CHRISTOS TSIOLKAS DEAD EUROPE

I struggled to come to terms with Dead Europe for a book reviewing competition in (I think) the Australian Book Review. 

Dead Europe

by Christos Tsiolkas

Vintage 2005

Christos Tsiolkas’ three novels explore the descent of a hero into different kinds of extremis. His latest, Dead Europe, shares with his first, Loaded, the picaresque quality which helped to make its adaptation to the film Head On so successful. Dead Europe though would need to be a blockbuster, so various are its approaches to the hero’s fall.

Isaac, a Greek Australian, is in Athens for an exhibition of his photographs. On a visit to his mother’s village he learns through his cousin that his mother’s family is cursed. Isaac journeys on to Venice, Prague, Paris, Cambridge and London taking photographs which reveal the demonic Europe which, though immersed in it, he cannot ‘see’. During this inverted Grand Tour Isaac finds himself being dragged under by ‘Eurotrash’ who become, more and more, evil angels.

Myth is the other major element in Tsiolkas’ panoptic account of Isaac’s life. It relates the genesis and enactment of the curse which fell first on Isaac’s grandmother Lucia (LUISA?) – ‘the most beautiful woman in the world’ – when she incited her husband to kill the Jewish boy the couple were sheltering from the Nazis. The ghost of the Jewish boy, Angelo, attaches himself to Reveka, Luisa’s daughter, as she makes her way to Australia.

The myth of Angelo, the avenging Jew, embraces the dreadful hardship of peasant Europe, the hardship many came to Australia to escape, haunted by their histories as Angelo haunts his beloved victims - with an unrelenting, icy grip. To some extent Angelo also represents guilt for the holocaust from which, Tsiolkas suggests, Europe will never free itself.

Australia is Reveka and her son’s youth. As Tsiolkas has it, for all its brutal treatment of its legal immigrants and decline into a nation where refugees/freedom seekers/illegal immigrants are locked up, Australia remains a place of warmth and light and innocence in contrast to the dark power of Europe.

Isaac’s inverted Grand Tour is a revelation of the appalling state of Europe. Refugees, into whose desperation the myth has given us insight, suck whatever life they can from the depravity of Europe. Very much of this depravity takes a homosexual form, embellished by drugs. Young male prostitutes abound.

Isaac is himself homosexual, constantly neglecting and calling on the strength of his lover at home – the big, butch, beautiful, caring, swastika-tattooed Anglo-Celtic Colin. Big, beautiful and butch is also to be found in Europe but there it takes much more complex and sinister forms.

The novel worries at ethnicity, deracination, modern history. What binds these various sources of anxiety is anti-Semitism. Jews seem to lurk behind the ills of Europe. In Prague Isaac encounters ‘King Kike’ who tells him ‘I am the real Jew, mate … You don’t know Jews, do you? You think we should be the nice old fella in the back of the store, wouldn’t hurt a fucking fly … I’m not that kind of Jew, cunt. That kind of mumza Jew is finished.’ ‘King Kike’ is a huge man, crushing.

By the time the reader encounters him, s/he is somewhat familiarised with the anti-Semitism expressed by the characters in Dead Europe. But we still want it to go somewhere, to be more than a noir gesture of Dirty Realism. Tsiolkas depicts it as a strong element in contemporary Europe, as having deep roots in its peasant past and at one point a character seems to justify anti-Semitism in terms of Judaism being the progenitor of Christianity and the Muslim faith (Dead Europe is au fond an anti-clerical novel). As already suggested, at the mythic level, Judaism is an eternal parasitic demon invoked by those who betrayed it.

The narrative thrust of Dead Europe is powerful up to a point, though I think most readers will baulk when Isaac sets off after Prague to discover yet again that Europe is all underbelly. When the novel’s myth coalesces with Isaac’s Grand Tour, the reader is caught in a flurry of horror which leans far too heavily on Anne Rice.

Humphrey McQueen has posed the fruitful idea of a comparison with Christina Stead’s The House of All Nations; Stead’s vision of a corrupt Europe centred on the practices of merchant banking. The style she employed had the clarity and force of documentary realism. Tsiolkas has a freer imagination than the great Stead but his style inclines to the melodramatic and to hectoring. The melodramatic has its place in a novel like Dead Europe but there is also an inclination to the sentimental.

Isaac takes photographs which reveal the demonic Europe, which though being immersed in it, he could not, until it was too late, ‘see’. In Dead Europe Tsiolkas seems to thrust at us a vision we have been wantonly oblivious to and from which he himself recoils in Gothic sensationalism and rant.