The Slap Review

By Christos Tsiolkas.

Very disappointed, very annoyed... with myself.  This has sat on my shelf since the week it was released, but after buying it I ignored it.  First of all, it was about normal everyday people living in the suburbs of Melbourne.  I thought:  Why should I read about that?  That's just my life and most people I know.  As Perseus Q scholars will know, I shy away from 'real-life dramas'.  I like books with grand themes.  I couldn't give a fuck for the minutiae of Western society. I like murder, death, sex, power, religion, collapsing nations... fuck the soap operas and fuck the fruity melodramas.  That's why I can't look at a Good Weekend (or any Sunday magazine insert in any newspaper) without wanting to kill people.  Second of all, everyone was talking about it, and then it became an ABC mini-series, and I have this social/intellectual disease that presumes if a work of art is instantly popular (as opposed to the slow-burn) it must surely be fucking shithouse.  Thirdly, I had in mind my review of Tsiolkas's other book I'd read, 'Dead Europe' where every second chapter (historical account of main character's ancestors) was fantastic, but every other chapter was about a gay bloke gaying around Europe being gay (note: if it was a heterosexual bloke heterosexualing around Europe being heterosexual I'd be equally ambivalent).  Being that The Slap was set in the now, I figured it'd be more like the half of Dead Europe that bored me shitless.  It sat on my bookshelf, lonely.

The Slap is the best book I've read in years and here is why.

I am a couple of years younger than Tsiokas.  He went to Blackburn High and I went to Mitcham High and the only thing that separated those two High Schools was Nunawading High (now a housing estate).  I was lower than middle class, but higher than lower middle class.  Mum never worked.  We holidayed in caravans.... but we holidayed.  I'm not Greek, but our school was populated about 10% Greek, so we all knew Greeks and had Greek friends.  I also happened to be a philhellene (Byron, Iliad, 'Clash of the Titans', Bullfinch) and ended up living in Greece for almost two years in my early twenties.  I speak some Greek.  I was best man at a Greek wedding.  I used to go to The Retreat when it was Greek and eat saganaki, drink wine and dance Greek until 3am.  I want to be writer.  I am writing a book.  I'm halfway done.  It's my 15th novel.  I am not gay but what I do for a living has put me my entire working life around gay people and I have many gay mates and I am simply not fussed by their sexuality but I do find their sexuality endlessly interesting to chat about.  I know alternate bands - intimately.  I didn't work at a vet surgery but I worked in audio-visual rentals.  What's all this matter?  I understand Tsiolkas.

Not only that, I may as well have been in the novel.  I knew every character.  I've been to their houses, I have been to their parties, I have eaten with them, fucked them and taken drugs with them.

The second-most awful person in the book was Rosie (her husband the worst) - she's the mother of the kid that got slapped.  Her cunt of a husband goes missing and she gets help from an Aboriginal Muslim family-friend.  They eventually find him in a pub but he's wasted so they leave him there.  The Muslim takes her back home and she's sitting in the kitchen.  We know her past.  She was once very promiscuous.  She's now just a fuckup.  She's eyeing off the Muslim (who has turned his life around - he used to be a drinker and fighter) thinking she should suck his dick, and I was getting all tense, but then he says to her: "I don't want you or your husband or your son in my life... I don't want you to talk to my wife, I don't want you to be her friend..."  Rosie loses them as friends, and the Mussies buy a 2 bedroom house in Thomastown.  It was at that point I realised it was the greatest Australian novel in a long time.  I realised it was about power, sex, religion and death - everything I want but it just happened to be set in Melbourne.  It's Game of Thrones: Coburg. 

See, the problem with Australian novels is that they are either cliché (bush setting), or they're about junkies (gee there's a lot about junkies) or they are meant to be about normal people but aren't.  They are about extraordinary people but the writers and publishers sell it to us as 'real-life' when it is not at fucking all real life.  The people in these real-life novels are far too sophisticated and altruistic, and quite often saint-like.  It's bullshit.  But Tsiolkas's people are real.  They look out for number one, and maybe numbers two to seven, and that's it.  Seems about right.  Like Germaine Greer does as well, he says what I think but I never know how to say it. 

Manolis, the old Greek man said this of my generation (but in reference to a female character):  "Her beauty, her sophistication, her education, none of it meant anything.  Monsters, they had bred monsters."  I know why he is saying that.  I know old Greek men.  I know old men.  I know my friends.  I know me.  Tsioklas knows me too, and he knows that we know we are monsters, but that we cannot help but be monsters in the eyes of the older generation, and we have to be monsters to our peers and our offspring, but that does not devalue what the old Greek man thinks, nor does it devalue how we live our lives.  We're Gen X.  That's just how it is.   We will make our mark like every other generation has made theirs. 

It is close to flawless, but there's one flaw.  One of the eight chapters, Aisha, read like a diary entry.  It lacked the flow of the other seven. 

It's now going back on my shelf to sit there proudly.

I give it an A. 

Familiar Review

By J. Robert Lennon

Thank fucking jesus, finally, a modern page-turner that I loved reading.  This was a ripper.  I read a book called 'The Light Of Falling Stars' by this same dude a few years ago, and though I barely remember any of it (plane crash, survivor) I remember really liking it, so decided to give his latest a crack and I'm happy that I did.  I read it in a day, because my missus, Andromeda, is a week overdue with our baby no.2 and all we can do is sit around and wait.  She's been watching Ellen, Australia's Biggest Loser and some other reality show where northern English people have sex, and I've been watching cricket and reading books.  I have so much time on my hands I've even been watching Big Bash (an aside: I am barracking for Hobart because there are two Melbourne teams, both called 'Melbourne', which is fucking spastic - couldn't one be called 'Victoria?' or 'Yarra' or some other form of differentiation?).

But the book... so this woman called Elisa, late 40's, is driving home from interstate after visiting her son's grave - he died about 10 years ago, when he was 15 - and suddenly, she's in a different car, in different clothes, with a different body (fatter) and she gets home and she has a different job, different friends and her son is alive.  Parallel universe?  That's what she thinks, and she investigates.  It's a mystery novel of sorts, but the real clue, I found, was in one line in chapter 21 - "Her thoughts have always been more interesting to her than the world itself."  Much earlier in the novel we become well acquainted with her vivid fantasies (she re-imagines petty disputes she used to have with a college room-mate, but in her re-imagining, they are violent and mixed up with current affairs) and so from my reading, one of the worlds she is/was in is real, the other a vivid fantasy.  Which is the real one?  Who cares?  It's brilliant. 

It reminds me of Sartre's comment that he finds ideas more real than things - in his excellent book 'Words' he says, "In the zoo, monkeys were less like monkeys" - as in, compared to what he thought of monkeys by reading about them and looking at them in books.  I have always been attracted to Sartre because of this.  I feel the same way.  I got to the Parthenon in Athens and it was a lesser place than the Parthenon of my mind.  I have fond memories of both Parthenons.  So this book made perfect sense to me.  Which is more real?  Neither, in the end.  A vivid fantasy is just that: vivid, and real life is not always so vivid.  I can easily live in both worlds, and this is a novel that takes that concept further.  On top of the basic premise, it's also a well-written mystery with interesting characters and reveals.  I also liked how some characters smoked. 

I give it an A-minus.

 

True Grit

By Charles Portis



Loved it.

I've been going through a John Wayne phase. You can buy his films cheap if you buy them in bulk. Across three collections, I scored about 30 the Duke's films for just $80. For a little under $3 a film, it's great value. I've been going through them slowly in the past few months - some are absolutley fantastic (The Searchers and Rio Bravo are standouts so far) and some are fucking retarded (Rio Lobo... write it down; write the words 'Rio Lobo' down, commit them to memory, and make a pledge to never see that movie). The other night I got to 'True Grit' and was about to hit 'play', but then remembered I owned the book. "What the Hell," says I, "I'll watch another film tonight, and actually read True Grit before I watch the flick," (this then lead to the Rio Lobo disaster of 2008. Seriously, I can't begin to describe how pathetic Rio Lobo is. As a 19 year old girl I met recently would say, "It was AIDS.").

The book starts: "People do not give it credence that a fourteen-year-old girl could leave home and go off in the wintertime to avenge her father's blood..." and from that very first few words to the very last, the book was UNPUTDOWNABLE.

It is told in the voice of the fourteen year old girl, Mattie, whose father was killed by one of his workers, a man called Tom Chaney, "...a short man with cruel features."

Mattie, though young, has an exacting or calculating manner about her to the point that I surmised she had Aspbergers, and with a mix of that need for exactitude along with guts, skill, wits and a Presbyterian's old-testament longing for revenge, she doggedly hunts down Tom Chaney.

I'm not being flippant on the Aspberger's line either. I don't know if that's just the way Portis writes or whether he's brilliantly skilled at bringing a unique young girl's voice to light, but, Mattie is brilliantly formed, so unique, in a kind of manner that's not quite right but nor is it bad, or wrong, or off-putting. No, Mattie is just, well, umm, not cold as such, but full on. Fortunately, her single-mindedness is taking us on a great adventure with what could only be described as a noble cause... the taking down of a violent killer in revenge for her father's death.

To hunt down the man, she enlists the services of a mean Marshal renowned for having 'true grit'. This is 'Rooster' Cogburn (the John Wayne part), and along with a Texas Ranger by the name of LaBoef (who is hunting the same man for killing a Senator back in Waco, Texas), the three hunters go deep into Indian-held territory.

It's a classic Western. It's also a classic moral tale, a classic chase, a classic adventure - it's romance free but sexy as fuck. It's got shootouts, dead horses, skeletons, rattlesnakes, Indians, double-crossers, executions... everything you want.

They talk mean. The Texas Ranger wants the killer to pay for the high-profile crime of murdering a Senator (and his dogs) back in Texas but young Mattie wants him hanged for the crime of murdering her simple and honest father.

"I want him to know he is being punished for killing my father. It is nothing to me how many dogs and fat men he killed in Texas."

"You can let him know that," said Rooster. "You can tell him to his face. You can spit on him and make him eat sand out of the road. You can put a ball in his foot and I will hold him while you do it. But we must catch him first."

I like the way Portis brings in characters for cameos (if you ever read it, watch out for the bloke 'Stonehill' who in just a few pages becomes one of the best fictional characters I've known). I like the way Mattie interacts with these cameos. The night before she leaves, she decides to sleep in the stable with her horse Little Blackie rather than waste money at the boarding-house for just a few hours' sleep (her financial acumen is a recurring theme).

The watchman was an old man. He helped me to shake out the dusty quilt that was on the bunk. I looked in on Little Blackie at his stall and made sure everything was in readiness. The watchman followed me around.

I said to him, "Are you the one that had his teeth knocked out?"

"No, that was Tim. Mine was drawn by a dentist. He called himself a dentist."

"Who are you?"

"Toby."

I can smell Hemingway...

Rooster, though mean and violent, has a heart under it all. Discovering two young boys torturing a mule, he frees the mule, gives the boys a' whippin' and says to one of them, "See that you mend your ways, boy, or I will come back some dark night and cut off your head and let the crows peck your eyeballs out."

It's at times a violent book, and perhaps the only time we ever get a sense that young Mattie feels fear is when an interrogation of two young cattle-thieves goes wrong. One of them, Moon, who was shot earlier, starts to spill the beans, and suddenly the situation spirals out of control. Fingers are chopped off, guns are fired, people are stabbed and Mattie records, "My thought was: I am better out of this. I tumbled backward from the bench and sought a place of safety on the dirt floor."

As Moon lays dying, he talks of his brother.

I said, "Do you want us to tell your brother what happened to you?"

He said, "It don't matter about that. He knows I am on the scout. I will meet him later walking the streets of Glory."

**

That'll do for extracts. You have to read it. It can be done in one sitting. One rainy afternoon, or as I did it, one empty evening tanked on coffee and Dunhills with an old cat beside me, occassionally strirring.

I wonder what it is I suddenly, in my late 30's, like so much about the Western? For starters, I like the names of things. Daniel Webster's Cigars, Stonehill's Livery Stable, The Grangers Trust Co. of Topeka, Kansas, and my favourite in this book, a reference to a company called 'The Great Arkansas River, Vicksburg & Gulf Steamship Company'.

I like the simple food they eat. Oh, I love gourmet chefs' stream-of-consciousness "agitated greens with Nicaraguan virgin jus" type stuff, but I also like meat and three veg. I think I even like it more, the older I get, and as these western stereotypes range across the land, whether the law or the lawless, they drink their coffee in the morning, their whiskey at night, and in between there's some salted pork, bread and maybe a bite of corn. Many smoke.

These Western stereotypes also have a pleasing mix of anarchy and freedom, but tinged with a sense of community, hard-work, morality and 'what's right and wrong'. Oh, there's a bit too much God-fearin' and that Old Testament rhetoric but I'm prepared to look past it and suggest that for then, back then, in those times, it was intellectual solace (no excuse now).

In the end maybe it's the stereotype itself that attracts me. I spent much of my late 20's banging on about post-modernism, about challenging the hegemony, bringing down stereotypes, throwing history away - stomping on it first - and starting anew with a Foucaultian Utopia where gender, race, class, sexuality, sanity and culture hardly exist beyond their entry in some dusty Museum's ledger.

But now suddenly I'm all, "Fuck it. A man's a man."

That's not denying variations thereof, nor does it condone violence or the evil that men do. Hell, it's the opposite. Sheikh Al Hilaly and his 'uncovered meat' fable diminishes the manliness of him and his flock as far as I'm concerned because real men act like real men, not like budding Satans with unbridled lusts for domination.

But saying a man is a man is a man is just saying, ecce homo, and, well, that's just how it is, and we all, deep down, know what 'being a man about things' infers.

It's the Western that right now exemplifies this for me, and this book is a highly entertaining Western.

I give it a B+.

(PS: The film 'True Grit' was a bit of a let-down of course. It was okay, but, it was largely ruined by a completely inapparopriate soundtrack (which seemed to never stop) that was lithe, light and fluffy - totally at odds with the themes of the story. Also, and I guess it's just because of when it was made and what audience they hoped to reach out to, the film, rather ironically lacked the very thing it promised most: grit.)

The Road

By Cormac McCarthy



I watched that stupid horror movie The Ring late at night, in the dark, by myself. I was sitting there in my flanny PJ's going, “Oh this is stupid... that’s not scary!... Oh there’s more plot-holes here than in a cheese-grater” and when it finished I thought, “Well, that was dumb as.”

Then I got into bed. My heart was racing. I was petrified. I turned on all the lights and put on The Young Ones.

I had a similar reaction to The Road. It hit me a day later.

I read it in one sitting. I’d read 10 pages of it the week before, lost it, found it under my car seat and so started again after tea one night and with the help of coffee, cigarettes, bachelordom and the occasional stretch, I was done my midnight.

I slept like a log, worked the next day, then after tea the following night I saw it laying about and suddenly found myself reacting to everything I’d read the night before. I became glum! I was moved by the characters’ plight! I got the shakes for a few minutes (though I did have a cold and those Codrals, man, they rock).

It’s a harrowing book, and if you give yourself time and space to think it all out, it’s fucking nerve-wracking.

It’s a micro-cosmic version of Saramago’s Blindness or Camus’ The Plague, and it’s a novel version of Lord Byron’s terrific poem Darkness which I will link to here.

The Road is set in a post-apocalyptic Earth and it’s about a man and his son, never named, who wander about trying to find food. That’s it. But that’s all McCarthy needs. He doesn’t go into boring explanations as to why the Earth is covered in ash which blocks out the sun and darkens the waterways, or why there are no animals or vegetation left. It just is that way, and the humans that are left wandering about are either cannibals or not cannibals. That’s the human division that remains.

There is the odd ‘flashback’ but he spares us the intricacies and instead serves us all the horror.

“... all stores of food had given out and murder was everywhere upon the land... blackened looters who tunnelled among the ruins and crawled from the rubble white of tooth and eye carrying charred and anonymous tins of food in nylon nets like shoppers in the commissaries of hell.”

The planet is black and the dead are everywhere. It’s so bleak, like an Einsturzende Neubauten album. Everywhere they go is charred, desolate and freezing cold and it never lets up.

They come into a city: “The long concrete sweeps of the interstate exchanges like the ruins of a vast funhouse against the distant murk... The mummied dead everywhere. The fresh cloven along the bones, the ligaments dried to tug and taut as wires. Shriveled and drawn like latterday bogfolk, their faces of boiled sheeting, the yellowed palings of their teeth.”

The man tells the boy that they are ‘carrying the fire’ – of humanity, is the inference. They are not cannibals.

The man’s only motivation is the well-being of his son. “... he tousled his hair before the fire to dry it. All of this like some ancient anointing. So be it. Evoke the forms. Where you’ve nothing else construct ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them.”

History, names, art, science... none of it matters any more.

Speaking of Saramago, one of his lines also came to me while reading The Road: “...for in places of damnation we’re almost certain to find men and women with the animals that keep them company until the moment comes to slaughter them in order to live.” McCarthy takes this one step further, and one planet further.

What’s great about the book is that at every turn we find ourselves emotionally investing in the man and his son. We want them to find food. We want them to get away when they’re chased. We want them to be safe at night and to hide their camp-fires so none of those dirty cannibals can find them. Meanwhile, we can smell/see the landscape that McCarthy describes so we’re right in the thick of the action (the landscape itself is as strong a 'character' as the man and the boy are).

The world McCarthy has given us is exactly as Byron says in his poem: "All earth was but one thought--and that was death."

And to quote Saramago again, “...but, when all is said and done, whoever goes, goes, whoever remains, remains.”

It’s such a simple notion, but from it, writers, good writers, can launch tremendous works of art.

My review of No Country For Old Men was just, “Can’t wait for the movie”, and I have the same review to make of The Road. But maybe I cheapened No Country For Old Men. Two books in, maybe I’m just starting to work out this McCarthy fellow. I bought Blood Meridian so I’ll see how that goes.

There’s been a lot written of McCarthy in recent years, and my contribution is just to say that he’s a ‘very entertaining writer’. I'm sure Lord Byron would dig him. I’ll leave it to others more inquisitive and perceptive than I to examine his motivations and his subtexts and his contributions and relevance to literature. I’ll just enjoy his books, I reckon, wallow in his misery and recommend The Road to anyone and everyone.

I give it an A-.