Recommend: No.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Certain periods of life are haunted by the great existential questions: Why am I doing this? What is this all for? If I was to stop, life goes on, so why do I persist? The weight of these questions are often unequal to the scenarios that give birth to them. They invade while waiting around the untended office cafe for seven minutes staring at a sign that says \u201cback in five minutes\u201d. They taunt while scrolling the sale section of a linen website, looking for an extra item to jump the hurdle to free shipping. And they settle solidly, indubitably, in-between the covers of the In-Between.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Tsiolkas\u2019 first novel, Loaded, had fiery appeal. It was brimming with physicality – of both place and youth – that gave the short sentences a commanding presence. I remember being hurtled around Melbourne with the narrator, a listless gay young adult who wouldn\u2019t be out of place in a Bret Easton Elis short story. I really liked Loaded. It was gritty and cold, a combination that Australian authors seem to really struggle with. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The In-Between reads as a tedious challenge the author has taken: now that he is older, he will write the total opposite of chaotic and youthful Loaded. The first indication of this is the title. It\u2019s hard to think of a worse title than the In-Between. It\u2019s a reference to the undefined space children of migrants and gay people and older single people inhabit in Australia. Actually, it\u2019s worse than that, it\u2019s all of the above, all of the time, all at once – older, single, gay children of migrants. You pick up a book named Loaded and you\u2019re excited: there\u2019s a fast, violent story to be discovered. You pick up a book called The In-Between and your mind wanders, thinking of the Woolworth\u2019s Online order you should place in the next few days.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So I come back to what I consider the most important question: why did I finish this book? Why did I even buy it to begin with? If I knew from the title that it was going to be a moralising bore why am I wasting my time with it?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The plot revolves around two older men, Perry and Ivan, who have struggled throughout their life with their homosexuality. In their old age, they are finally finding peace with themselves, and their emerging relationship is playing a part in that journey towards serenity and self-acceptance. Yawn.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The boring plot is barely the worst thing about the In-Between though. If I had to choose what I disliked the most it would be a toss up between the endless moralising and the stupidity of the character Ivan. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Let\u2019s start with the moralising. The novel is split into five chapters, and each is essentially just one long (long) scene. The third was probably the most bearable. In it, Perry and Ivan attend a dinner party with some old friends of Perry\u2019s that he\u2019s drifted away from. That\u2019s a pretty awkward set up: a new lover intimately meeting friends you\u2019ve long outgrown. But the chapter is dragged down by long discursions on gender politics and climate change. Tsiolkas tries to make the dynamic interesting by forcing the characters into arguments and showing them vacillate between old and new loyalties. Sadly, he is not a good enough author anymore to pull this off. Instead the pacing just feels off. His characters move in and out of support for each other randomly, so instead of the intended complexity he was aiming for, Tsiolkas just gives us characters that we don\u2019t care about. It\u2019s a bit like in Survivor when a tribe just totally implodes: alliances disintegrate and reform according to no discernible logic, and as viewers we are cheering the complete ruin of that tribe and the end to an unpredictable, pointless storyline.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I went a bit off topic there. I was trying to talk about the dull moralising and meandered into the unrealistic character relationships. Back to the moralising. Here\u2019s an exemplary snippet from page 246:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n\u201cIt as a different time, Troy. We didn\u2019t have a washing machine when I was little. Mum had to wash everything in this tub and then there was this wringer thing.\u201d Ivan stretches his hands out as far as he can. \u201cIt seemed enormous to me at the time but that was \u2018cause I was so small. And Mum would be sweating in the middle of summer, putting the clothes through this bloody contraption.\u201d Ivan sits up in the bed, mimicking those actions. \u201cRaising two kids and working full-time at a factory. Thank fuck for washing machines.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
It\u2019s pretty hard to imagine, but that is actually a conversation Ivan is having with a prostitute. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Gosh, Ivan was such a lazily constructed character. I hated so much about him. Every fifteen or so pages you get him declaring how proud he is that he is a grandfather, like he’s expecting a round of applause each time. Offering that, apparently he\u2019s into such sordid gay sex that he\u2019s afraid of being arrested, but we\u2019re just forced to take this at face value. He probably just gets off sucking Perry\u2019s toes. By the final, fifth chapter, he\u2019s essentially a joke. Hard to take seriously a character that cries in the face of ancient Greece\u2019s architecture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\nIvan turns around. There are tears in his eyes. \u201cYou know, when we first saw it from the road, coming around the bend, it looked so\u2026\u201d He falters, grasping for words. \u201cIt looked so fragile, so small.\u201d He smiles wanly. \u201cAnd then you come close and the sea is just beyond and the sky is so low.\u201d He stops, heaves, and is quietly sobbing.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
Tsiolkas\u2019 writing is no saving grace for this novel. There were a lot of words I didn\u2019t know and had to look up the definition, but then they didn\u2019t seem to fit the sentence. Church bells emit a \u201cbellicose\u201d ringing. Definition: demonstrating aggression and willingness to fight. Church bells willing to fight?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In general, Tsiolkas\u2019 writing is way too extreme. Given the structure of the novel being five long scenes, a lot of the background occurs in flashbacks. Tsiolkas, aware of his publisher\u2019s requirement to have this book spawn over 300 pages, pads them out with dramatic prose (\u201cThe memory is always like a shard of glass slicing into his throat.\u201d<\/em>). Tsolkas, another thing, why are your characters always depicted going to the toilet or farting? It\u2019s kind of off putting. The toilet scenes must spill over into double digits, but I\u2019ve refrained from only choosing two.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\nIvan rushes to the toilet and the relief is exhilarating.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
\nChloe belches, and then farts, all of the night\u2019s toxins rising. She rushes to the toilet. She will never have cause to recall that stranger again. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
Cuts to strangers observing Ivan and Perry every now and then are poorly executed. For example, we are with Chloe for only 1 out of an exhausting 370 pages and the above scene of her farting is the end of her brief life as a character. Presumably these intermissions are designed to be poetic, or perhaps Tsiolkas understood the audience’s yearning to step away from Ivan and Perry for a few pages. For me, they add nothing to the book.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The final chapter is the only chapter that deviates from Ivan and Perry\u2019s perspective. We instead are watching them from the eyes of Lena, Perry\u2019s ex-lover\u2019s daughter. It\u2019s a shit end to a shit book. Lena is probably meant to be a break from the all-encompassing masculine energy of the first four chapters. She\u2019s so poorly defined though. Her defining trait is that she too is gay, so she reads as if she is an extension of Perry and Ivan, despite the fact she\u2019s clearly meant to be a youthful, feminine reprieve from the two men. There\u2019s also extensive back and forth between French and English and Greek language in this chapter that is possibly more boring than the moralising.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I found this book excruciating. I despised the characters. I thought the plot was bland. The writing was inexcusably terrible. I will never read Tsiolkas again. I should have stopped at page 30 of this book.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Yet here I am still, writing about and thinking of and wasting my time on this book. Have I gotten what I deserve?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
More time on the oven can’t save a sugarless, vegan pie.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":540,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-536","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews_books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/536","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=536"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/536\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":556,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/536\/revisions\/556"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/540"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=536"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=536"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=536"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}