Tag Archives: Melbourne

The Slap – in your house this Thursday!

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Community Service Reminder! 

The TV series of Christos Tsiolkas’ Melbourne novel The Slap (reviewed here) is starting this Thursday 8.30pm (Australian Eastern time) on the ABC.  I just found out that one of the scriptwriters is the actor/author Brendan Cowell!  Yes, he who wrote for and starred in Love My Way and who recently published his first novel, How it Feels.  (He even appears as a minor character in the series… watch out for him!) 

And here is Tsiolkas, who was an associate producer for the series, talking about the cast:

My first time on set happened to be at the Alphington house where the slap happens, so all the cast were there, and to suddenly have the experience of suddenly seeing these fictional characters from my imagination, in flesh and blood, was truly humbling and truly awe-inspiring and it felt like the perfect cast. I can’t imagine the characters without seeing the faces of the actors and there isn’t a wrong note at all.

Sounds pretty happy with it, doesn’t he?  You can read the rest of his interview here.   And watch a preview here.  

I’m thinking this could be good…

Melbourne – Sophie Cunningham (2011)

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How better to end this Month of Melbourne than with Sophie Cunningham’s hot-off-the-presses cultural history?  I had a surreal moment while reading this book recently: I was riding the No. 19 tram up Royal Parade when I came to the following passage:

When I was a child my dad used to take my brother and me to watch Carlton play at Princes Park.  My most vivid memory of those years is of my three-year-old brother, Saul, strapped into a baby car seat that was then tied to the wire fence at the back of the outer so he could get a good view…

As I glanced up from the page for a moment and looked out the tram window, there was Princes Park itself – a very Melbourne moment, you might say!

This memoir of the city of Melbourne (part of a series commissioned by UNSW Press to celebrate Australia’s capital cities) is not a piece of hardline investigative journalism, nor a scandalous tell-all biography: this is a loving memoir told by a person who never tries to pretend that she could be objective about the place she grew up in.  Cunningham, a respected novelist and publisher, is clearly a supporter of her city, yet she is not sentimental.  She doesn’t neglect to point out its faults, yet clearly loves the place, for all its imperfections.

The memoir is divided into seasonal chapters: we begin in Summer 2009 and we end in the following summer, having followed Cunningham in her personal journey through the culture, geography and history of the city she loves.  This division seems appropriate, somehow, since Melbourne is a place where its changeable weather really affects people – what we wear, how we travel, how we feel.   (I completely agree with her frank description of Melbourne winters as ‘long, unpleasantly clammy and one is inevitably depressed by the end of them’.) 

All sorts of geographies and topographies are explored – social, artistic, sporting, architectural… Cunningham’s life experience has allowed her to live at all these levels and her knowledge of the many layers of Melbourne’s story is impressive. Cunningham grew up in the middle of the ‘Carlton Push’ (a version of its Sydney sister?) – a group of 1970s writers and thespians who oscillated between producing great art and being professional ratbags, and Cunningham is honest about the tensions within this volatile group.  Her arts upbringing and subsequent publishing work brought her into contact with Melbourne’s arts royalty and she draws upon these connections (and many fascinating Meanjin articles) to tell her story.

Cunningham wryly expounds upon the big split in Melbourne’s inner-city social geography, defined by its famous Yarra river which cuts it into North and South.  She offers up the following email exchange from between her friends as representative of the way Melbournians like to poke fun at this geographical and moral divide:

Email 1: …I should warn my North Fitzroy friends that both trams will take you OVER THE RIVER.  This is meant to happen, just act normal…

Email 2: Wait, what? Hold on – you mean if you keep heading south there’s a RIVER?!

Email 3:…I’m all up for journeys to far-flung climes.  As long as I can bring my cynical North-of-the-river sneer and sense of intellectual superiority and be sneered at in turn by those with an inflated sense of their own prettiness and of their importance to the city’s arts…

And so on…  Cunningham herself is embedded within these tribal divides and yet is able to rise above them when necessary to communicate a broader picture of Melbourne’s culture. 

Melbourne is the birthplace of Australian Rules football, of which Cunningham is an avid supporter (she barracks passionately for Geelong), hence there is rather more football-talk than this non-sporty reader might have wanted.  However it’s to Cunningham’s credit that these passages are still fascinating to read – the history of this unique game is interesting and the emotions that it provokes are well captured by her lucid writing.  She explains the city-stopping nature of the September Grand Final:

You wouldn’t (I didn’t) auction a house in the last weekend of September you wouldn’t call an election, and even having friends over to dinner involves endless emails that go something like this… ‘Could we book in Friday September 10? I doubt if Geelong would be playing that night but if they are we can change.’

Well, Geelong did play that night, Cunningham tells us, so of course the dinner was cancelled.

Cunningham is skilled at showcasing the general in the particular, the history in the moment, the public in the personal.  It’s the personal nature of this book, I think, that is its great strength, because its human scale allows the reader to feel involved and engaged, even in the more obscure details of Melbourne’s quirky cultural histories (for instance, the history of Melbourne’s drain-dwelling tribes!).  This is not a long book – only about 280 (small) pages, but it captures the heart of Melbourne beautifully.  I was sad to come to the end of it.

Verdict:  Loving, personal memoir of a cultured city – well-researched and a pleasure to read.

Read more: Cunningham is also a talented fiction writer –  you can read extracts from her two novels here.

The Time We Have Taken – Steven Carroll (2008)

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This is not a book to read impatiently!  Steven Carroll’s Miles Franklin Award-winner The Time We Have Taken is a poetic, atmospheric work that forms part of his ‘Glenroy trilogy’ (although it may be read on its own).  Carroll introduced us to his characters in The Art of the Engine Driver (2001) and The Gift of Speed  (2004), set in Glenroy in Melbourne’s northwest, and this novel revisits his characters at the beginning of a new decade.

The year is 1970 and an atmosphere of boredom prevails. It seems the entire suburb is snoozing in the summer sun, the political upheavals of the times having almost completely passed it by.  One resident, however, hatches a plan that will offer some much-needed excitement to the suburb’s jaded citizens…

The reader is gently taken for a visit into various houses as, chapter by chapter, we get to know the characters, family and business ties of the area.  There is Rita, a middle-aged woman, alone but not necessarily lonely, since she has separated from her husband and her only son has left home.  Of similar age, but of a different class, is ‘Mrs Webster’ (we are not allowed, it seems, to get to know her on a first-name basis).  She, too, is left alone since her business-magnate, factory-owning husband died, but perhaps she is lonely.  A potential friendship is hinted at between these two different women, but the class divide looms strong….

Michael, Rita’s son, is at university and in love with that slightly-irritating, aloof and unknowable type of idealised girl that male writers are always populating their novels with.  She is above him, she is a saint, she is a sexual cipher who may or may not have a past with other men, etc, etc… The warm dreaminess of Michael’s lovelorn state is nicely realised, but Madeleine, his elusive love, can only ever be a mystery to him – and to the reader.

Although ostensibly set it the 1970s, Carroll’s novel dips in and out of other times as his characters fall back into their memories or fly ahead to an imagined future.  He is particularly adept at a kind of accessible stream-of-consciousness style, so that the memories and thoughts of one Glenroy resident blend seamlessly into descriptions of the street he lives on and so into the memories of one of his neighbours…  These blended and woven memories form, ultimately, a meditation upon time and its passing:

The time we have taken is no more or less than it takes for a dreamer to roll over in bed and wake from the dream.  No more or less time than it takes for a suburb to be born and grow, for its streets and footpaths to be scooped out of the paddocks of old farms and wild thistle country…

Because the ‘burbs are not at the centre of political change (despite a pre-prime-ministerial visit by Whitlam!), change is felt rather than seen.  It’s ‘in the air’ and some residents have a sense that what was their time now belongs to someone (something?) else.  The factories close down and they do not make things any more.  Decisions about manufacturing will very soon be taken offshore and out of their hands.  Is this a novel about the birth of economic rationalism?  Of globalisation?  Carroll will not be drawn: he leaves it up to his readers.

Upon my first reading, I felt the narrative never really ‘took off’; it seemed to be continuously in second gear.  I wanted a climax or a dramatic arc rather than a series of episodes in the emotional and community lives of the suburb.  Although the dreaminess of Carroll’s style is in some ways appropriate for the time and place – 70s non-bohemian suburbs –  it can, at times, make the novel feel insubstantial.  However, I think it has to be taken as a chapter in a greater work – a work that is still continuing.  Its goal, like its British counterpart Dance to the Music of Time, is to record a time that has passed away – to record it in undramatic detail, and to let other people – the readers and critics – analyse, politicise, pass judgment and draw out its morals.  This is a ‘quiet’ book that could easily be dismissed as slight, but its gentle telling of small joys and slow declines is haunting in its own way.

Verdict: Slow-paced, poetic narrative of life in 1970s suburban Melbourne.  Not for impatient readers!

Read more: Carroll has just published his ‘prequel’ to the Glenroy trilogy, The Spirit of Progress (2011).  For those new to Carroll, this might be a good place to start, so you can read the history of his Glenroy characters in chronological order and get the full cumulative effect!  And you can listen to a podcast by Carroll about his work here.

The Getting of Wisdom – Henry Handel Richardson (1910)

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When I first heard of this book, I remember thinking it sounded like a dusty boring tome written by a gruff old man.  Imagine my surprise when I found out that ‘Henry Handel’ Richardson was actually Ethel Richardson and that it was a lively school story about a young girl!  Richardson, like many female authors of the time, took a male nom de plume in order to get published.  The ponderous-sounding title is actually ironic – Richardson is parodying those serious moral-of-the-story books that were so popular in Victorian times and into the Edwardian era.  This is in fact a tongue-in-cheek half-serious half-comic telling of a young girl’s adolescence in a world that at the time constricted girls in frustrating ways.

The story starts in country Victoria, where Laura, our heroine, resides pleasantly with three siblings and an impoverished widow-mother.  The time has come to send Laura, as the eldest child, away to boarding school in Melbourne (apparently Richardson modelled the school on Melbourne’s still-extant Presbyterian Ladies College, for which she got into rather a lot of trouble from outraged principals and parents when the book was published!)  She does not present a flattering portrait of this school: teachers (‘mistresses’) are alternately overly-strict or foolish, rules are absurd and students are snobbish.  Laura is constantly falling into trouble because of her ‘wild’ tendencies to speak when not spoken to, to express her knowledge of the world rather than enact false modesty, and generally to be headstrong when girls are taught to present a false face of passivity to the world.

A sense of place is established early on and we get a fascinating glimpse into Edwardian Melbourne: people still routinely drive a horse-and-carriage to run errands and students visit the Eastern Market (demolished in the 60s, it was the Queen Victoria Market of their time).  In some ways, social geography of Melbourne has not changed all that much: upon the discovery of the fact that one girl’s father runs a newspaper, we are told that ‘Lucy of Toorak could not recover from her amusement’:

 ‘An uncle who keeps a newspaper!  A newspaper!  Well, I’m glad none of my uncles are so rummy.  Say, does he leave it at front doors himself in the morning?’

Oh the shame of having a father who works for a living rather than has an inherited ‘income’!  Laura can never quite decide whether she wants to be part of the privileged groups in the school, joining in with bullying the shopkeepers’ daughters, or retreat into proud separateness.  Many of the dramas of the story consist of Laura’s attempts to ‘get in’ with various groups in the school, most of which turn out disastrously.

Strong friendships / romances between the schoolgirls is a recurring theme: Laura both receives and gives romantic attention.  Her crush on an older student, Evelyn, is intense but is threatened as the object of her affections starts to explore the new world of ‘adult’ heterosexual romance.  Laura suffers from agonies of jealousy when Evelyn spends time with men, but she herself has no compassion for a younger girl who adores her.  How Laura treats her younger follower is one of the disturbing incidents in this book, but contributes to a realistic shades-of-grey portrait of Laura’s character.

One of the saddest events is presented in a short, almost throwaway, line in which the fates of two of the most ambitious students at the school are revealed.  In the Australia of 1910 mere ambition was not enough for female students to achieve their dreams: many were thwarted by domesticity once they left school.  But we have high hopes for the protagonist, whose determinedness seems to promise a brighter future:

‘I’ve tons of wishes… I want to see things – yes, that most of all.  Hundreds and thousands of things.  People, and places, and what they eat, and how they dress, and China, and Japan… just tons!’

Laura is essentially ahead of her time – she wants more than the stifled lady-hood that is offered her, and she dreams large, far beyond the scope of her genteel upbringing.  Part of the pleasure of this book is the prospect, hinted at but never fully described, of a young woman encountering the new freedoms for women that we know will eventually come about.

Verdict:  Lively school story with a strong heroine and a fascinating glimpse of early Melbourne.  Surprisingly modern, for a book  published in 1910!

Watch out for: if you can, get hold of the Text Publishing edition of this book (2001) – it has an introduction by Germaine Greer, which is most enlightening!

Melbourne Writers’ Festival 2011 roundup

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The Melbourne Writers’ Festival finished last weekend – here are some interesting summaries of the Festival from around the web:

 Happy reading!

Unpolished Gem – Alice Pung (2006)

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One of the best things about Melbourne is its multiculturalism, so this memoir is an appropriate start to a Month of Melbourne!  A lot of great art and writing has been coming out of Melbourne’s West lately, of which this book is an example: this is the true story of a young girl of Cambodian-Chinese background growing up in Melbourne’s West (Footscray and then Braybrook), and struggling between two cultural worlds, both of which exert a lot of pressure on her.  As well as having been possibly the cutest kid ever (see photo on cover), Pung is a talented writer with a distinctive voice – and she’s funny.  She can really see the lighter side of dire situations.  With finesse she highlights the absurdities, the clashes of cultures and the misunderstandings that occur when people migrate from one land to another.  She paints lively portraits of her immediate and extended family and makes us see Melbourne and its suburbs through fresh eyes – the eyes of her parents, the first generation immigrants and refugees, relieved to have escaped the tragedies of Cambodia and not yet jaded about such First World wonders as the ‘little green man’ who tells you when to cross the road:

This little Green Man was an eternal symbol of government existing to serve and protect.  And any country that could have a little green flashing man was benign and wealthy beyond imagining…

Australia does not, of course, turn out to be quite the rich utopia it seems at first: there is loneliness and racism and marginalisation to contend with.  Pung’s family tries valiantly to ‘fit in’, as she describes:

We are trying to assimilate, to not stand out from the neighbours, to not bring shame to our whole race by carrying over certain habits from the old country, such as growing chickens in the backyard or keeping goats as pets.

(It’s interesting that we are currently in a time when keeping chickens in the backyard is becoming increasingly popular and seen as the height of environmental responsibility! Back then, it was just a mark of ethnic ‘otherness’.)

Pung set out to write a non-typical Asian memoir – it’s not about fleeing Cambodia’s war or Mao’s cultural revolution or any other dramatic world-changing event, but about the domestic (yet still dramatic) events of a life lived in the suburbs. As she explains in an interview:

I thought, damn it, I’m going to write a book about yellow people aspiring to become white middle class!  It’s not going to start with the struggles of war, but something more ironically Marxist – it would be about a working class family and their petit bourgeois dreams.  And damn those who perpetuate the stereotype of the joyless Asian.  My characters are going to laugh…

And this memoir strikes just the right balance between humour and pathos: Alice is a spunky, strong character who tries to be a hero for everyone in her life and live up to the weighty hopes of new migrants that their children will have every opportunity that they were denied.  Alice is both extraordinarily brave and an ordinary, vulnerable girl, and we follow her development through a series of increasingly posh schools (government school, Catholic school, selective school, Grammar school), proceeding dutifully up the steps from working- to middle-class.  Of course, the moment she draws breath the middle-class dream starts to crack – especially when it becomes clear that no amount of study and perfect scores will gain a non-Anglo person anything other than ‘outsider’ status among the privileged partying blondness of the grammar school top cliques (think Ja’mie in Summer Heights High!).

The teenaged Alice struggles valiantly and, at times, comically to achieve academic results and be the perfect supportive daughter at the same time, helping out regularly in the family electrical appliances business.  But all this perfection comes at a cost and before she can sit her Year 12 exams she finds herself having a nervous breakdown…

I was seventeen, and all the right things seemed to happen to me at the right time.  I had got into a good school.  I got the usual Asian High-Achiever marks.  I had even been asked out by a boy.  But the “right” things, like everything else in my life, had their false, unsettling undertones…

Although told with a gentle voice, this memoir contains some serious messages about valuing the human person over the academic achievements.  It also leads the reader to a greater appreciation of the first- and second-generation migrants who contribute to, but don’t reap, the full benefits of Australia’s prosperity.  A particularly timely reminder is to be had in the fact that, as Pung has described elsewhere, Pung’s father paid a people smuggler to come to Australia in the first place.  This is the reality of war and dispossession that Australians need to understand: if you’re not justified in paying a people smuggler to get away from the Cambodian killing fields, when are you ever justified?  Anyway, without such movement of people Australia wouldn’t have had the fabulous Ms Pung! Now, that’s a sad thought.

Free the Refugees.

Verdict:  Witty and intelligent memoir of growing up Asian in Melbourne’s western suburbs.  Entertaining, with serious food for thought.

Read more:  Pung edited a collection of essays on a similar theme, called Growing up Asian in Australia (2008), and she’s just recently filled in the details of her father’s horrific experience in Cambodia, in Her Father’s Daughter (2011).  See her website for details.

A Month of Melbourne!

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Welcome Spring and hello September!  I think we need some literary goodness to balance all the football that will soon be upon us (September being the Aussie Rules Grand Final month), so I’m dedicating this month to literary Melbourne.  We’ll look at some recent Melbourne writing, both fiction  and non-fiction, and some old faves… My favourite Melbourne novel is Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip (reviewed here).  What’s yours?  If you have any recommendations, do share!…

In My Skin – Kate Holden (2005)

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And now for a spot of non-fiction… You would think there’d be a huge divide between studying Classics at Melbourne Uni and living as a heroin-addicted prostitute, but author Kate Holden somehow managed to cross it.  This memoir is the opposite of one of those callgirl-made-good stories where the woman pulls herself up by her bootstraps and finally gets the education and opportunities she always dreamed of.  Starting at the other end of the socioeconomic scale, Holden is of a relatively privileged background: her parents are a teacher and a scientist, her childhood home is book-lined etc, etc…. Like many other such people in Melbourne she eventually studied Arts at Melbourne University.  Unlike most such people, she became addicted to heroin in the 90s and it was quickly downhill thereafter, as she details in this unusual memoir.   

 

Anyone who has read Holden’s regular column in The Age knows that she can write: she has a delicacy of style and a frankness which balance each other out nicely.  This works well for her in this memoir, where she can somehow manage to detail disturbing sexual incidents without offending or distancing the reader.  She is self-deprecating, intelligent and restrained in her descriptions, qualities which make this more than just a ‘misery memoir’.  Holden reflects honestly upon her unusual choices and attempts to offer her readers some explication, if not justification, of her actions.

 

The awkward teenaged Holden ‘was going to be an archaeologist who read Virginia Woolf in a tent’.  But university is not what she expected and she finds herself increasingly isolated, beneath a ‘camouflage of black clothes and conceit’.   This all changes when, at 21, she accepts an invitation to share a house in the Melbourne suburb of St Kilda (in the days when students could still afford to live there).  Suddenly she’s in the middle of everything dangerous and exciting.  As Holden explains:

 

Heroin was all around us in St Kilda… there were fashion shoots of sullen anorexics in smeared make-up and the suburb we lived in had a high population of tottering, lean-thighed people with harsh mouths and dirty jeans.  But it was a scene I’d never known.

 

Her eventual entrance into this scene is domestic rather than dramatic: her gentle boyfriend James takes to disappearing regularly to do heroin with friends.  Sick of feeling left out, Holden simply joins in one day.  Seemingly only a short time later, she is desperately strapped for cash: borrowing money off her sister and losing it, hungry at home but, with the gas cut off, unable to even cook 2-minute noodles.  (Life really is bad when the only thing you can afford to eat is crunchy uncooked noodles.)

 

Holden takes us through the pulls and pushes of the heroin scene, showing us how ‘the string of habit slacked, pulled tight’.  As she descends into Melbourne’s underbelly what stands out in her vivid descriptions is the sordid pettiness of this scene – it’s not what it looks like on primetime TV!  The world of organised semi-legal prostitution is a world of (effectively useless) ‘panic buttons’ in smelly brothel rooms and scheming managers who are always asking for mysterious extra ‘fees’.  There’s something blackly funny about a scene where Holden tries to point out to the manager of a brothel that extracting an extra fee for tea and coffee is ‘illegal’, in a context where women are sometimes savaged by unscrupulous men, with no recourse to legal or other action.  Indeed, one disturbing incident in particular seems to call into question the idea that prostitution could ever really be made ‘safe’ for women.

 

One niggle with this book is that it’s not completely clear what attitude to prostitution Holden finally takes: although she doesn’t shy away from exposing its exploitative and violent side, at other times she implies that it’s merely a service like any other, taking pride in telling taxi drivers that she works in the sex ‘industry’ – she even enjoys the work, at times.  Ultimately, this book remains a politics-free zone, which I find puzzling, given Holden’s arts-educated background.  I kept waiting for some acknowledgement that she’s aware of the wider ongoing debate about the ethics of prostitution, even if she prefers not to engage with it… but it never came.  This omission doesn’t detract from the bravery of the book, but it does feel, after all that soul-baring, that she holds back in the end.

 

Verdict:  A memoir of drug-addiction written with bravery and delicacy, but readers looking for a more in-depth response to the complex issue of prostitution should look elsewhere.

 

Read and… check out Kate Holden’s blog, Persiflage and Perfidy, where she declaims upon all things literary.

  

Monkey Grip – Helen Garner (1977)

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This has to be one of the best opening lines in a novel:

 In the old brown house on the corner, a mile from the middle of the city, we ate bacon for breakfast every morning of our lives…

Makes you want to read on, doesn’t it? Or fry up some bacon?  This is the story of a young woman, Nora,  in 1970s inner city Melbourne.  She's living in various semi-communal situations and trying to be true to herself while looking after her daughter Gracie, amidst all the upheaval and anarchy of the time.  The best quality of this highly-autobiographical novel is its immediacy: from that first page we are plunged back into 1970s counterculture Australia and what an interesting place it is!  Nora lives among people of varying levels of functionality… other feminist single mothers like her, random children (who are brought up by everyone), and some stragglers like ‘Javo’, who is ‘teetering as many were that summer on the dizzying edge of smack’.  Nora is falling in love with him and we know from the start this can’t be good…

Garner’s novel is beautifully written – often quite tender and forgiving towards its hapless characters, but not afraid to show the seedier side of some people’s choices.  Atmospheric, summery, creaky, sweaty… Garner has always been a writer who emphasises physical sensations.  This creates a wonderful feel of ‘being there’ for the reader.  Nora and her funny little daughter Gracie are characters to care about – Nora is sometimes strong, sometimes vulnerable, not always likeable but totally believable.  We want things to work out for her, we want her boyfriend Javo to get off the drugs finally and for the adults in Gracie’s life to stop letting her down.

I can’t ignore the specific ‘sense of place’ in this novel – it’s a character in itself: the baked yet-to-be-yuppified flat streets of Melbourne’s inner north – ‘a mile from the middle of the city’.  It’s not that you can’t appreciate Garner’s evocative descriptions unless you live here, but it’s certainly a bonus for Melbournian readers.  We know about the beauty of the Exhibition Gardens where Nora and her friends walk and we know that the ‘University Cafe’ isn’t actually at the university.  The Uni, the Markets, Shakahari, Elgin and Grattan, the Palais… she charts a detailed social geography of her life at the time.  Houses of friends are known simply by the street they’re situated on: ‘Grattan Street’, ‘Rathdowne Street’, ‘Nicholson’…  Nora’s up-and-down life consists of repeatedly trekking between these more-or-less communal local houses, from drama to drama, with the occasional dash down the Great Ocean Road or to Sydney when it all gets too much.

This has to be, for me, one of the top ten Australian novels.  It’s honest, skilfully written and intruiging.  Structurally, it’s divided into short segments somewhat like diary entries, each with its own sardonic title: e.g. ‘Flapping Like a Bloody Bandage’.  In a 1986 interview Garner explains:

It’s based on a diary and that’s why it’s got that rather broken-up structure… But I didn’t think of myself as a writer then.  I was just messing around.

It’s all emotionally real and we trust Garner, who certainly is a writer, to tell us the whole fascinating story of what life was like for her at the time.

Verdict: Believable account of 1970s living on the edge, told with grace and sensitivity.  A must-read, especially if you live in or have ever visited Melbourne.

Random trivia: Monkey Grip was made into a movie in the early eighties starring Noni Hazelhurst – yes, of Playschool fame! It’s worth watching, but hippies don’t look like hippies when they’re given eighties fashions and hairstyles…

The Slap – Christos Tsiolkas (2008)

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And now for something Australian…the premise of this novel (soon to be a TV series) is of a barbecue-stopping event: a spoilt child gets over-excited, annoys the entire party and gets himself slapped, but – shock! – not by his own parents.  Of course this much-read novel is not really about the slap at all, but about the tensions between multiple ‘tribes’ which exist in modern cities like Melbourne (where this novel is set).  Here are just some of the tensions  between groups Tsiolkas presents:

  • The Anglos look down upon the Greeks
  • The Greeks look down upon the Indians
  • The religious look down upon the irreligious
  • The parents look down upon the childless
  • The home-owners look down upon the renters, etc..

The world of The Slap is a multicultural dystopia, a world of constant mistrust, of ‘sticking to one’s own’, of punishing those who dare to stray outside their original tribe.  And yet the irony, which Tsiolkas points out through the actions of his characters, is that they are all often shifting from one cultural world to another, changing between them as is convenient and indeed belonging to multiple groups.  People are not really consistent, as Tsiolkas shows us repeatedly. 

The ‘slap’ of the title is a mere precursor to a staggering list of errant behaviour  – rape, adultery, alcoholism, etc – but these events change colour depending on which tribe’s point of view we are given access to by Tsiolkas.  Cleverly, he twists us around, makes us see the other side, and what emerges is not this or that event but the event’s situation within the value scheme of a particular character.  Friendships and families are divided and loyalties are tested; new alliances are formed.  It’s all very political – a kind of rise and fall of many little empires that make up the human networks in a big city.

We get a genuine sense of the city and of the changes that happen to it over time.  As one Greek-Australian character muses about Melbourne’s inner city suburbs:

The houses had not seemed so pretty back then, they had seemed small, ugly and squat.  Now that the wogs had moved out and the yuppies had moved in, the houses had been renovated, beautified, the streets stank of money…

Tsiolkas captures these sociological shifts and a sense of uneasiness among the newly moneyed generations that urban development has not brought about the utopia their migrant parents had hoped for.

A warning: from the first page the reader will be plunged into the murky sexist / violent workings of (some) males’ minds.  Tsiolkas is reporting this behaviour, not endorsing it, but those who are queasy about explicit misogyny should take heed. Furthermore, a weakness of the book is Tsiolkas’ female characters: all but one I found unconvincing.  We are allowed (indeed, have forced upon us) access to the mental states of the male characters, but the female characters, who often act against their own interests, are relatively opaque.

Tsiolkas is no racist or monoculturalist (see link to an interview with him below) – he values the diversity of cultures he has grown up with, but the focus of this particular novel is on divisions rather than connections between people.  That the messages in this book are largely negative – warnings rather than recommendations – may make it too dark overall for some readers, but the fearless presentation of a complex urban reality makes it worth a reader’s forbearance.

Verdict: A dark novel of substance, imperfectly executed, and a great debate-starter. 

Read and… check out this interesting interview with Tsiolkas at the Edinburgh Festival: , in which he talks about class, race, growing up Greek in Australia, etc. (And watch out for the TV series – but it’s never as good as the book, is it?)