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HIT NOVEL With his controversial new novel The Slap, Christos Tsiolkas has touched a few raw nerves. Kelly Apter hears about how the writer tackled this multi-story tale of suburban Australia
Judge me once you’ve walked a mile in my shoes, the old saying goes. Well in his latest book, The Slap, Christos Tsiolkas hands us the literary equivalent of eight pairs of walking boots. Set in suburban Melbourne, the novel opens with a chapter devoted entirely to Hector, a middle-class fortysomething. We see life, the eponymous slap, and the friends and family he surrounds himself with through his eyes. Once we’ve made judgements about all of them, our assessment is swiftly disabused by the next chapter, and the next, when each of the eight major players get to have their say. Aside from offering us a fascinating snapshot of contemporary Australia, Tsiolkas’
main achievement is the creation of eight wholly believable voices. Whether it’s 17-year- old Connie, nervous at the prospect of her first sexual encounter, 69-year-old Manolis saddened by the death of his elderly friends, or Hector’s wife Aisha dabbling with infidelity, Tsiolkas leaps across the generations and genders with aplomb.
How difficult was it for Tsiolkas to see things from all sides? ‘That was one of the most challenging but also the most fascinating things about writing it,’ he says. ‘Initially I had a fear of writing women, and it was such a pleasure to realise I could do it. Whether I succeeded is up to the reader, of course. But I thought if I can’t inhabit these characters, maybe I should give up writing. And what I found is that I really enjoyed doing it.’ One of the most complex characters in the novel is Rosie, mother of the slapped child
and a woman with great potential who frustrates readers by refusing to acknowledge the dysfunctionality of her marriage. Tsiolkas almost left her out, then realised her voice was ‘the centre of the book’ and that actually, he had empathy for her actions. ‘I think there’s part of me in every one of the characters,’ he says, ‘and there are choices I’ve made that are not dissimilar to some of the ones Rosie makes.’
Like all the inhabitants of The Slap, Rosie has her good and bad points, and Tsiolkas works hard to convey that. Surprisingly, not everyone agrees. ‘Some people have asked me why I made the characters so unlikeable, but I can’t see that. There are moments when they do detestable things, but I understand every single one of them. All those shadows and demons are inside us all.’ ■ Christos Tsiolkas, 14 Aug, 10.15am, £10 (£8).
12–19 Aug 2010 THE LIST 23
his society. I was never part of it when it was powerful and my tattoo activity is a way to give a little respect.’ He was persuaded of Salvatores’ capacity to present his own story respectfully after seeing the director’s I’m Not Scared.
‘One time, I found a kidnapped boy of 10 or 12, really dirty, really scared,’ he recalls. ‘I preferred to see dead people. Alive was more terrible, because their condition was like dead. All those people who stayed a year or more in the terrorist camps had psychological troubles for the rest of their lives. He slept on my arm and our doctor told me to keep holding him, because he was nervous, he needed to feel my body to sleep. When I saw Salvatores’ film, with the kidnapped boy, it was like reality for me. I told my manager: “He can make the film because he doesn’t care about money or public opinion [or even recreating] things in a perfect historical way, he cares about the true story inside the person.”’ Lilin’s follow-up book, Freefall, frankly depicts the butchery he witnessed while a sniper, killing as many ‘Arabs’ – ‘Chechens, Muslims, Afghans, Taliban, terrorists of any politics’ – as possible. ‘In war, I had no time for understanding. It’s really fast and you think only of your mission. If you start to think about morality, you will die, because you lose control. You can’t think about life, you must think only of war so you will survive.’
Currently writing the final instalment, he describes it as covering the most ‘tragic’ period of his life, the aftermath of the conflict. After two years of incessant fighting, he found it difficult to adjust to peace. For 12 months he found himself unwilling to sleep. ‘Many of my friends never got out of this state, they start to take drugs or a lot of alcohol, some turned to crime, some committed suicide. Many guys, good brothers who came from the Chechen War, they finished really bad because their psychological system was completely broken. Many of us start to hate peaceful society and feel ourselves its enemies. Many of us died because we couldn’t find our place here.’
Nicolai Lilin, 19 Aug, 6pm, £7 (£5).