FICTION: EILEEN BATTERSBYreviews The Slap, By Christos Tsoilkas, Tuskar Rock, 483pp, £12.99
TO HIT A child, your own child, is second only to illness or death as the worst dread a parent could have. Beyond the violence, it is the damage done, it is the betrayal of trust and failure of patience. It is a private horror. But to strike another person’s child, that is a different matter. Teachers live in fear of committing such an act. When the child is not your own, it becomes public, the hurt caused is lost in the legality. It shouldn’t be, but it is.
Greek-Australian Christos Tsiolkas has constructed a vast, heaving soap opera of a novel about a very serious offence. A neighbour’s exasperation with a spoilt child cuts through a community of selfish characters. All involved, even as onlookers, take sides. You feel there is going to be an important message, there should be one, shouldn’t there be one? Why would an adult man hit a three-year-old? Why am I making such a big deal of it? Such atrocities happen all the time. Is the anger generated by this narrative on the side of children, not the boy in the novel but all the children? Has Tsiolkas written a powerful polemic about abused children? No, he hasn’t. This big, earthy, often coarse, at times sickening novel is about people, about married couples with various problems – fear of ageing, sexual preoccupations, cultural complications.
In a dense narrative, set in a multiracial milieu in present-day Australia (admittedly an Australia one doesn’t get much sense of), the major obstacle is the characters. The men are constantly primed for sex, whether with their wives or their shabbily treated girlfriends. The children watch television while what passes for life goes on in the background.
This novel's presence on the Man Booker Prize longlist may well raise a few eyebrows, particularly as the implied theme, that of child abuse, is not central. In fact, it is almost incidental. Emotional abuse could be said to run through the entire book, except that few of the characters like each other sufficiently to be able either to inflict or experience, emotional abuse. Tsiolkas is also a screenwriter, and The Slapreads like a mini-series in the waiting: there are sufficient characters, large servings of domestic unrest, conflict between friends, and graphic sex. For all the heat, anger and tears, it is disturbingly cold. It is a difficult book to read – the sex is dominated by the physical perfection of the players and it is so aggressive it is surprising none of it actually concludes in a casualty department.
The players, and players they are, are summoned by an author utterly in control of his material. First up is Hector, and this is no modern-day Greek hero. Within the opening paragraph we discover he is indolence personified. He is thinking of a girl not his wife. He is intent, no matter what is happening, on completing 150 sit-ups each morning. "He simply loved women," we are told. "Young, old, those just starting to blossom and those beginning to fade. And sheepishly, almost embarrassed at his own vanity, he knew that women loved him. Women lovedhim."
Had a woman written this bestseller it would be described as a beach read – and why not? It is a free world. But instead it is presented as a literary novel, and to see it being compared with Don DeLillo's Underworldis as unfair to Tsiolkas as it is to DeLillo.
Hector’s self-love is almost comic, in fact it is about the only bit of humour in almost 500 pages. In ways, his early-morning fantasy is a coy variation on Leopold Bloom’s reveries. Whatever about his lying, his egoism and his infidelity, here is a guy who won’t even allow his wife to listen to her choice of music on the radio. The wife is perfect, a beautiful Indian woman who runs her home with precise attention to detail and who also manages her own veterinary clinic. Do such paragons exist? She is admittedly tense and not very happy, but she is determined to stay with Hector because he is so good-looking and they make the perfect couple, at least visually. Anyhow, without giving too much away (and, in fairness, there is far less at work in this novel than one might think), Hector doesn’t slap the child. This makes sense because Hector wouldn’t be interested enough.
Harry, also married to a beautiful wife, also involved with another woman, one grateful to take whatever crumb he throws to her, is the one who hits the child. Less than a quarter into the narrative we hear him being briefed by his horrible lawyer: “No, you are going to look contrite, you are going to look like a loving husband and father. Which you are. I am going to do all the talking. That’s why your pocket is bleeding.”
No one takes the offence seriously, it has nuisance value, and the general consensus is that the child is a monster not helped by his mother. Rosie is unhappy, not as well off as her friends and still breastfeeding the three-year-old slap victim.
The Slapis a portrait of a communal midlife crisis. But this is not Updike-land, there is no beauty in the prose. There is no wit, no real feeling. Nor is it Martin Amis. The writing is not comparable, and Tsiolkas relies too much on sex as a page-filler and narrative dynamic. Almost halfway through a novel that will leave the reader weary and let down, the end of an affair the young Rosie had while in London is mentioned: "She had cried on leaving Eric but they both knew the tears were not for the relationship, that they had both been playing parts in a late 20th-century soap opera that needed to come to an end. They were bored with each other."
Tsiolkas might almost be referring to this book. The human condition, however messy, is one of the staples of great fiction, and had this big, heavy yarn been half its length, it could have been twice the novel it is. But the story is too thin and the characters are far too loud and simply not convincing.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
