The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas

The Slap is a novel looking at a cross section of Australian life by taking the viewpoints of eight characters, all whom were present at the BBQ where the eponymous slap took place. Hector is first up, a Greek bureaucrat, married to Indian Aisha but considering an affair; then Anouk, a hard Jewish writer who cannot see the problem with hitting a child - and, in general, has no understanding of, or liking for, children; Harry is next - Hector's hot-headed cousin who delivered the slap. Connie is a teenager who regularly looks after Hugo, the child who was slapped, and dreams of becoming a vet; Rosie is the mother of Hugo, pathologically attached to him and still breast feeding her child even though he is three years old; Manolis is the father of Hector, a doting grandfather and fiercely Greek. Finally we hear from Aisha herself, as she and Hector take a holiday where truths come out, and Richie, Connie's best friend, a young lad waiting to hear his exam results and struggling with the fact he is gay.

I struggled with this book. It is annoyingly readable, but has so many flaws that, despite a storming and compelling start, it really tails off towards the end of the novel and you find yourself wondering why you are still reading.

The premise is fantastic - taking a child being slapped as a starting point, and exploring how this affects friends and family is just brilliant. I heard about this book at a blogger event and was determined to seek it out and read it purely based on the premise. It must be such a great sell - in fact, I have mentioned it to other people and they have shown the same intrigue.

Tsiolkas does a brilliant job at showing us a cross section of Australian life, a seething mass of religions and cultures, sexualities and races. With this morass of humanity, conflict is inevitable and Tsiolkas handles the macro issues of life in Australia as well as the micro.

I also liked how Tsiolkas was able to explore perceptions of people through the slap - at first we think Harry possibly had a case for slapping a child who was both misbehaving and threatening his own child (as much as anyone has a case for slapping a child, anyway), but then we discover that Harry is a foul-tempered man who keeps a mistress and has hit his wife in the past. I enjoyed having my perceptions overthrown like this - a literal exploration of not judging someone by first impressions.

So that is the good... On to the bad...

I've mentioned my dislike of profanity in books before. I can handle it when it feels natural and when it serves the plot - here we had (excuse me) cocks and cunts on virtually every page. It was an endless stream of bad language - and mostly used in universally poor sex scenes. It got to the point where I was sickened by the profanity and the relentless, grotesque mentions of masturbation and rough sex.

In fact, this book hit a number of my literary black spots: women being mistreated in terms of hitting them and forcing them into sex; young girls feeling as though they have to have sex to make them women; adultery; flagrant and accepted use of hard drugs. This book was simply filled with horrible misogynist men and women with victim complexes.

The pacing of the novel was entirely off. The premise was to do with the slap and this drove the narrative admirably for the first two thirds. The resolution to this part of the tale came way too early, and left me wondering why I was still reading the novel as it petered off into a limp ending.

Also, for a literary novel, this felt very much like a trashy summer read. I could imagine seeing similar characters and events in a novel that is as far from Booker Prize winning as I can imagine!

Altogether, I hated this book. Yet I read it greedily and compulsively. Something must have driven me to keep turning these pages, and I guess it was Tsiolkas' writing. Ultimately I wanted to finish the novel - whether that was simply wanting to find out the result of the court case, or seeing whether Tsiolkas could descent into worse depths of depravity in his writing.

Man Booker thoughts: Please don't let this book win! It might have something to say on racism, homosexuality, the life of ordinary people, but it is wrapped up in a novel that is filled with one dimensional cliched characters. There must be better novels on the long list than this one...

The Long Song by Andrea Levy

The Long Song chronicles, from a first person perspective, the life of July, a female slave born and brought up on the plantation Amity. She speaks about her life at the behest of her son, starting with the rape of her mother by a cruel overseer, through her time as a house maid for a white lady called Caroline Mortimer, the two children she bears, and touches on the dying days of slavery, including the Baptist Wars.

The book is written with simplicity and grace, using the Caribbean patois to great effect. July's voice is warm and cheeky, insisting that she will tell her story without "...words flowing free as the droppings that fall from the backside of a mile..." The words bounce from the page, idiosyncratic and humorous: 'fatty batty', 'bug-a-bug', 'licky-licky'.

With the prose reading so smoothly, it is easy to disregard this novel as being merely light and readable. It deals, rather, with the true realities of slavery and plantation life: the gulf between the house slaves and those who worked the fields; the hateful mistreatment and casual cruelty by the white people of those who slaved for them; and, indeed, the undercurrents of tension between the blacks regarding the colour of their skin: "Only with a white man, can there be guarantee that the colour of your pickney will be raised. For a mulatto who breeds with a white man will bring forth a quadroon; the the quadroon that enjoys white relations will give to this world a mustee; the mustee will beget a mustiphino; and the mustiphino... oh, the mustiphino's child with a white man for a papa, will find each day greets them no longer with a frown, but welcomes them with a smile, as they at last stride within this world as a cherished white person."

Despite the weighty subject matter, Levy manages to avoid it becoming a depressing read. In fact, we delight in the japes played by the slaves on their white owners, such as when they switch the good table linen for soiled bedsheets during an important Christmas meal. However, there are a couple of occasions when the sheer horrors of the slaves' lives is brought home to us, such as here when Kitty carries dung in a container upon her head: "...the solid odour did choke her at the throat, after mighty coughing and a few strong inhalations, all the air about Kitty, be it sweet or bitter, came to smell like shit, so the offence was lost. But for her tongue there was no such accommodation. When, unwittingly, a piece would fall into her open mouth... it would burn so fierce upon her tongue that she feared a hole was being bored right through it."

The white people in this tale are, universally, to be derided or hated or pitied - none of them emerge well, but all are three dimensional with realistic motives ascribed to them, such as Robert Goodwin who seeks to do well by the blacks he owns right up until the point where they refuse to work for him.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading The Long Song - in fact, my only complaint was minor and thus: the story was written from first person perspective which meant that a) sometimes July wouldn't have known things that she was presented as knowing e.g. how her mistress feels when smelling the bodies of her slaves and b) we missed hearing an awful lot of external events, since July herself did not see them or know of them.

Other than this, The Long Song was a fine book - telling an authentic tale about a very shameful point in British history. It represents a feat in research and imagination, combining to present a novel that, though slight, presents an honest account of what it must have been to live as a slave in the 1800s. I found it entertaining, funny and horrific by turns and the story of July will stay with me for a while.

Man Booker Prize thoughts: I feel like a fraud talking about this novel's chances at the Booker Prize. I genuinely don't think I've read any of the previous winners, unless by accident and all unaware! This being the first novel of the long list I've read, as well, doesn't make it any easier setting out my thoughts. All I can say about its chances is that I think it effectively combines literary skill with a damn good story, that also conveys a weighty message. If this is what the Booker judges are looking for, then I can see The Long Song making it to the short list.

Man Booker Prize Long List Announced

Today the long list for the Man Booker Prize has been announced, after much deliberation by the judges, who picked 13 books from a total of 138. The shortlist will be announced on 7th September 2010, followed by the declaration of the winner on Tuesday 12th October.

Here are the long list nominees:

Parrot and Oliver in America by Peter Carey

Olivier is a French aristocrat, the traumatized child of survivors of the Revolution. Parrot the son of an itinerant printer who always wanted to be an artist but has ended up a servant. Born on different sides of history, their lives will be brought together by their travels in America. When Olivier sets sail for the New World, ostensibly to study its prisons but in reality to save his neck from one more revolution - Parrot is sent with him, as spy, protector, foe and foil. As the narrative shifts between the perspectives of Parrot and Olivier, and their picaresque travels together and apart - in love and politics, prisons and the world of art - Peter Carey explores the adventure of American democracy, in theory and in practice, with dazzling wit and inventiveness.


Room by Emma Donoghue

It's Jack's birthday, and he's excited about turning five. Jack lives with his Ma in Room, which has a locked door and a skylight, and measures 11 feet by 11 feet. He loves watching TV, and the cartoon characters he calls friends, but he knows that nothing he sees on screen is truly real - only him, Ma and the things in Room. Until the day Ma admits that there's a world outside ...Told in Jack's voice, "Room" is the story of a mother and son whose love lets them survive the impossible. Unsentimental and sometimes funny, devastating yet uplifting, "Room" is a novel like no other.


The Betrayal by Helen Dunmore

Leningrad in 1952 is a city recovering from war, where Andrei, a young hospital doctor and Anna, a nursery school teacher, are forging a life together. Summers at the dacha, preparations for the hospital ball, work and the care of sixteen year old Kolya fill their minds. They try hard to avoid coming to the attention of the authorities, but even so their private happiness is precarious. Stalin is still in power, and the Ministry for State Security has new targets in its sights. When Andrei has to treat the seriously ill child of a senior secret police officer, Volkov, he finds himself and his family caught in an impossible game of life and death - for in a land ruled by whispers and watchfulness, betrayal can come from those closest to you.


In A Strange Room by Damon Galgut

A young man takes three journeys, through Greece, India and Africa. He travels lightly, simply. To those who travel with him and those whom he meets on the way - including a handsome, enigmatic stranger, a group of careless backpackers and a woman on the edge - he is the Follower, the Lover and the Guardian. Yet, despite the man's best intentions, each journey ends in disaster. Together, these three journeys will change his whole life. A novel of longing and thwarted desire, rage and compassion, "In a Strange Room" is the hauntingly beautiful evocation of one man's search for love, and a place to call home.


The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson

'He should have seen it coming. His life had been one mishap after another. So he should have been prepared for this one'. Julian Treslove, a professionally unspectacular and disappointed BBC worker, and Sam Finkler, a popular Jewish philosopher, writer and television personality, are old school friends. Despite a prickly relationship and very different lives, they've never quite lost touch with each other - or with their former teacher, Libor Sevick, a Czechoslovakian always more concerned with the wider world than with exam results. Now, both Libor and Finkler are recently widowed, and with Treslove, his chequered and unsuccessful record with women rendering him an honorary third widower, they dine at Libor's grand, central London apartment. It's a sweetly painful evening of reminiscence in which all three remove themselves to a time before they had loved and lost; a time before they had fathered children, before the devastation of separations, before they had prized anything greatly enough to fear the loss of it. Better, perhaps, to go through life without knowing happiness at all because that way you had less to mourn? Treslove finds he has tears enough for the unbearable sadness of both his friends' losses. And it's that very evening, at exactly 11:30pm, as Treslove hesitates a moment outside the window of the oldest violin dealer in the country as he walks home, that he is attacked. After this, his whole sense of who and what he is will slowly and ineluctably change. "The Finkler Question" is a scorching story of exclusion and belonging, justice and love, ageing, wisdom and humanity. Funny, furious, unflinching, this extraordinary novel shows one of our finest writers at his brilliant best.


The Long Song by Andrea Levy

You do not know me yet. My son Thomas, who is publishing this book, tells me, it is customary at this place in a novel to give the reader a little taste of the story that is held within these pages. As your storyteller, I am to convey that this tale is set in Jamaica during the last turbulent years of slavery and the early years of freedom that followed. July is a slave girl who lives upon a sugar plantation named Amity and it is her life that is the subject of this tale. She was there when the Baptist War raged in 1831, and she was also present when slavery was declared no more. My son says I must convey how the story tells also of July's mama Kitty, of the negroes that worked the plantation land, of Caroline Mortimer the white woman who owned the plantation and many more persons besides - far too many for me to list here. But what befalls them all is carefully chronicled upon these pages for you to peruse. Perhaps, my son suggests, I might write that it is a thrilling journey through that time in the company of people who lived it. All this he wishes me to pen so the reader can decide if this is a book they might care to consider. Cha, I tell my son, what fuss-fuss. Come, let them just read it for themselves.


C by Tom McCarthy

I cannot find any information about this book at all online! Except for the fact that it is being released on 5th August 2010 by Jonathan Cape Ltd.








The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell

Set at a turning point in history on a tiny island attached to mainland Japan, David Mitchell's tale of power, passion and integrity transports us to a world that is at once exotic and familiar: an extraordinary place and an era when news from abroad took months to arrive, yet when people behaved as they always do - loving, lusting and yearning, cheating, fighting and killing. Bringing to vivid life a tectonic shift between East and West, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is dramatic, funny, heartbreaking, enlightening and thought-provoking. Reading it is an unforgettable experience.

February by Lisa Moore

In 1982, the oil rig Ocean Ranger sank off the coast of Newfoundland during a Valentine's night storm. In the early hours of the next morning, all 84 men aboard died. Helen O'Mara is one of those left behind when her husband, Cal, drowns. Her story starts years after the Ranger disaster, but she is compelled to travel back to the 'February' that persists in her mind, and to that moment in 1982 when, expecting a fourth child, she received the call informing her that Cal was lost at sea. A quarter of a century on, late one winter's night, Helen is woken by another phone call. It is her wayward son John, in another time zone, on his way home. He has made a girl pregnant and he wants Helen to decide what he should do. As John grapples with what it might mean to be a father, Helen realises that she must shake off her decades of mourning in order to help. With grace and precision, and a shocking ability to render the precise details of her characters' physical and emotional worlds, Lisa Moore reveals the whole story to us. And just as, finally, we watch the oil rig go down, we see Helen emerging from her grief to greet a new life.

Skippy Dies by Paul Murray

Ruprecht Van Doren is an overweight genius whose hobbies include very difficult maths and the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. Daniel 'Skippy' Juster is his roommate. In the grand old Dublin institution that is Seabrook College for Boys, nobody pays either of them much attention. But when Skippy falls for Lori, the frisbee-playing Siren from the girls' school next door, suddenly all kinds of people take an interest - including Carl, part-time drug-dealer and official school psychopath ...A tragic comedy of epic sweep and dimension, "Skippy Dies" scours the corners of the human heart and wrings every drop of pathos, humour and hopelessness out of life, love, Robert Graves, mermaids, M-theory, and everything in between.

Trespass by Rose Tremain

In a silent valley stands an isolated stone farmhouse, the Mas Lunel. Its owner is Aramon Lunel, an alcoholic so haunted by his violent past that he's become incapable of all meaningful action, letting his hunting dogs starve and his land go to ruin. Meanwhile, his sister, Audrun, alone in her modern bungalow within sight of the Mas Lunel, dreams of exacting retribution for the unspoken betrayals that have blighted her life. Into this closed Cevenol world comes Anthony Verey, a wealthy but disillusioned antiques dealer from London. Now in his sixties, Anthony hopes to remake his life in France, and he begins looking at properties in the region. From the moment he arrives at the Mas Lunel, a frightening and unstoppable series of consequences is set in motion. Two worlds and two cultures collide. Ancient boundaries are crossed, taboos are broken, a violent crime is committed. And all the time the Cevennes hills remain, as cruel and seductive as ever, unforgettably captured in this powerful and unsettling novel, which reveals yet another dimension to Rose Tremain's extraordinary imagination.

The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas

At a suburban barbecue, a man slaps a child who is not his own...The reverberations call into question the relationships between all those who witness it. At a suburban barbecue one afternoon, a man slaps an unruly 3-year-old boy. The boy is not his son. It is a single act of violence, but this one slap reverberates through the lives of everyone who witnesses it happen. In his controversial, award-winning novel, Christos Tsiolkas presents an apparently harmless domestic incident as seen from eight very different perspectives. The result is an unflinching interrogation of our lives today; of the modern family and domestic life in the twenty-first century, a deeply thought-provoking novel about boundaries and their limits...

The Stars in the Bright Sky by Alan Warner

The Sopranos are back: out of school and out in the world, gathered in Gatwick to plan a super-cheap last-minute holiday to celebrate their reunion. Kay, Kylah, Manda, Rachel and Finn are joined by Finn's equally gorgeous friend Ava - a half-French philosophy student - and are ready to go on the rampage. Just into their twenties and as wild as ever, they've added acrylic nails, pedicures, mobile phones and credit cards to their arsenal, but are still the same thirsty girls: their holiday bags packed with skimpy clothes and condoms, their hormones rampant. Will it be Benidorm or Magaluf, Paris or Las Vegas? One thing is certain: a great deal of fast-food will be eaten and gallons of Guinness will be drunk by the alpha-female Manda, and she will be matched by the others' enthusiastic intake of Bacardi Breezers, vodkas and Red Bull. With Alan Warner's pitch-perfect ear for dialogue, pinpoint characterisation and glorious set-pieces, this is a novel propelled by conversation through scenes of excess and debauchery, hilarity and sadness. Like the six young women at its centre, "The Stars in the Bright Sky" is vivid and brimming with life - in all its squalor, rage, tears and laughter - and presents an unforgettable story of female friendship.


Well, what do you think? How many have you read? How many are you intending to read?

I am having to stop myself contemplating reading the long list and getting involved the way that I did with the Arthur C Clarke earlier this year - I have too many books to read already. But there are a few books on this list that I am interested in - The Slap and The Long Song amongst them - and a few that I didn't know until I looked them up, but am now keen to read - C and The Stars in the Bright Sky. So let's see if reviews of at least some of these 13 appear on my blog in the next month and a bit!