Christos Tsiolkas - The Slap

A Gen-X story, The Slap is set in Melbourne with a Greek family at the pivot point. Hector, the protagonist, is married to Aisha, an Indian girl. The two of them are the envy of their friends, set in their perfect lives, with two children. Of course, there is no such thing as perfection, once you peel away the layers, but on the face of it, they are pretty much "perfect." Aisha is vet; Hector is a bureaucrat. The two of them host a barbecue one afternoon, inviting their friends and family as well as the children. Disagreements between the kids (Spiderman on TV?), unease with the in-laws, and tensions building between some friends sums up the afternoon, although again, on the face of it, everyone seems to be having a good time. But then, the facade falls when Harry, Hector's cousin, slaps a brattish four-year old across the face, and that's the tipping point.

The drama that unfolds is almost unbelievable, with the parents looking to press charges - the mother is one of Aisha's best friends - and Hector and Aisha trying to maintain some kind of decorum. Hector sides with his cousin, and Aisha with her friend. Stalemate.

But, this linear narrative isn't just focused on the slap. One could argue for days as to whether the slap was deserved or not, and still not reach a verdict. Instead it focuses on the people at the barbecue, their reaction to the slap, and which side they're on. It also gives us a peek into the lives and thoughts of a bunch of people living in the middle-class Melbourne community. Apparently, affairs are rampant, alcoholism and recreational drugs common and racism and homophobia normal. Oh, and the slang is profanity-intensive.

I'm not sure I enjoyed the peek though. While some seemingly perfect characters had a massive fall from grace, the lack of self-awareness to the degree of coming across as complete morons was evident in others. Some people had over-inflated opinions of themselves, and some had haunting pasts. As the narrative progressed, we learnt more about all of them, and for the most part, they became more and more unlikeable. I'm an idealist, hate the very idea of cheating and don't really care about the boxes that society puts people in. As long as someone's "nice," it's good enough for me. So, reading this book had alarm bells jangling in my head almost like there's no tomorrow.

It's not a literary novel, and personally, I think the author tries too hard to be too controversial. Each chapter is written from the point of view of one of the characters (including Hector, Aisha, Harry, Hector's father, the slapped child's mother etc), and each chapter brings with it a plethora of expletives. Do parents, grand-parents and children actually use four letter words with one another as part of normal conversation? Again, maybe I'm super-conservative, but I don't think I've ever sworn in front of my parents... and vice versa.

I was really looking forward to reading this book, and I guess I had extremely high expectations from this book, which were unfortunately not met. Maybe I would've enjoyed this book a lot more if I hadn't opened it with about a million pre-conceived notions! That always happens to me!

What did you think of The Slap? Do you think badly behaved children deserve to be slapped? And does it have a place in the Booker shortlist?

I'm inclined to reply in the negative to the last question, but hey! What do I know?!

Colleen McCullough - Angel

I loved The Thorn Birds when I read it, almost ten years ago. Never went near another book by Colleen McCullough after that, as I was scared it would ruin The Thorn Birds for me. However, while browsing around at the library, I saw a fair few books by McCullough, and decided to take the plunge. So happy that I did - I loved this book! It's a diary of twenty-one year old Harriet Purcell in the 1960s. An X- Ray technician, Harriet's engaged to the boy she's been dating for a long time (but he doesn't even kiss with his mouth open!), and she shares a bedroom with her grandmother.

Despite what, on the face of it, seems like the perfect life, Harriet isn't completely happy. So, much to her parents' chagrin, she moves out of home to The House, which is located at the sleazy side of Sydney, Kings Cross. Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz is her landlord, and her neighbours include artists, prostitutes and lesbians. Harriet, having lived an extremely sheltered life, hadn't ever interacted with any lesbians prior to this!

The main thing that convinced Harriet to move into The House was her landlady's daughter, Flo - a four year old child, who's affectionate but a mute. She helps Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz in her profession as a soothsayer - a business she initially started as a racket, but with time, her predictions became accurate thanks to Flo. Harriet fell in love with the child at first glance, and continuously refers to her as an "angel." She does have her nemesis in Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz lover, though...

Harriet matures as she keeps writing her diary - she takes a walk on the wild side; has her first affair, has a long-lasting affair with a senior doctor, learns how to cook, and works hard to first be transferred to Casualty, and then asked to run the X Ray unit in Casualty. She's intelligent, energetic, generous, conscientious and presumably attractive (based on the number of men who are attracted to her). She's also got a strong independent streak, and has a wicked sense of humour (referring to her ex-fiance as a "constipated Christian boy." At times, she comes across as a hedonist - someone who loves life, and wants to live it to the fullest!

And though this is only a few days old, I'm already well into a fat exercise book, and I'm quite addicted. Maybe that's because I can never sit still and think, I always have to be doing something, so now I'm killing two birds with the same stone. I get to think about what's happening to me, yet I'm doing something at the same time. There's a discipline about writing the stuff down, I see it better. Just like my work. I give it all my attention because I enjoy it.

She's also naive and innocent, struggling to figure out some things which everyone around her seems to understand - be it about sex, or lifestyle, or life at Kings Cross. Full credit her though, as she befriends all the social "outcastes," without paying much heed to their lifestyle choices. She sees them as "real" people, and doesn't put them in the brackets that society does.

Tonight has been a blinding enlightenment. I can never think the same about people again. Publicly one thing, behind closed doors something very different. Dorian Gray everywhere.

Of course, as things roll, there's a twist and a turn, but annoyingly enough, there's a perfectly happy ending, where everything just falls into place, and makes sense, and they all live happily ever after, despite it looking as if there would be no light at the end of the bleak metaphoric tunnel, for the longest time. I'm not really the biggest fan of books that end with all the loose ends tied up perfectly, but somehow, it did work for this novel, and left me feeling very glad that I'd read it.

Have you read anything by Colleen McCullough? If yes, what would you recommend I read next?

Peter Carey - My Life As A Fake

Peter Carey, an Australian novelist, is one of only two authors to have won the Booker Prize twice, for the works Oscar and Lucinda (1988) and True History of the Kelly Gang (2001). While I have both books on my to-read list, I thought I'd introduce myself to Peter Carey with one of his later books (published in 2004), My Life As A Fake. The premise of My Life As A Fake is based on a real literary hoax in Australia in the 1940s: When Ern Malley, a garage mechanic, died at a young age, his sister sent a bunch of poems written by him to a modernist magazine, hoping to determine if the poems were any good or not. The magazine, Angry Penguin, devoted a whole issue to the works of Malley, as the editor thought they were written by a poet in the same class as Dylan Thomas or WH Auden. The public reaction wasn't quite what he expected, and later on, it was found out that the editor had been hoaxed by two young poets who were in the Army at that point in time. The two young poets were exhausted of the pretentious intellectuals that defined most of the world around them, and they just wanted to call them out as 'fakes' - not real intellects or, real connoisseurs of poetry.

Carey's novel is a complicated fictionalised version of these events, with new characters being drawn in, and a Frankenstien-esque character emerging. When Sarah, the editor of an esteemed poetry publication in England, travels to Malaysia with a friend of her parents (John Slater, a famous poet), she meets Chubb - the hoaxer. Against the warnings of Slater, she speaks to him, and hears his story, hoping to find an epic poem for her magazine, which he put before her on one of their first meetings. In the fictional account, the editor of the magazine kills himself, after coming face to face with Chubb's monster: McCorkle. While McCorkle originally existed only in Chubb's head, as the book progresses we find that someone does come forward, insisting he's McCorkle... and then meets Chubb and accuses him of not giving him a childhood, and then requesting his birth certificate! In fact, the poem Chubb showed Sarah was written by the "true" McCorkle.

The story takes both, Chubb and McCorkle to various places, as the creator tries to destroy the monster, who is hell-bent on ruining his life - first by kidnapping his daughter, and then going on an adventure in the Malaysian jungles! The sequence of beautifully described, extremely vivid and extraordinary events, set in Malaysia and Indonesia, with some very colourful characters is surreal, and at times, one does think unnecessary. Yet, it does boil down to Sarah's patience in return for that one piece of genius which Chubb put before her initially.

While the story intrigues, my main gripe with the book was that it was very passive. All the events were in the past, and for the most part, Chubb was narrating his story to Sarah. Within his story, another protagonist emerged, and it got increasingly confusing to figure out who was saying what - specially as the editors and the authors decided to forgo the use of double quotes. I had to go back and re-read parts of it, just to keep track of what was going on. As the book progressed, I found I really didn't care that much as to how things unfolded, and ended up speed reading (skim reading) the last hundred-odd pages.

Rating : D