CHRISTOS TSIOLKAS The Slap **** (or possibly **)

I’m still not sure whether I love or hate this book.

The characters are all pretty unpleasant most of the time and I nearly gave up after a couple of chapters. Who is this bloke who thinks he’s an Australian John Updike, I was thinking. But on reflection I’m glad I stuck with it. I think.

It’s set in Australia – mostly in the Greek community in Melbourne. Hector and his Indian wife, Aisha, are hosting a barbecue. One of Aisha’s closest friends, Rosie, is there with her husband and 3-year-old son Hugo, who is an undisciplined nightmare. He’s already broken another child’s games console when he raises a baseball bat in anger. Hector’s cousin, Harry, stops him and gives him a (well-deserved?) slap. The police are brought into it and Harry is arrested.

The reverberations of that slap cause fracture-lines to develop between friends and spouses and show up the fragility of people’s happiness. So, for instance, Aisha feels duty bound to stand by her friend, Rosie. Hector doesn’t want to see his cousin dragged though the courts. Everyone in the book seems miserable in their own way and they all seem angry with themselves and their fate. They’re desperate for love and often seek it in sex outside their marriages, sex which annoyingly (and unbelievably) each of them without exception always refers to as ‘fucking’. Do people like that exist? (In fact, if you’re allergic to bad language avoid this book – I doubt if there’s a ‘fuck’-free page – not to mention a liberal sprinkling of ‘cunts’.)

There are eight chapters, each told from the point of view of a different character – four men and four women, aged from 18 to 70. It’s very cleverly done, because each of them takes the story on and reveals more about the others, and in the end I had a sense of the sadness and vulnerability of all of them, and of their potential to be better, kinder people.