The subject of male violence is at the core of Christos Tsiolkas’s bestselling novel The Slap and of its follow-up, Barracuda. Here too, in this earlier work only now published in the UK (it came out in Australia in 1999), male fear and brutality fractures the family at its heart.
Walking with his brother on a deserted beach at the southernmost tip of Australia, the narrator is horrified by the sight of crows feeding all along the shore beside a sea in which large grey birds are caught and floundering in an oil slick. “The terror I experienced is indescribable,” he tells us, but, though his brother advises them to turn back, he cannot tear himself away: “Part of me wanted to stay, I wanted to face this terror, examine it, wanted to comprehend it.”
Set mainly in Melbourne, the book powerfully explores the migrant experience through a family torn between conflicting identities: Dom, Tommy and Louie are three sons of Greek and Italian immigrants. They have grown up Australian, and struggle to relate to one another and forge a place to belong. (“See what they do to Whitlam because he cared about us migrants,” laments their mother on prime minister Gough Whitlam’s 1975 dismissal.)
The novel has the visceral intensity of a Greek tragedy, as one of the brothers, Tommy, “spirals out of control” after losing his job, descending into a cycle of violence, pornography and crime. Rapidly running out of money, governed by his sexual proclivities, he is “both repulsed and attracted” by the underbelly of the city, leading inexorably to catastrophe. Unflinching and urgent, the novel traces the frightened family’s attempt to understand and deal with the devastating aftermath of Tommy’s death and “the awful collapse in our lives”.
Tommy’s grieving brother, Louie, seeks consolation in music (“all I wanted to hear was something that spoke of light”), while his mother listens to traditional Greek music, “a slow, painful dirge”. When the children were young, their mother told them about the 12 gods of Olympus. The narrator’s favourite was “the celestial artist” Hephaestus: “His blemishment, the club foot, meant he understood all too well, was compassionate to, human weakness”. Indeed the greatest strength of this novel is its harrowing exploration of human weakness.
The Jesus Man is published by Atlantic (£8.99). Click here to buy it for £7.37
