Bookclub - The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas

Editor's note: This episode of Bookclub is available on Sunday 4th May and will be available to listen online or for download

When he was writing The Slap, published in 2008, Christos Tsiolkas remembers thinking, ‘I want to write a soap opera on acid.’ And it is indeed a book that deliberately breaks boundaries, reflecting his own feeling that Australians like him were dispensing with the culture of the old country...but perhaps even more his frustration that the new country wasn’t changing as fast as he’d imagined that it would. He told this month’s Bookclub readers that he once thought Australia was becoming steadily more socially liberal, that it would soon be a Republic and that there would be reconciliation with the ‘first nation’ - the descendants of the people who lived there before colonisation. To someone of his stance, the politics of the 1990s were therefore a disappointment - ‘xenophobic, anti-immigration’ - and he found the increasing wealth around him an irritation rather than a delight, because he thought it wasn’t producing a better country. That was why, he told us, that he wasn’t writing about the British-Irish world that spawned Neighbours, but another suburbia that he saw with different eyes.

 

So The Slap has pain built into it, as well as a great deal of humour. The plot develops from a simple incident, spawning emotional complications that ensnare the eight characters through whom the story is told.  We enter their heads, one by one, and as a consequence the story has a rampant energy: it’s as if the narrator has a hand-held camera that’s always on the move. With each chapter we hear a different voice, and have a different view of the world. From the moment a four-year-old boy called Hugo is slapped by a man called Harry at a barbecue while the children are playing cricket we start a journey into the melting pot of modern Australian society – especially into the Greek community which is Christos’s own. He says he feels close to the character of Hector – and you can’t get more Greek than that – who is the first man we meet in the book, and whose drug-taking and disorganised emotional life becomes a kind of frame for the story.

‘I was setting out to write a book about a middle class that had become self-entitled, and part of that was the Greek-Australian world.’ One of the results was that he looked at the relationship between Greek men and their mothers – ‘infantile’ was his word – and one of our readers wondered if he wasn’t falling for a stereotype.  Christos hoped not…but what could he do? It was the world he knew.

The Slap became a world-wide bestseller in part because of the gutsiness with which Christos approaches his characters, and their failings. For example, in relation to drug-taking, with which he’s quite familiar. ‘ Maybe it’s a controversial thing to say, but the reality is that one of the reasons we become immersed in drugs is the elation of it. I also wanted to put in – the serpent in paradise. The moment when the kids are going out celebrating, dancing like an Utopian version of multicultural Australia, the serpent in paradise is you, as the reader, knowing it may lead to addiction, to something that isn’t pleasurable.’

That means that although humour flows through the book (as well as a lot of swearing – something Christos found himself having to discuss with his parents) there are dark undercurrents in the misunderstandings and cultural sensitivities that are the spine of the story. But don’t imagine that the characters aren’t likeable, or well-intentioned. Some of them are.

But Christos says, ‘It’s no coincidence that the likeable characters are not of my generation.’

Maybe that says it all.

I hope you enjoy The Slap and Christos Tsiolkas on Bookclub. And you can look forward to another good read next month. The book is Room, and you can hear our conversation with Emma Donoghue on Sunday, June 1st.

Happy reading.

Jim

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