Source: Amazon.com

By Christos Tsiolkas, 2008

In a week when I gave away three books while managing to acquire seven more, I got this one at the Value Village on Whyte Avenue.  This seems to be a place where people drop off recent  books when they have finished them.

A dark tale set in contemporary Australia, the novel is the story, told by eight narrators, of the reverberations of an angry man slapping another guest’s horribly misbehaving child at a party.  The host, a sleekly successful Greek-Australian named Hector with a beautiful veterinarian wife named Aisha of South Asian origin, narrates the first chapter.  His cousin, the man who delivers the slap, is the second narrator. Connie, an orphaned student who works at the veterinary clinic who has been molested by Hector (her boss’s husband), is the third.  The fourth chapter is told by Rosie, the mother of the misbehaving child. The most engaging chapter is narrated by Manolis, Hector’s Greek immigrant father. There is a striking contrast between Manolis’s view of family as almost a full-time job and his daughter-in-law’s sense that family is the friends we choose.

Class, religious, gender, ethnic and racial tensions are front and centre at the party where the slap occurs, and in the characters’ reactions.  Hugo, the child who gets hit, is a horribly spoiled and unappealing brat, still breastfeeding at the age of four, to the disgust of mostly everyone except himself and his mother.  His unattractiveness makes taking a side more difficult.

Everybody in this novel casually uses drugs, smoking marijuana or popping ecstasy, even at family parties. Adults usually get to work and kids usually get to school in spite of all the drugs and alcohol consumed. The teenage Connie and Richie attend a drug-fuelled party where the parents are intentionally away overnight. For all their drug taking, the teenagers seem more wholesome than the adults, and if there is hope in the novel it resides with Connie and Richie.

Read this book only if you can handle the f-word and the c—t word used over and over again.  The repeated use of the latter word may reflect the misogyny of Australian society or of these particular characters. Perhaps I move in extremely wholesome circles, but I found both the language and the drug taking hard to take at times.

Nevertheless, I am glad I read the book because of the provocative issues it raises.

I have seen neither of the two TV minseries based on the novel.  A  friend says the Australian one is much better than the American