lou is occasionally mentioned as a minor character, a kid in the background of his brothers' stories.  However, it is only when we get to hear his version of events that we begin to realise the full extent of the effect Tommy's behaviour has had.  By the time the story has reached its end, you start to wonder whether the Stefano men really are cursed.

As mentioned above (and in my other reviews of Tsiolkas' novels), this is not a writer who shies away from graphic descriptions of sex and violence - one of which forms the pivotal moment of the book, a scene that you will not forget in a hurry.  He manages to get under the reader's skin, and into his characters' minds, leaving you breathless at times as you try to keep up with Tommy's head-long descent into hell.  The constant random sex and masturbation does pall after a while; however, that is probably the point.  Tommy's attempts to solve his problems with pornographic videos end, like everything else, in failure.

One of the reasons I like Tsiolkas' books is the insight they give into Australian life and the goings-on in my adopted home town of Melbourne.  It's no coincidence that the story begins with one notorious political event, the sacking of Labor Prime Minister Gough Whitlam in 1975, and ends with another, the rise of extreme right-wing politician Pauline Hanson at the 1996 Federal Election.  The juxtaposition of one of the giants of Australian politics with one of its most reviled and ridiculed figures is surely no coincidence, the decline in the nation's political life mirroring Tommy's own fall.  The growth of Melbourne itself is also evident, with Tommy's horror at moving to the Eastern suburbs (Blackburn, about twenty minutes from the city), compared to Dom's later purchase of a house in Ringwood (about twice as far away).  I, coincidentally, live even further out, proof that the shift to the suburbs continues today...

The Jesus Man is a good example of Tsiolkas' style and themes, containing ideas reflected in his other three novels.  The depiction of a hedonistic lifestyle is, as mentioned, reminiscent of his debut novel Loaded while the use of multiple voices to narrate the novel foreshadows the way The Slap is constructed.  However, the most interesting link to another book is the relevance of religion and superstition, a subject covered in even more depth in his following work, Dead Europe.  The comparison of the all-seeing eye of God (and the icon of the Virgin Mary watching over Tommy) with the sinister crow, a sign of retribution from Aboriginal mythology, perfectly reflects the awkward mix of influences the ethnically-blended family consists of.  When you add the third element of the influential trinity, the hissing, ever-present television in Tommy's room, you have three ambivalent guardians watching over the poor, confused soul.

The Jesus Man is a wonderful book (even if it will make you watch Neighbours with a slightly more critical eye in future), and Tsiolkas is a very talented writer.  Even though I don't think The Slap was quite as good as it could have been, I'll be eagerly awaiting whatever he produces next.  There's just one thing I'm worried about though.  While there is obviously a lot of Tsiolkas in his books, I just hope that it's not all autobiographical - I wouldn't wish some of the things Tommy and his family go through on anyone...

*****
Thanks to Golda from Random House (Vintage) Australia for the review copy :)

Review Post 26 - Slap Happy

Last year, it seemed as if you couldn't step onto a train in Melbourne without seeing the familiar, grassy cover of Christos Tsiolkas' novel The Slap held twelve inches away from the face of one of the many unfortunate patrons of the city's creaking transport network. Every time I got up to fight my way to the doors in time to get off at the next station, I had to bob and weave through forests of paperbacks emblazoned with Tsiolkas' name in large white letters. Nominated for the Miles Franklin Award, Australia's equivalent of the Booker or Pulitzer prizes (but beaten by Tim Winton's Breath), this story of the consequences of a back-garden barbecue was, for a brief time, more prevalent than Twilight (sadly, as they always do, the vampires later made a big comeback on the trains).

Having picked up Dead Europe and Loaded at the library earlier this year, I was even keener to see for myself what all the fuss was about, and, luckily enough, last time I was dragged to the library by my elder daughter, Emily (in the thirty seconds I was permitted to look for adult books in between the searches in the children's section for such wonders as Topsy and Tim go to the Zoo and the latest Charlie and Lola delight), I noticed the iconic cover featuring an anguished child's face on a background of a lawn. Brilliant. And I even had my library card with me this time.

So it gives me no pleasure to say that I felt ever-so-slightly let down after reading it. Now, I'm not saying that it's a bad book, not by any means. It's a good read, particularly for anyone living in Melbourne (which probably explains the hundreds of copies on the 8.01 city loop service); it's just a little disappointing and uneven, and I walked away from the book without really getting what the author wanted to say.

The premise of The Slap is very simple. A group of friends and family gather at the house of Hector, a Greek Australian family man in his early forties, to celebrate summer in the way most Australians do, namely by throwing huge chunks of meat onto a barbecue, burning them, eating them and washing them down with copious amounts of alcohol. Somewhere between the cooking and the drinking, however, Hector's cousin, Harry, sees Hugo, the obnoxious three-year-old son of Hector's wife's friends, threatening to bash his son with a cricket bat. So he slaps him - hard, across the face... The consequences, both direct and unforeseen of this event, affect all of the people at the barbecue, straining and breaking ties of loyalty, pushing some people together and ripping others apart for ever.

Tsiolkas tells the story through the eyes of eight of his characters, each one getting sixty pages or so to continue the narrative, and it is here that I feel The Slap falls down a little. As in his earlier novels, the writer dwells on the sleazy and negative side of the human persona with infidelity, violence and alcoholism rife. However, where Loaded and Dead Europe were taut, lean and intoxicating, The Slap is, like its mostly middle-aged protagonists, flabby and bitter, and not all of the sections work. The two Greek-Australian men, Hector and Harry, are suitably macho, attractive and repellent at the same time, but this is home territory for Tsiolkas. When he moves onto some of the female characters, the narrative falters, the voices become less credible, and the writing appears to get bogged down in descriptions of dresses and page-long digressions about appearance.

By the time the resolution of the main plot arrives, around two-thirds of the way through the story, I was starting to wonder what had happened and where the book would go from here. Luckily, Tsiolkas manages to pull the story through thanks to some of the stronger characters at the end of the novel. The section seen through the eyes of Manolis, Hector's father, is wonderfully written, showing the sadness and sense of loss that come with old age - and also the sense of acceptance. The final part of the book which follows Richie, a gay teenager who is tangentially connected to many of the other characters, is one of the best, sensitively handled, showing the confusion and betrayal felt by the one character who does nothing wrong.

On finishing the book, I felt a little disappointed, but only because I had built the book up in my mind to be something it wasn't. This wasn't Loaded, amplified a hundred times: this was the story of the kind of people we saw in Loaded twenty years on, struggling with parenthood and a mortgage, but not averse to reverting to the behaviour of their glory days. As always with Tsiolkas though, I should also take a look at myself to understand my attitude towards this book and its inhabitants. Perhaps it's not the fact that the characters are so damaged which taints my enjoyment of this book; perhaps I'm just too removed from the kind of life he describes to really appreciate it.

Whatever the reason, I liked this without loving it, and I think the good people at the Miles Franklin made the right choice in giving Winton his fourth award. However, don't let me put you off The Slap. There aren't that many Australian books that make it on the world stage, and anything which is set in Melbourne is very welcome indeed. My adopted hometown is a great place to live in and read about - were it not, of course, for the trains...

Review Post 19 - Sex and Drugs and Local Elections

If Anthony Trollope had been born a century or so later, of Indian descent, on the island of Trinidad, he may well have written something like The Suffrage of Elvira. Instead, he sketched out his middle-class dramas among the backdrop of 19th-Century Westminster, and it was left to Nobel Prize winner V.S. Naipaul to inform us of the intricacies of Caribbean politics. This book, his second novel, is full of the same humour and social observation as A House for Mr. Biswas but is a shorter, more focused story - and it's a very good read.

The story revolves around a local election in the district of Elvira, and we follow businessman Surujpat Harbans as he discovers the hard way the cost of running for parliament. In order to ensure his victory, he needs the support of a majority of the eight thousand registered voters - four thousand Hindis, two thousand Negroes, one thousand Muslims and one thousand Spaniards. Of course, in a fledgling democracy such as his Caribbean island state, Harbans' strategy is not to campaign door-to-door with convincing policies and arguments but rather to gain the support of ethnic leaders who will deliver the votes for him. One would think then that having sealed deals with Baksh, the leader of the Muslims, and Chittaranjan, the leader of the Hindi community, Harbans would have the election in the bag. Alas, things do not run as smoothly as that in Trinidad...

The bewildered candidate soon finds out that promises are not always kept, allegiances can be changed fairly quickly and that the voters expect compensation for their promise of support. Despite his reluctance to part with his hard-earned money, his election committee (led by Baksh's son Foam, a young man born to work in politics) set out to ensure victory by buying off as many wavering voters as possible. Along the way they must lure voters away from Harbans' rival, Preacher, and contend with his associates, Lorkhoor (a mouthy young man with a van and a megaphone) and the redoubtable Mr. Cawfee. And then there is the dog. And the two missionaries. And black magic. Politics can be so complicated.

It's a chaotic, rambling tale, as much about ethnic rivalry (as opposed to ethnic tension) and corruption as it is about the noble art of politics, and Harbans' descent into a gibbering doler-out of free money is a joy to behold. The description of the actual election is very reminiscent of that in Framley Parsonage, with the roles of the patrons in the background played by the Duke of Omnum and Mrs. Dunstable in Trollope's book and Baksh and Chittaranjan in Naipaul's. The idea of exorbitant spending, despite supposedly strict rules against bribery, is also a common theme (something Trollope was especially big on, being a defeated candidate himself in real life). In Trinidad though, people take this more in their stride; as Baksh remarks, people expect a little something in return for their support, and they're not scared to ask for it.

After 220 wonderful pages, the election race has been run and won, and we get to see what happened to all our friends. The winning candidate makes one last appearance in Elvira and then vanishes, never to be seen again (or, at least, not for another five years). It's a telling reminder that some things never change in politics; the focus on personality is still true today - as is the total absence of any kind of policy throughout the book. However, after all the fun and games, Naipaul is still intelligent enough to raise the reader above the amusement, and in the very last sentence, he causes us to reflect on another side of the story, to think about what might have been and what will be. Just as in politics, there are (at least) two sides to every story...

*****

If Anthony Trollope had been born even later, of Greek descent, in the city of Melbourne, he most definitely would not have written Loaded. He probably wouldn't have read it either. In fact, he may have even decided to burn it. Christos Tsiolkas' first novel, like his later work Dead Europe, is full of illicit drugs and casual sex and is as far from the quaint tales of Barchester as it is possible to get. Loaded reminds me of some of the darker pieces I've seen by Dan Holloway and his Year Zero colleagues; raw, vibrant and slightly disturbing. Which is not to say that I didn't enjoy it.

Loaded is a 24-hour tour of Melbourne's inner suburbs in the company of Ari, a nineteen-year-old Greek-Australian. From the moment Ari wakes up in his brother's house on Saturday morning to the time he crashes into his own bed the following day, our hero snorts, injects, dances, flirts and screws like there's no tomorrow. In between the 'action' scenes of sex and drugs, the reader gets occasional glimpses into Ari's mind, receiving a run-down on life in his home city, Melbourne according to Ari: the brain dead middle-class residents of the East, the ethnic ghettos of the North, the Bohemian mix of students and drop-outs of the South and the refuse and scum floating out into the West. Ari hates them all.

Of course, what Ari hates most of all is his life or, at least, the life people want him to lead. He doesn't want to be Greek, gay, unemployed or macho; he just wants to escape to a place where labels don't matter, and he can be himself, whatever that is. Not seeing a place for himself in a hypocritical ethnic marriage, university or work, he seeks to block out the world around him with narcotics and transitory sexual acts with men (and occasionally women) he comes across on his travels around the night-time suburbs. But can he do this for ever?

Loaded is, in essence, a story of identity, a rejection of it, a search for it. Ari is Greek, but he's not; he despises the traditions of a culture imitating the mores of the old country, but he secretly feels a superiority over, and a loathing of, the 'Skips' (the white, as opposed to Mediterranean, Australians). He feels the need for a masculine man, but sex renders his partners feminine and conquered, thus eliminating any desire or possibility of romantic feelings. His upbringing has repelled him, and he wants to break away but doesn't have the energy, or the guts to do it, despite the urgings of his friends. He's stuck in a very bad place.

In portraying Ari's life, Tsiolkas is also painting a picture of modern Melbourne, though it is far from pretty. In contrast to the usual harmonious story of a vibrant, integrated, multicultural city, the view in Loaded is one of a holding pen for the poor and downtrodden of the world, longing to return to their homelands, rotting in ethnic suburbs, pretending they are keeping up their old traditions. The writer doesn't really have a lot of nice things to say about my adopted home town (which is a lovely place to live - trust me) and sees the experiment as a failure, with people walling themselves off in big suburban McMansions as soon as they get enough money. I'm not saying he's completely wrong, but he's definitely Mr. Glass-Half-Empty.

This book is not as compelling as Dead Europe (which, by exposing more of the protagonist's weaknesses, made the story more intriguing and convincing), but it is a highly thought-provoking story of life on the other side of the garden fence. What stays with me after reading this book is the sense of a parallel Melbourne and a life I have never (but could have) lived. There are thousands of Aris all over the city, high on speed and hassling people on trains, slumped in a friend's bedroom in a marijuana haze, or stretched out in their own vomit in a tenement, arms covered in scars and scabs. The life I lead is one which Ari despises; I'm more than happy to be in my shoes rather than his.

Review Post 12a - Australians All, So Please Rejoice

With my new regime of posting this year (weekly posts on multiple books, enforced mainly by other commitments and a dodgy back which doesn't like sitting at the computer all day and all night), my little compositions appear to have become more theme-based of late - as seen in my previous effort. Even so, I've outdone myself with today's offering: not only were all three books borrowed from the lovely people at Narre Warren library, they're all by Australian writers. Beauty. Pull up a lamington, and let's get stuck into a belated Australia Day literary bonanza!

*****

We head first to Brisbane, the capital city of the northern state of Queensland, to enjoy a book by Nick Earls. I've read a fair few of his early books which could be categorised as lad-lit, albeit of a high calibre (more Nick Hornby than Mike Gayle), and usually contained a fair amount of slapstick moments (a date, a need to urinate, an unalert cat - let's just leave it at that). However, his previous novel, The Thompson Gunner, marked a move away from his usual style into a more adult, dare I say literary, genre, and his latest book, The True Story of Butterfish, continues that trend.

Curtis Holland, a member of the incredibly successful (and now imploded) group Butterfish, has come home to Brisbane to get away from it all and get on with a second career as a small-time producer. He buys a house next door to the Winter family: single mum Kate, Lolita-esque sixteen-year-old Anneliese and grungy teenager Mark. Throw in his (gay) brother Patrick and a surprise visit from Derek, the off-the-rails lead singer of his band, and you have the mixture of characters around whom Curtis' new life will form.

However, it's a bit more subtle than that, and the story is just as much about people who are no longer around as it is about those who are. All of the characters are making new starts, attempting to move on after losing, or being rejected by, someone special in their life. Patrick has accepted the end of his long-term relationship, and the Winter children attempt to balance their new life with occasional visits to their father. And Curtis? Well, he has more than his fair share of ghosts to deal with on his return Down Under.

It's a bittersweet story, and Earls handles it skilfully, avoiding the slapstick and forced happy endings of his early work in favour of a snapshot of a life most ordinary (if you ignore the fact that Butterfish sold twenty million records in the US). Does Curtis manage to create an ordinary life in the Brisbane suburbs, or does he, like many an Earls protagonist, manage to mess things up in a spectacular way? It's worth finding out...

*****

Our next book also takes us off to sunny Queensland (after a short detour via North America). Australian superstar writer Peter Carey's His Illegal Self is centred around Che, a young boy from a rich American family. One minute he is off to see his long-absent mother, the next he is hitchhiking along unpaved roads in the Sunshine Coast hinterland in Australia. As you can imagine, this causes poor Che (and the reader) a fair amount of confusion.

Set in the early 1970s, a time when the Vietnam war was raging and young men from both the States and Australia were being sent off to the slaughter, His Illegal Self touches on the political counter culture of the time and brings Che (or Jay, as his East Coast grandmother prefers to call him) into contact with a group of society drop-outs in the Queensland bush, on the run just as much from the brutal police state of Premier Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen as from the threat of the draft.

The book's blurb concentrates on Carey's depiction of the innocent child, stolen from his home environment and forced to make sense of the exotic, alien Queensland landscape, but I didn't think that Che actually stood out much. For me, the character of Dial, the academic with the hidden past, was much more interesting. Once this highly educated working-class girl found herself in the jungle setting, her carefully-constructed persona (an image built to distance herself from her humble beginnings) slowly starts to crumble. The contrast with the enigmatic hippie Trevor, illiterate but street smart (or should that be bush savvy?!) is fascinating: Dial finds herself manipulated by the community she has landed in and is frustrated at her inability to outwit a bunch of stinking drop-outs.

I found it hard to get into this book; the first few chapters were good, but then it slowed down with a burst of flashbacks and multiple perspectives. It wasn't until Dial and Che were established in their new (temporary) home that the novel came to life again and Carey was able to show us the effect of a change of environment on our hapless American protagonists. In a book that ponders the meaning of family and strangers (and where we're not always on the side of the family) and takes the main characters half way across the world, Dial (which, of course, is a nickname) is very aptly named: Anna Xenos - in Greek, the stranger or foreigner...

*****

Our third slice of Australiana comes courtesy of Greek Melbourne writer Christos Tsiolkas, and I have a warning for the delicately formed among you: if you are offended by homosexuality, sleeping around, drug use, bodily fluids and functions, blasphemy and anti-Semitism, it's time to go and do something else - your time here today is done. If however, you are still curious, let's continue, and I'll do my best to make sense of Tsiolkas' novel Dead Europe. No promises, though.

The writer divides his story into two strands: one follows young Greek-Australian Isaac on a trip around Europe, starting in Athens and moving on to Venice, Prague, Berlin, Paris and London; the second starts in Greece in the 1930s and is part folklore, part horror story. The reader suspects that the two parts will intersect, but the way they eventually do is as fascinating as it is horrific. Tsiolkas combines casual sex, fantasy, horror, violence and racial tension in a novel which starts slowly and gently increases the pressure until something has to explode. And does.

The genesis of the story is when a Greek couple agree to hide the son of a Jew from the invading German forces in return for a box full of jewels; however, the wife (after certain illicit nocturnal activities) persuades the husband to kill the man in order to avoid the risk of retaliation from the Germans. This act of brutality and betrayal has far-reaching consequences - both in time and space. As Isaac goes about his merry way on the old continent, he begins to experience strange sensations, feeling out of sorts, physically and mentally. And then he starts to get strange cravings...

To be honest, I struggled, initially, to identify with Isaac. Not particularly because he is gay, more because of the way he seemed to be screwing and snorting his way across Europe. We are expected to believe that he loves his partner, Colin, who is the breadwinner of the pair and stuck in Melbourne, while Isaac behaves like a gap-year student on a twisted Kontiki tour. Later, it becomes clear that this behaviour is actually suggestive of events which will happen towards the end of the book; Isaac is, almost from the start, unable to control his desires, be they for sex, drugs, alcohol or blood.

I am a little squeamish at times (definitely not a big fan of slasher films), and there were times, standing and reading on my commute home, where I visibly flinched at some of the events of the later stages (probably making other passengers edge carefully towards the other end of the carriage). It was hard reading; there was some powerful and disturbing stuff to take in. It is, though, precisely this which makes the book a success; its ability to shock the reader and make them consider Isaac's situation and how they would act in that position. Tsiolkas also plays a little with the reader as we are never completely convinced that we understand what is real and what is imagined; as you may have gathered from what I've already said about Isaac, he is far from being a trustworthy narrator by the end of his travels.

What's it all about? The new world (Australia) versus the old; the curse and strength of the Jew; racial and ethnic tension; sexual freedom and exploitation. And blood. The blood of your ancestors running through your veins, and the blood keeping you alive. A thirst for blood.

You'll love this book. You may not enjoy it.