Originality, range of characters make breakthrough novel winner

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This article was published 19/07/2009 (5925 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The Slap

By Christos Tsiolkas

HarperCollins, 483 pages, $25

Christos Tsiolkas has written three previous novels, but The Slap is his breakthrough work. It has just won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and will soon become a TV miniseries.

Though the prose is pedestrian at times, what makes this novel a winner are its originality and the amazingly wide range of its characters.

The story opens with one day in the life of Hector, who, like the author, is an Australian of Greek origin. A handsome, impulsive hedonist, Hector is not a likable character. He is impatient with his children, and he is cheating on his cool, competent wife, Aisha.

But by the end of the day, Hector has a new problem to cope with. At a barbecue that he and Aisha host at their Melbourne home, Hector’s cousin Harry (whose problems of self-control exceed Hector’s by far) slaps a child, and the child’s parents decide to press charges.

Soon the sides line up as issues of friendship or family loyalty take over. Like Ian McEwan’s Atonement, The Slap takes a seemingly slight incident and shows how it plays out in the lives of various characters.

But Tsiolkas goes much farther than that. In giving us a penetrating, no-holds-barred glimpse into the lives and thoughts of the eight different characters who tell the story, he draws a portrait of contemporary Australia, warts and all.

The warts are immediately apparent: excessive drinking, womanizing and a shocking degree of overt racism. Words like wop and wog and bogan (poor white trash) and boong (aboriginal) abound.

On hearing yet another report of violence in the Middle East, Harry (the slapper) thinks, “Let the towel-heads and the yids wipe themselves out,” but, at the same time, he has an Arab mistress!

And Hector’s mother, who has never forgiven him for marrying outside the Greek community, constantly refers to his wife as “the Indian.”

Like Canada’s Mordecai Richler, Tsiolkas is unflinching in depicting the hypocrisies of his own community, but his portraits are never one-dimensional. We discover that even Harry, whose anger flares so fast, has his tender side, and that Rosie, the vindictive, over-indulgent mother of the slapped child, is struggling with her own demons.

Tsiolkas is remarkably clear-eyed and unsentimental with all his characters. But it is evident his sympathies lie not with the likes of Hector and Harry and Aisha and her good friend Anouk — all successful 40-year-olds with a strong sense of entitlement — but with those characters on the margins of society — the old, the young, the gay, the aboriginal.

The richest sections of the novel are those written from the points of view of Manolis, Hector’s father, and two teenagers, Richie and Connie. For none of these three characters is the slap incident central.

Manolis is coping daily with an aging body, an irritating wife and the death of old friends. He begins his day reading the obituaries.

Richie and Connie are both linked to Aisha through her work at a veterinary clinic (Tsiolkas also worked at veterinary clinic until his recent success). They both have an easy acceptance of others’ differences, so lacking in their elders, but accepting themselves is another story.

All the self-conscious awkwardness, the agony and the bliss of youth and first loves are here, wonderfully depicted.

Through their passions, as well as their patience, both Richie and Connie are drawn into the destructive path of incidents set off by the slap.

Not until very near the end does the novel build to a climax. Then, at the last moment, Tsiolkas steps back, apparently unwilling to let his chickens come home to roost.

Somehow he comes up with a happy ending — the only false note in an otherwise uncompromising work.

Faith Johnston is a Winnipeg writer and biographer.