By Michele Magwood for The Sunday Times
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Barracuda
Christos Tsiolkas (Atlantic)
****
The author of the epic bestseller The Slap is back with a new novel, about swimming, shame and redemption.
Christos Tsiolkas is on the line from London and we’re talking about wogs. As you do. There are wogs all over his books, barely a page goes by without someone being called a wog, or calling themselves wogs, sometimes affectionately, but the word is uncomfortable. Isn’t it taboo in Australia as it is here?
“Nah,” he laughs. “The word wog came to refer to the post World War 2 wave of immigrants. It lost its potency in the 80s, the second generation reclaimed it. So anyone from across the five continents coming into Australia is a wog.”
Aborigines aren’t wogs, they have another name: “blackfellas”. And yes, racism is alive and well in Tsiolkas’ contemporary Melbourne. We talk about similarities between Australia and South Africa, both formed, as he puts, it “in that violent colonial moment.”
“I’d like to give you a hopeful answer about a new transformed Australia, but there’s racism and fear and hatred still, and the country’s aflame at the moment on the issue of asylum and refugees. It’s really shocking. But in our colonial experience we never had an Afro-Caribbean immigration, so the marker of race is not so much colour as language.”
Barracuda is the story of Danny Kelly, son of a Greek mother and a long-distance truck driver. They’re solidly, proudly, working class, so when Danny wins a swimming scholarship to a private school his father is ambivalent. “Our sort can’t dream,” he says.
But dream Danny does, of the 2000 Sydney Olympics. He silences the snobbish, bullying boys at the school by being better, faster, stronger in the pool. He’s arrogant, winning race after race, until at an international event he fails to even win a place. His meltdown is spectacular, the coach observing of his appalling behaviour “He’ll be ashamed of this moment for the rest of his life.”
Drowning in humiliation, his life veers off into prison, despair, dislocation. He must come to terms with his homosexuality and his estrangement from his family, to make atonement and to find a way of belonging in the world.
“When I sat down to write the book I had a card above my desk saying ‘This is the story of a good man’,” says Tsiolkas. “A friend of mine, the author Angela Savage, had posed me a challenge. She said you’re a humanist so why are you so afraid of writing about redemption? We treat it with suspicion, that it can only be treated sentimentally or with irony. We put quote marks around it. I took up the challenge. Not to write about it would have been a cop out.”
Tsiolkas seems incapable of creating a stereotype. Even his smaller, walk-on characters are layered with inner life: a Jehovah’s Witness aunt who makes just one appearance but is so ghastly you want to avert your eyes; the brittle, patrician family of one of Danny’s team mates, his strident best friend Demet.
The characters may be unique, but they come from readily-identifiable social contexts. For Barracuda is also a story about class. “It’s always been one of the myths of the new world nation, that a classless society can be built. This book was a way for me to ask the question about the transformation of class.”
- @michelemagwood
Book details
- Barracuda by Christos Tsiolkas
EAN: 9781782392422
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