Christos Tsiolkas: In the swim and on the money

Novelist Christos Tsiolkas talks sport, success, and Australian society

Coming-of-age: Australian author Christos Tsiolkas

One of the things that readers and reviewers like to do is confuse and conflate an author with his or her characters. When Christos Tsiolkas’s breakthrough fifth novel, The Slap, was published in 2008 the writer was accused of misogyny, racism, and homophobia, and he found himself often having wearily to defend his views and his writing.

After about two minutes in his company, accusations that the Australian author is anything other than a warm, friendly and open-minded person are blown out the water. We meet in Edinburgh at the swanky hotel his publisher is paying for as he tours the UK and Ireland to discuss his latest novel, Barracuda. The hotel bar is too fancy for his liking so we adjourn to the traditional pub across the road where he drinks pinot grigio pretty fast and laughs a lot. He’s a big man but very softly spoken, and he considers his answers to questions for a long time before opening his mouth, perhaps wary of being misinterpreted.

Tsiolkas’s recent history is the classic story of an overnight success that was years in the making. When The Slap came out it was 13 years since his first novel, Loaded, and in that time Tsiolkas had been plodding away, creating fine and challenging work as a mid-list author, but never getting much in the way of recognition or success.

The Slap changed all that. A breakout international sensation, it won the Commonwealth Writers Prize, was longlisted for the Man Booker and picked up plaudits and prizes across the globe. It sold in excess of a million copies, and was adapted into a terrific eight-part television series by ABC in Australia.

Five years later Tsiolkas has returned with another equally brave, inventive and challenging piece of work. Barracuda centres on Danny Kelly, a promising young swimmer aiming to compete in the Sydney Olympics in 2000. The narrative is split into two timelines, one going forward detailing Danny’s build- up to a crucial race, the other backwards from a Dan in his thirties, which tantalisingly hints at disastrous events in the swimmer’s past.

It is a big, visceral narrative that addresses all sorts of facets of society – class, race, sexuality, Australia’s obsession with sport – and like The Slap it’s in the reader’s face from the get-go, exposing the darker side of society down under.

“Partly you find out what a book is about in the process of doing it,” he says, “but writing about class was one of the things at the outset that I definitely wanted to do. After the success of The Slap, for the first time in my life, I felt like I could do it now, because I know what both sides are like.”

Tsiolkas is keen to stress that Barracuda is in no way autobiographical, but there are elements that clearly stem from his own experiences. In the book, working-class Danny, the son of Greek and Scottish immigrants, is given a scholarship to an elite school because of his swimming. The school is referred to throughout Barracuda as Cunts College, which gives you an idea of how Danny feels about the place.

“That in-between feeling, that’s the world I know, and Danny’s in-between in lots of ways,” Tsiolkas says. “When I went to Melbourne Uni, it seemed like everyone else there knew each other from when they were kids. And that stuff I’m talking about in Barracuda, the golden boys and girls, that thing about their perfect skin and teeth, when I was at uni I felt that. I was walking around going, how the hell do they do that, their skin and teeth are perfect!”

One of the great myths of Australia is that it’s some kind of classless society, a myth that Barracuda blows to pieces. Similarly, The Slap dug away at the idea of a happily integrated community at peace with its immigrant population. I wonder whether Tsiolkas deliberately sets out to debunk Aussie myths, or if it’s just a natural outcome from depicting his homeland as he sees it.

“I think it amounts to the same thing,” he says. “There was an interjection from the audience last night in Dublin, this woman with a very loud Aussie accent said ‘But it’s a fantastic place, it’s a great country’, and it is, I do love so much about Australia. I talked to her afterwards and we had a great conversation. It’s not like I sit down and think what I’m going to do is completely slam into Oz, but it comes out of the writing, the labour of doing the novel.”

Barracuda is particularly good at talking about sport, from Tsiolkas’s brilliant descriptions of Danny’s swimming to more generally looking at the nation’s obsession with sporting heroes, and how it reacts when those heroes don’t live up to expectation.

“The truth is that using sport as a metaphor for understanding Australia came after,” Tsiolkas admits. “At the start, in the wake of the success of The Slap, I was asking myself all sorts of questions like, do I deserve this, am I going to be found out? And I found myself really envying the sportsperson, because it just seemed like they had a really pure relationship to achievement. The first one to cross the line, the fastest, it’s scientifically quantifiable, that never happens to an artist, it’s impossible to have that certainty.”

The author found his own relationship to sport and attitudes to success changing as he wrote the book, and the result is a more rounded, deeper and more complex look at the interaction between sport and society.

“While the original impetus was that purity and clarity of the finishing line, I began to also want to reflect the cultural stuff,” Tsiolkas says. “Young sportswomen and men are like the golden boys and girls, they’re feted and celebrated. And of course they’re so young they make mistakes, and now with social media and traditional media there’s a lynch mob, there’s no sense of letting these people be human and make mistakes.”

Danny makes an almighty mistake in Barracuda, and much of the book is about how people learn to cope in the aftermath of that. Without giving too much away, it is redemptive in a way that Tsiolkas’s previous novels aren’t, though it stays clear of sentimentality. Tsiolkas says that during the writing of Barracuda, he had a notice above his desk that read: “How do you be a good man?”

“That came out of a conversation I was having with a great writer friend of mine, Angela Savage,” he says. “She said to me, ‘You’re someone who cares a lot about questions of redemption, how to live a good life, but that’s not in your writing.’ I don’t think that’s completely true, I think there is a grappling in my earlier work about what is an ethical life, but maybe it’s buried deep. I was always really scared because I didn’t want to write a sentimental book, but what she said stuck with me, so I decided that I wanted to write a book from the outset about what it means to be a good man, as simple as that.”

In Tsiolkas’s hands, it is far from being a simple matter, but then that’s what great about his writing. It shows the messiness and complexity of the real world in all its horrible detail, and we should be thankful for such a skilled documenter of modern life.

Extract: "Barracuda" by Christos Tsiolkas (Atlantic, £12.99)

‘In the change-rooms, no one would look at him. But no one dared to mock him, no one dared say anything to him. He could just hear the murmurings behind him and around him, sensed the whisper first take form in Luke’s astonished and admiring stare. He could hear the words, Jesus, that Danny Kelly they whispered. That Danny Kelly. He’s a psycho.’