Book Review: The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas

The Slap follows the stories of eight characters who were all guests at a suburban Australian barbecue, tied together by their roles as witnesses.  A child is slapped at this barbecue, by a man who isn't his father.

Who would have thought such a small screaming brat could have created such a flap?  If Harry hadn't slapped him I would have.

The cast of The Slap is very multi-cultural and PC (although quite a few of them aren't so PC themselves).  We have the extended family of Greek immigrants, now settled; the white Australian girl converted to Islam; the Aboriginal man also converted to Islam; the Jewish woman dating a younger guy; the young guy who's just come out the closet; the white trash alcoholic man; the hippie woman who breast feeds her kid till it's like four or something; the girl whose father became a woman and then died from an AIDS related illness, along with her mother; the Indian vet married into a Greek family....You get the drift.  But against this liberal leftie ensemble we get vitriol, misogyny and general unpleasantness.

The trouble with The Slap is that I didn't really like any of the characters.  They're all proved to be sly equivocators who say one thing and mean another.  They all seem to be two-timing their partners.  In the end I sympathised most with the two teenagers: Connie and Richie, although I do worry about their future after reading the whole novel.  I really do.

But the reader ends up having to spend time in all these different characters' heads.  Harry, the child-slapper, is the most unpleasant.  We view "the slap" from the perspective of barbecue host and Harry's cousin, Hector.  Harry seems okay from Hector's view.  He was just protecting his own child (the screaming brat looked set to brain him with a cricket bat).  But once we get into Harry's head, well, we just want to get out really.

In a way this works, this constant reappraisal of character that we're forced into.  Eight sides to every story after all.  I like how we're given a glimpse of the character and then move onto another, never to return, unless through another characters' view.

A few things annoyed me however.

For example, some sloppy writing.  The hippie mum has no money.  Her white-trash-alco-husband-who-wants-to-be-an-artist keeps on spending it all down the pub.  They're skint.  Utterly.  Yet she spends an afternoon getting her hair done at a salon before she goes to meet the girls and orders champagne.  

But mainly it was the sex.  Please God Not Another Sex Scene.  I was reading this on a busy train and I actually had to re-angle my book so the person next to me couldn't look over and think I was reading some Black Lace story.  What's with the cringe worthy mild erotica?  The low point for me had to be when the teenage Connie had a bath and found herself appraising the girth of a shampoo bottle.  PLEASE GOD NO.

I've not really read any modern Australian fiction before.  But what I've learnt from this novel is:
- Australia is a melting pot of diversity and ethnicity
- Yet there are a lot of sexist views
- And class is an issue too
- Quite a few parents are so liberal they don't mind their kids doing drugs.  They even chat about it before the kid goes on a night out
- Some of the parents look after kids while speeding
(disclaimer - I'd like to read some other fiction to get a more rounded view)

So The Slap eh.  If you're expecting an investigation about the ethical issues about hitting a child then you won't find it here.  The actual slap is a trigger to explore these (mostly) seedy lives.  But if you're looking for a load of unpleasant, egotistical, mean and lying characters, well, here you go.  And that's fair dinkum.

Book Review: Girlfriend in a Coma by Douglas Coupland

I've been meaning to read Girlfriend in a Coma for a while; it's always on sale in HMV and Fopp for a few quid, has an interesting cover and of course, a title taken from a Smiths song.

This novel has a 3 part structure - part 1 is narrated in the first person by Richard whose girlfriend Karen ends up in a coma aged 17, part 2 moves into third person when she wakes up 17 years later, while part 3 moves into another first person narrative from a ghost named Jared.  Oh and the Apocalypse has happened. Confused?  Well I was, and still am.  Jared bookends the story.  We'll come back to him later.

I quite enjoyed the start - a bit of late '70s nostalgia and a suitably morbid premise, despite the OTT language in places.  In the first few pages we learn the December night air felt like 'the air of the Moon'; the city dreams of 'only what the embryo knows'; Richard and Karen were 'pumping like lions'; Richard 'thought of jewels being tossed off an ocean liner over the Marianas Trench'.  Err, what?

(PLOT SPOILERS AHEAD)

Karen falls into a coma rather than confront the vision of the future she sees.  Okay! This is my kind of stuff!  But things gradually become more slipshod.  The sudden change to third person was a bit off putting, but the change to Jared's narration was totally jarring.  I kept on thinking he was Richard, our initial narrator.  No surprise as their voice is exactly the same.  Who is this Jared anyway?  Some teenager who was friends with the main characters and died before the story begins.  He hovers over them, after the plague, touching them and giving them gifts, curing their ailments etc like some high school Virgin Mary in American football shoulder pads. Throw in some ridiculous and pretentious mumbo-jumbo and a million pop culture references (yes I can see you like The Smiths).  And then it was all a dream.  Sort of.

Book Review: The Passage by Justin Cronin

I've just finished Justin Cronin's The Passage - thank the Lord.  You know when you've been reading a book for too long and you just want to move onto another story?  Well it was getting to that stage.  I'm normally a quick reader but this behemoth had me going for about 3 weeks.

You've probably heard of Cronin's epic vampire pop culture meets literary novel which prompted a bidding war before it was even finished and will be given cinematic treatments in the near future.  But is it any good?

1. THE PRACTICALITIES

I've gotta be honest, this is not an easy read.  In the literal sense.  It's just so bloody big.  Now I've tackled big books before - your James Joyces and Tolkeins and Kings, but this was just plain painful.  My hands are still aching even now.  The strange thing is my copy is around 760 pages long - that's shorter than Stephen King's The Stand (at least I think so - the pages are larger) but the actual book is so big it's awkward and resulted in a bruised nose when I fell asleep reading it in bed. You certainly can't put it in your handbag.  I feel that Cronin may be personally responsible for boosting Kindle sales.  But of course, that doesn't really matter, it's what's inside that counts as my teachers always told me, which leads me onto...

2. THE GOOD

I have to agree with the many reviews I've seen which say the first 250 odd pages are gripping.  We meet an interesting cast of characters - Amy, Wolgast, Carter - and Cronin gives us decent character development.  This is the part of the novel which covers the outbreak of the virus and how a kind of Apocalypse came to pass - maybe just in America, but who knows?  The relationship between Amy and Wolgast is developed and works well to hold it together.  Sister Lacey too.

3.  THE BAD

Which brings me onto the next section - 100 years later.  Now quite a few reviewers on Amazon say they don't like this bit as suddenly finding all those characters you've been spending time with for the past 250 pages are dead(ish).  I don't actually have a problem with that.  If the book's going for an epic, sweeping history, dislocating feel, then it works.  However Cronin introduces too many new characters in too short a space of time.  I'm still not sure who some of them are, and I wasn't sure who I was supposed to side with.  It was only about 70 pages before the end that I realised who the "hero" was.  Not that a book can't have lots of heroes, but this one is evidently more important and I'm not really sure why.  Other characters die and I don't really care.  Who are you again?

4. THE UGLY

So there are some plot holes and confusion.  But to be fair, it was only when I read the end and thought "Hmmm, that doesn't really seem like a proper ending," and investigated further that I discovered it's the first in a trilogy (note to self - must buy Kindle).  So some bits left hanging may be resolved later

But there are some stylistic aspects I find a bit UGLY.  For example, Cronin likes to trick the reader.  Oh no! S/he's dead!! How sad.  Cut to different scene.  Cut back.  Oh it's okay, s/he's not, and here's why.  Also as I ploughed through, my poor aching hands forced into vampire-like claws, I noticed a few bits of flamboyant vocabulary peeping through.  Vampires "ascend" and "descend", people "arise" from sleep and so forth.  And I'm still not really 100% sure why (MINOR PLOT SPOILER AHEAD) when the Colony party wake up that party of vamps in the library they don't just run out into the sunshine of the Californian desert.  Instead they go and hide in a shopping mall, with shade and those kind of dark spaces that vamps love.  But then the vamps seem to be able to move around in day a lot, just by keeping in the shade of trees - when it suits Cronin.  But I guess Spike and Angel did the same...maybe I'm just thinking a bit too much about this.

If I was going to grade it I'd give it a "C".  I'm hooked enough to want to read the rest when they come out (but on a Kindle) but I'm not under any illusions that this was the Holy Grail of a popular-literary mash up.  Now I'm going to go and massage my aching knuckles some more.

[phantom kangaroo]

I've had my first poetry acceptance/publication this week - something I'm pretty excited about.  It's in an online magazine called Phantom Kangaroo which I've been reading for a little while now.  Initially the name grabbed me, but when I looked at the manifesto I knew it was the sort of publication that was right up my street:

Phantom Kangaroo is published on the 13th of each month, and features 13 poems by 13 poets.

We accept poems in any form, of any subject, or of any length, but favor is given to poetry in the shape of ghost sightings, horoscopes, obituaries (preferably yours), fortune cookie fortunes, tales of UFO abductions, and home-made love spells (preferably ones that work). 

It's run by poet Claudia Lamar - you can check out her work here:
http://claudialamar.com/

Anyway, here's a bit of background context about my poem 'A Ghost About Town'.  Last summer John (I work with him, he's an English teacher too at my college) kind of got me into this induced, heightened state of poetry writing.  He'd give me some material (a quote, newspaper article or myth) and I'd produce a poem, and quite often he'd also produce one and we'd compare.  This one came about from a quote from Robert Benchley, the American humorist, about ghosts.  It got me thinking about America and Europe and our differing ideas about/sense of history.  Also at the forefront of my mind were ideas from New Historicist Stephen Greenblatt (Hamlet in Purgatory) - hence my slight manipulation of a Shakespeare quote in there.  So all these ideas slopped around my head for a while and this was the result.
Here's the link, but please do check out the rest of the issue.
http://www.phantomkangaroo.com/issue-no-5/a-ghost-about-town.html

[molotov cocktail]

I've just found a home for this flash fiction piece I wrote before Christmas.  It's in Molotov Cocktail, which I'm really stoked about as it's a quality flash journal online.  Have a look and check out the other pieces in there (and the back issues).

http://themolotovcocktail.com/past-issues/vol-1-issue-23/leavethecity/

Reading List 2011

The Wind Up Girl - Paulo Bacigalupi (REALLY enjoyed this! Future calorie-punk)

Reservation Road - John Burnham Schwartz (Interesting idea, not sure the execution totally worked)

Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury (Forward thinking with some really beautiful descriptions in there)

The Passage - Justin Cronin (I was reading this for weeks!)

High Rise - JG Ballard (That '60s architectural dream of streets in the sky meets Cabrini Green; modern life is rubbish when all there is to eat is barbecued pet dog)

Girlfriend in a Coma - Douglas Coupland (Just read the first 70 pages and you'll be fine)


The Slap - Christos Tsiolkas (It's like Neighbours on coke, and with more sex)

Lustrum - Robert Harris (I'm literally OBSESSED with Roman history)

Oryx and Crake - Margaret Atwood (Hey, I loved this! So much so I read it in a day)

The Great and Secret Show - Clive Barker (Enjoyed about 30% of it, the rest needed a severe edit)

The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ - Philip Pullman (My first Kindle read! A re-telling of the Jesus myth with some interesting changes)

A Visit From the Goon Squad - Jennifer Egan (Seriously the most amazing book I've read in ages


The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini (Don't know why everyone raves about this. I found it contrived and full of one dimensional characters)

Zoo City - Lauren Beukes (Liked the setting and the animal spirits as punishment.  Not so sure about the hard to follow thriller plot and bizarre finale)

Small Island - Andrea Levy (This is a potential set text for A level so thought I'd check it out. Enjoyable period details and had a good hook. The outdated attitudes are quite unsettling though! Worth a look)

The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst (Part 1 - blossoming sexuality in the early '80s; Part 2 - hedonism and Maggie T; Part 3 - the party's DEFINITELY over)

The History of Love - Nicole Krauss (loneliness, some funny bits, interesting divisions, some confusion but hey ho)


Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell - (a re-visit for me as I'm teaching it.  I love this book ; it's so playful and varied, plus it gets better when you read it again)

The Secret History - Donna Tartt (another re-read. I love this book!)

Quarantine - Jim Crace (I really didn't enjoy this as much as I thought I would. I found the shifting narrative perspective a bit distancing)

Tamburlaine Must Die - Louise Welch (This has been sitting on my bookshelf for years, literally. It was a fun quick read - kind of a literary romp)

Year of the Flood (Follow up to Oryx and Crake. Loved it - although I preferred Oryx and Crake a bit more. It did lose a bit of pacing at the end)

One Day - David Nicholls (Not my usual genre, but I was drawn in by the structure. Immensely readable, but some of the dialogue and characterisation really did start to grate. Loved the late '80 and '90s references though!)

Sophie's Choice - William Styron (God this was hard-going: Nazis, porn and sexism)

Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro (Ironically, I felt let down)

The Fellowship of the Ring - JRR Tolkien (I used to read this every September, but stopped about 10 years ago. Surprised myself by how much I'm enjoying it again!)

The Two Towers - JRR Tolkien (I still can't decide which is my favourite - although I guess that's kind of a pointless thing to think about as Tolkien didn't want them broken up anyway)

The Return of the King - JRR Tolkien (And my marathon is over. I had fun.)

Book Review: Reservation Road by John Burnham Schwartz

Reservation Road is about the aftermath of a horrific incident; Ethan and Grace Learner's young son Josh is killed one summer night in a hit and run.  However the driver isn't just a faceless figure that disappears into the night.  Instead we get to know him through a first person narrative.  It turns out the Learners know the killer too.  Dwight is a divorced mess of a lawyer who's still obsessed with his ex wife and has violent tendancies.  His ex wife taught Josh piano.  Josh was a gifted piano player - a trait which seems employed to increase the poignancy; Josh had so much to lose.

I wanted to read this book because of Schwartz's narrative stance.  He uses alternating perspectives: Ethan, Grace and Dwight.  So we get three perspectives on the horrible event and see how it alters everything, including the Learners' marriage.  However rather oddly we get a first person narration for the boys (father Ethan and killer Dwight) but a third person for Grace.  I have no idea why.  Perhaps it's to show her emotional distance?  I found her quite hard to connect with, but she's zoned out and in shock so I guess this makes sense.  Or perhaps Schwartz felt he couldn't write from a feminine perspective?  Whatever the reason I found it quite disconcerting, like I wasn't getting the whole picture.  There wasn't really much to differentiate Ethan and Dwight's voice either.

I think it dipped at the end.  I won't give it away but it wasn't really what I expected and didn't feel true to the rest of the book.  But I still enjoyed it; there are some really evocative pieces suggesting the seasons, passage of time and memories and we do get a glimpse of grief.  Bit of a strange one though.  There's a film of it apparently, but I haven't seen it yet.