DLR Library Voices: Christos Tsiolkas

DLR Libraries recently hosted a reading and interview with up-and-coming Australian author Christos Tsiolkas in County Hall, Dún Laoghaire. It was a sell-out, and I know many more of you would have loved to attend, but interest in Tsiolkas has become stratospheric since his book The Slap was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize 2010 on 27th July. Tickets suddenly began to go like hot cakes, so to prevent disappointment in the future, please contact The Pavilion Theatre box office before a Library Voices event, as it now does all the ticketing for DLR Library Voices.

Having just finished The Slap I was intrigued to find out what the author was like. As I'm sure everyone is aware by now, even if you haven't read it, the book has caused all kinds of controversy for its portrayal of today's Australian middle class as foul-mouthed, mercenary, brutish, sexually dissolute, drug-addled....I could go on.

Although I rattled through this novel at a rate of knots, mainly in a desperate quest to find one character I liked, the question that vexed me throughout was; what is the message that Tsiolkas is trying to get across? It certainly has nothing to do with the morality of slapping children, and reads as a "state of the nation" novel. What makes it interesting is it gives a completely alternate view of Australia from the one we're used to; TV soaps like Home and Away, Neighbours, All Saints, etc. have convinced us that Australia is not situated where it is - plumb spang in the middle of Asia - that it's still a British colony peoples exclusively by English/Scots/Irish.

And really I think that's all Tsiolkas is saying; in answer to a question put to him by interviewer John Boyne, he said that what he primarily wanted to convey in The Slap was that London, Edinburgh and Dublin are no longer the centres to which Australians look, it's more and more likely to be Athens, New Delhi, Beirut or Beijing. The most successful characters from a social and monetary point of view are Greek, Indian, Muslim, Jewish and Aborigine - albeit in far too many cases also vain, selfish and violent. The most pathetic characters in the book are Rosie and Gary who are "skips" (Skippy the bush kangaroo), Aussie slang for white Australians of Anglo/Irish/Scots descent, and whose lives are blighted by alcoholism, hippy idealism and by a sense of their own entitlement and envy of their more successful ethnic friends.

Chistos also said he was afraid of writing the female characters, but in my opinion has been far more successful with them that the males. The only happy ending for a book containing Hector, Harry, Gary and particularly the hellish Andrew (Harry's lawyer and a very minor character, whose speech on page 105 of the paperback actually made me feel queasy), would be for a very large bomb to fall on and annihilate the lot of them.

The women on the other hand, for all their faults are recognisable and understandable, particularly Aisha who feels love, lust, repulsion and boredom for the tiresome Hector in almost equal measures, and Anouk whose cathartic rants I can also identify with - even the deluded and needy Rosie rings unfortunately true.

The sheer awfulness of nearly all the males in the novel, which conversely only serves to reinforce the Aussie stereotype, is completely at odds with Tsiolkas in person - he is friendly, gentle and quietly spoken. Perhaps in his zeal to not idealise his Greek characters he went overboard giving them every flaw imaginable. The crudeness of the language and some scenes in the novel has also come in for criticism, but it struck me from talking to people on the subject that tolerance levels vary widely. A married friend of mine had been told that farting featured prominently on the first page of the novel and admitted it had put her off reading it. I rushed to assure her that there was far "worse" in the book, to which she replied bleakly; "There's nothing worse than farting!"

At the end of the day, folks, it's all relative!

Oonagh