Book - The Slap - Christos Tsiolkas

Reviews, By Weasel, 28th May, 2009

The Slap, this year’s winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, is arguably an unlikely critical darling. A plot-driven, unpretentious novel that demands to be quickly devoured, Christos Tsiolkas’ fifth novel (his best known to gay readers, and probably full stop, being Loaded, which became the film Head On) is a piece of Australian literature unencumbered by willful obscurity or the ever-tedious landscape-as-character ‘device’.

A set of eight vignettes told from the perspectives of eight different adults who were present at a suburban Melbourne barbeque when a man slapped someone else’s out of control four-year-old son, it’s a quietly epic work that raises compelling and at times unsettling questions about family, personal identity, class, race and sexuality without resembling a sociology text book in the slightest.

Each of Tsiolkas’ characters – from Harry, the man who is utterly convinced that he was right to slap the boy threatening his own older son, to Rosie, the mother of the child who so keenly feels a need for her son’s attacker to be punished – is voiced with stunning authenticity. I found myself feeling a surprising empathy for characters whom I was sure I would dislike immensely in real life, and feeling critical of those who I most identified with. Yet the novel doesn’t fall into a trap of moral relativism, rather Tsiolkas deftly navigates the complexity of his characters’ choices and the constraints that limit them.

Even more surprising is this novel’s power to spur self-reflection. I found myself thinking and rethinking my own reactions to the events that unfold and to the resulting actions and feelings of the protagonists. Was I reacting as a gay man, as a wog or semi-wog, as a middle-class Gen X/Y cusp? Could I have chosen between family, my partner and my friends?

The Slap is a book that will stay with me for a long time. It is deeply moving, both because of the sadness of the compromised existences it charts and because of the strange sense of belonging it evokes. This is Australia, it seems to whisper, and it’s full of people who are everything and nothing like you.

Christos Tsiolkas – The Slap is published by Allen & Unwin. Same Same has five copies to give away to members – click here to enter.