Dead Europe (#86)

Dead Europe by Christos Tsiolkas


What I said then:

I'm one of the few people left that hasn't read The Slap, but I'm told by people I trust that this is a better place to start.

What I say now: 

Dead Europe is magnificent. After thinking long and hard about it, I reckon this is my favourite Australian novel.

It's also a hard book to discuss, to dissect. I finished it weeks ago, and I'm still thinking about it. And thinking about how to write this blog post.

Isaac, a gay Greek-Australian photographer travels to Europe. He starts his trip in Greece, visiting some cousins and then hiking into the mountains to visit his mother's village. After that, he travels the continent, journeying through Prague, Paris and London. Despite his destinations, the Europe he sees is not the postcard world that we here on the other side of globe picture in our collective memory. Isaac's trip is across the darker face of Europe, the Europe of docks and slums and mistreated migrant workers, of crumbling ancient buildings and crumbling ancient beliefs. Tsiolkas makes a point of refusing to give us what we might expect: nearly every time Isaac sees somebody on the street, it's not a native of the country he's in. He wanders through the Russian and Chinese neighbourhoods of Athens, the Jewish quarter of Prague, and shares cigarettes with North Africans in Paris. Everything is in flux, Isaac (and Tsiolkas) tells all the Europeans he meets, and all the things that once seemed so solid are shifting beneath your feet. And yet ...

In horrific counterpoint to Isaac's realist narrative is a second story, a bleak, black nightmarish fable. Told initially in the language of a fairy-tale, this story seems at first wholly disconnected from Isaac, worlds apart from his listless, jaded journey. Except ... except the two stories bend together, slowly converging in what becomes a masterpiece of real horror. There are monsters buried in Europe's past, and the ruptured earth can't always hold them in. When they surface --- the old stories, the old hatreds, the old wars --- anyone can be caught up by them.

I shouldn't say much more about the plot, except to say that it's breathtaking in the way it toys with the reader, and masterful in its execution. The two stories begin by seeming to have opposite meanings: is everything changing, or can nothing ever change? These two ideas are reconciled inside the body of Isaac, a Greek from the other side of the world, an exile returning home to a place he's never belonged. How that's achieved, I really shouldn't tell you. But God, it's fantastic.

I used the word 'horror' a couple of paragraphs ago, and Dead Europe could be read as a horror novel. There's barbarity, there's blood, there's even a monster of a kind. Now, I'm a sci-fi and fantasy kinda guy, and a lot of my favourite novels are literary excursions into sci-fi or fantasy territory (Handmaid's Tale, Tender Morsels, J.G. Ballard, Kurt Vonnegut). When great writers take genre and turn it to literary pursuits, there's some curious alchemy that makes those stories work brilliantly for me. Tsiolkas is doing the same thing here, only he's doing it with horror: he takes old tropes (curses, vampires) but uses them with new, startling effects.

(I probably should add as a word of warning: I've spoken to a number of people who found passages in Dead Europe really confronting, to the point that they found it difficult to continue reading. I didn't have that problem, but I've probably got a jaded reading palate when it comes to extreme violence. Seriously, once you've read American Psycho, there's really nowhere else to go, and I've also written a fairly long piece myself that is pretty bloody in parts. Just thought I ought to mention it though, as it seemed a common theme among other Dead Europe devotees. Having said all that, not one of them thought it was anything less than an exceptional novel.)

There you go. It's past midnight now, and I'm really tired, and I've barely scratched the surface of what makes this book remarkable. I also have no idea how much sense any of this rambling has made. If it hasn't made any at all, then I'm sorry, and I'll put it much more simply for you: read Dead Europe. It's amazing.

Cheers, JC.


about to read: The Iliad by Homer (translated by Stephen Mitchell)
books to go: 85