Grant Cartwright

There can be little doubt that Christos Tsiolkas is one of the writers of the moment when it comes to Australian fiction. His star was in the ascent from the moment his first novel, [b:Loaded|9564753|Loaded|Christos Tsiolkas|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1287888301s/9564753.jpg|1197295], was turned into the movie Head On in 1998. The twenty-first century was his true time to shine, however, in an arc that begins with [b:Dead Europe|2883972|Dead Europe|Christos Tsiolkas|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1323545872s/2883972.jpg|2910197] in 2005, to the scandalous success of [b:The Slap|6632916|The Slap|Christos Tsiolkas|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1327122830s/6632916.jpg|5464024] in 2008, and its follow-up, Barracuda, in 2013. This trio of novels alone will have cemented Tsiolkas's place in Australian literary history.

In many ways, it is a bittersweet victory. Tsiolkas's success lies in his unflinching assessment of the hypocrisy and moral cowardice of Australian culture, its outwardly petty but deeply painful bickering about class, ethnicity, and sexuality. As a gay man and the son of Greek immigrants, Tsiolkas is uniquely positioned to observe these things.

Barracuda itself is focused on the story of Danny Kelly, a young boy who aspires to be a world-class swimmer. He lives in the working-class Melbourne suburb of Reservoir with his trucker father (of Irish descent) and hairdresser mother (of Greek descent), as well as young siblings Regan and Theo. Danny's talents see him get a scholarship at "Cunts College" - as he and his best friend, Demet, like to call it - an elite boy's school in the old-money suburb of Hawthorn.

Naturally, Danny has difficulty fitting in at this school because of the color of his skin, his sexuality, and most of all, his working-class status. At Cunts College, Danny makes a lifelong friend in Luke, the son of Vietnamese-Greek parents who, despite similar struggles, manages to become a prefect. Danny's main interactions, however, are with his Hungarian coach, Torma, who pushes him toward excellence, and swimming buddies like Wilco or Martin Taylor. Danny has a huge crush on Taylor that has important consequences for the overall plot.

Rather than tell the story in a linear fashion, Tsiolkas jumps back and forth in time between Danny's schooldays and his life in the present, some twenty years later, when he has a job as a care worker, helping to look after people whose lives have been damaged in various ways (car accidents, etc.). In this later life, Danny (or Dan, as he now calls himself) is in a back-and-forth relationship with Clyde, his Scottish lover, who wants Dan to move to Glasgow with him.

Tsiolkas skillfully maneuvers his way between these two timelines, circling ever closer to the kernel of the repressed event that Danny does not want to talk or think about: his assault on Martin Taylor, an incident that had sent him to jail and was the culmination of a spiral of shame and failure in Danny's life.

What makes Tsiolkas a seriously good novelist is that, unlike so many other writers looking to criticize society, he does not try to preach from a moral high ground. His most sympathetic characters are never exempted from the worst aspects of the society in which they are involved. There are no innocents in Tsiolkas's novels: everyone is tainted by the eddy of prejudices that constitute modern society.

Another strength of Tsiolkas's stories is the depth of his empathy and compassion. He has the wisdom to understand the extent to which hatred - even impersonal hatreds, like class hatred - is often anchored in the perversities of the human capacity to love. This is a repeated theme in his novels, and one of his most powerful. I particularly like how this manifests itself in Tsiolkas's depiction of women. Tsiolkas is clearly a man who has a deep and appreciative knowledge of women - this is particularly true for his portrayal of Danny's mother in Barracuda.

I loved Barracuda, not only because it is a great novel, but because it reflects so much of my own upbringing. I grew up in Melbourne in the 1990s, lived in a working-class suburb, and to crown it all, got a scholarship (albeit it not a sporting one) to attend Cunts College (yes, it is very much modeled on a real school). Tsiolkas also finds a way to end the book in a satisfying way, not by some false note of redemption, but through an ingenious usage of the shifting time perspective, one that allows us to glimpse, one last time, a Danny Kelly that is free of the burden of shame.… (altro)