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Christos Tsiolkas delivers a punch

June 18

Christos Tsiolkas has gone from strength to strength in recent years – and rightly so. From his acclaimed first novel Loaded to the darkly ambitious Dead Europe, his writing has become known through a steady wave of word-of-mouth for its fearlessness and its courage.

What I love about Tsiolkas is his need to write his experience of contemporary Australia as he sees it, not just as mainstream pressures deem it should be written. Dead Europe, so full of love, sex, racism, religion, prejudice, blood and hatred, completely blew me away in its scale and detail, as did The Slap, Tsiolkas’ latest work and frontrunner for today’s Miles Franklin Award.

While Meanjin has expressed its reservations about the shortlist’s failure to recognise the wide and excellent range of writing by women in Australia (see here) we certainly have our fingers firmly crossed in hope that Tsiolkas will walk away with the prize. If he wins, this will mean not only a great recognition of his work, but also a new willingness to see Australian culture more broadly – no small thing by any means.

Tsiolkas’ interview with Michael Williams in the June Meanjin is now up on the edition’s page. In the meantime, here’s a brief extract:

Michael Williams: When Loaded came out, a great deal of the commentary surrounding it focused on identity politics. The emphasis was on whether your protagonist, Ari, defined himself chiefly through his sexuality or his race. While many of the same themes can be followed through your work, arguably The Slap’s key moments of identity concern age and class. Would you agree with that and does it reflect a shift in your attitudes?

Christos Tsiolkas: I think it does reflect a shift in my attitudes. Not that what formed my interest—immersion even—in identity politics has disappeared. Questions of sexuality, cultural and racial identity are still important to me. But I think that shift represents one thing: I’ve gotten older. My relationship with older members of my family is something that I’ve been thinking about a lot, and the children in my life are now teenagers and young adults. As for class, especially over the period of Howard, its transformation seemed so under-debated, so under-thought-out. It sort of disappeared, I thought, from the intellectual and public landscape of Australian culture. And it just seemed to me that class is the great unspoken theme underlying what’s occurring.

MW: You bring it up really powerfully in this and it’s through the lens of things such as talking about where characters’ kids are going to go to school. That seems to me to be the very Australian class conversation that’s happening …

CT: It is actually quite incredible. We have the highest rate of private school education in the OECD. What we’ve done to the education system is one of the great cultural failures of Australia. And we will see that in hindsight. We will see that because we’ve had every opportunity to create something much more, something better.

I didn’t set out to be explicit about the politics in this book. But while I was working on the final edits of The Slap, I read George Megalogenis’s book The Longest Decade. And I think that’s one book that is really saying some interesting things about the nature of Australian culture, and what has happened over the last fifteen or twenty years. One point he makes is that almost 30 per cent of the population has disappeared from political representation, from media representation, from cultural representation, and it doesn’t matter whether we have a Labor or Liberal government. That’s almost like an underclass that we can refer to and talk about if we’re interested but actually know nothing about. It feels like a complete economic apartheid. Australian suburban middle-class culture is such a wide proportion of the population and the reality of the aspirational class is that it does look Wog, it does look Asian as much as it looks Irish and Anglo and that’s really fascinating. Maybe I should read more widely, but I’m not aware of [that diversity] being represented in our literature or in our films or television.

MW: There’s an extent to which the contemporary urban Australian experience of any class is fairly underrepresented in our literature and our arts. Apart from genre stuff where its acceptable, there seems to be an argument that Australian Literature has to be historical, it has to be rural, it has to be a particular kind of national motif.

CT: It has to be named after a tree!

MW: Absolutely! One thing that makes your writing stand out is the way in which it speaks to the contemporary Australian experience.

CT: Look, I think that reluctance to talk about contemporary Australia comes from an artistic class with a reluctance to actually see ourselves as connected to this suburbia. You know there’s a rich vein to mine about our reluctance to be suburban and that antipathy to the reality of suburban life in Australia. I think there’s been a turn away from realism in our writing as well, and I’m not sure why that is. I think there’s almost a sense over the last twenty years of going for the grand themes; that if you did talk about the domestic, if you did talk about the contemporary urban, that somehow you were not as good a writer. The important writers were those dealing with the Big Themes.

Dead Europe came out of that kind of questioning of the role of the writer in this culture. And The Slap was a reaction to the work I did in Dead Europe. It was meant to be a much lighter and a much smaller book. I’d started to inhabit Isaac and the characters in Dead Europe and it was a really difficult book to write. Sometimes I still get queasy about that novel. When I started it I didn’t realise how immersed I was going to be in that world. And that by revealing something about anti-Semitism, which I knew was an important project to do, I think I was unaware of how consumed I would become by those politics and by that racism.

That’s actually how I first started working on The Slap: Dead Europe had, quite honestly, left me exhausted. I can only use that word. And I said ‘I’m gonna actually stop working on it.’ It almost became one of my ‘filed in the back of the drawer’ books. And so the beginning of The Slap felt like a holiday. It was just to get into the joy of writing again. But we’re all prey to the insecurities and neuroses and self-obsessions and narcissism that come with this craft. I thought: Am I going to get hammered for writing a domestic novel? But I also think that there’s something in giving a voice to the contemporary experience that is important to do. Not only important, exciting…

JA

 

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