Book Reviews: The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas and Room by Emma Donoghue

I haven’t updated the blog in a while simply because I have been on holiday, which was lovely and a chance to fully relax and kick back with a good book or three.  My holidays reads this year included the above two titles, both of which have attracted their fair share of hype and publicity over the past year and which also stirred such strong emotions in me that I felt I had to share my thought and opinions here.

Both books are, at heart, about parenting although they are very different in plot, setting and execution.  As one who has chosen a child-free life, which I continually feel the need to justify, I am aware that a great deal of my reading material these days centres around the decisions to bring, or not to bring, children into the world.  I guess I am looking for some justification and understanding of my own situation and also a chance to experience the other side of the fence.  Sometimes it is hard to explain why I feel the way I do about having a family and yes, I admit, there are occasions when I wonder if I have made the right decision.  Reading other people’s views, whether books like these or fellow bloggers, helps make sense of my own swirling cloud of feelings on the subject. 

Starting with The Slap:  I was so excited to read this book, having heard so much about it and being intrigued and impressed by the beautifully simple premise; one day at a suburban barbeque, a man slaps a child who is not his own…  I was intrigued by the placing of the story within the Greek community of Melbourne and expected an intelligent and balanced exploration of this very emotive and provocative subject matter delivered through the points of view of eight members of the community present at the defining event.  What I found, was a lazily written book full of thoroughly dislikeable characters who all share the same crass voice and personality and the titular event is barely a footnote to the “story” which turns out to be a long and tedious account of unpleasant people taking drugs interspersed with gratuitous sex scenes and punctuated by banal and contrived swearing.  It is as if the author has gone so far out of his way to shock the reader that the overuse of the C word and explicit sexual content ends up having precisely the opposite effect and becomes simply boring.

Let me get things straight from the outset.  I am not in favour of hitting children under any circumstances but I do believe that child discipline (or lack of) has become a big and highly contentious issue in the western world with many parents too afraid to say no or raise voices to their offspring.  Physical chastisement has all but died out (thank goodness) but in its place is a void where many children are not taught respect to the detriment of their own happy and healthy upbringing.  Hugo is one such child and Tsiolkas makes it clear from the outset that his longstanding behavioural problems, which often result in violent tantrums which can be dangerous to those around him, are a product of his upbringing by a one dimensional alcoholic father and dippy-hippy mother.  Tsiolkas is also at pains to point out that these characters are the only white Australians in the book thus damning an entire nationality to a drink-soaked hell.  It is clear that Hugo is a victim of poor parenting and when he throws one tantrum too far, another guest at the gathering, Harry, steps in to administer some discipline.  Unfortunately, having established the controversial event, the author immediately ducks out of what could have been a superb and intelligent dissection of the fallout of this brief moment of madness by establishing Harry as a boorish thug, who engages in a spot of wife beating when he is not intimidating his employees and other minor characters.  Portraying Harry in this way denies the reader the opportunity to consider what would we have done?  With whom do we sympathise?  Instead of drawing our own conclusions we are force fed the notion that Harry is in the wrong.

It is not just Harry.  All of the characters in The Slap are drawn from the same self-obsessed page.  Without exception they are drug users and adulterers who all secretly hate each other.  Now I am in no way suggesting that such activities do no happen, even in middle-class suburbia, but not one person or description in the book seemed to be drawn in any reality.  I guess the author set up to make a book that would shock it’s readers but in lacking the guts to follow through on the promised big theme, decided to forgo character grounding and development for pages and pages of explicit sexual exploits and bad language.  Subtlety is not Tsiolkas forte and some of the attempts to shock are laughable in their execution – such as the letter from Connie’s bisexual father, written as he is dying from AIDS.  At best, the book is like a Pedro Almodovar film in which all tongues have been surgically removed from cheeks, at worst, a weak attempt at a character study of eight of the most vile human beings ever consigned to the printed page.  Particularly bad are the chapters devoted to the two teenage characters, Connie and Richie.  Shock alert – Connie has sex with a Muslim boy and Richie is gay!!!  I got the feeling that the author perhaps had another Skins-style novel about Australian teenagers up his sleeve but decided just to shoehorn it into this one where the chapters really don’t fit.  Annoyingly, had the author stuck to the premise of the novel, there may have been some interesting insights and arguments given by each of the characters, from the perpetrator of the titular slap to the victim’s mother, the child-free friend (who has an abortion during her chapter just to underline that she doesn’t want children) to Connie and Richie who are still just children themselves by way of the husband/father and wife/mother unit of Hector and Aisha and the older, grandparent generation.  Unfortunately the aftermath of the slap plotline is shoehorned in awkwardly, almost as an afterthought, in each chapter to a point where it is no longer relevant.  Sadly the characters from whom I was most interested to hear (Bilal and Samira) were not given chapters to voice their views.  This was one of the reasons I kept reading to the end – in the hope of finding either a purpose or redemption to the whole debacle of a book or at least a different point of view but yet again it seems Mr Tsiolkas has created an interesting premise in the characters of the Aborigine and White Australian couple who have converted to Islam but once again fails to substantiate the premise or engage with the issues he has raised.  That such big and braves themes are hinted at but not fully explored is the greatest source of frustration with this novel.  Ultimately Tsiolkas has some great ideas such as Aisha’s musing that “...the world is divided into three genders – there are men, there are women and then there are women who choose to have nothing to do with children.”  As a woman who is childfree by choice, I was intrigued by this concept and looked forward to further suggestions from the author before I could fully form my own opinion about the statement (for the record, I think I agree) but the concept is swiftly left in favour of more sex.   



In contrast, Room offered a rather dubious premise which fully exceeded my expectations on delivery.  It is difficult to talk about this book without giving away some spoilers so I will apologise now for what I am about to reveal.   Donoghue has been obviously influenced by recent high profile abduction/imprisonment cases such as those of Elizabeth Fritzl and Jacyee Lee Dugard and is narrated by five-year-old Jack, who lives in a locked room (11ft x 11ft) with his Ma.  As far as Jack is concerned, the room is the whole world and outside is outer space.  He knows he cannot leave and he doesn’t want to as Room is a safe sanctuary for him, even when the sinister Old Nick visits in the night.  Jack cannot conceive of any people or indeed any matter outside of his four walls and has never spent a moment of his life away from his mother so it comes as a shock to him when she gradually starts to reveal that there is a world outside of Room and it is filled with boys and girls and dogs and families and beaches and parks.  A world which she once loved before Old Nick abducted her at age 19, forcing her to live as his prisoner and sex slave for 8 years, during the course of which she gave birth to Jack following a previous stillbirth. 

At first I was hesitant to read this book, concerned it would be too sensationalist and would both glorify and underestimate the suffering that women like those mentioned above have experienced.  Instead I found a story which despite its bleak setting, offered a tale of maternal love and a boy trying to find his way in the world which transcends to tiny prison of Room.  In handing over the narration duties to Jack, Donoghue has avoided the temptation of long drawn out scenes of horror as this is not what Jack sees.  Hidden in the wardrobe each night he does not see Old Nick hurt his mother.  He knows they go to bed together but has no idea what this means.  The reader meanwhile reads his earnest account of counting the bed creaks until Nick makes his usual gasping sound with growing anguish for the two protagonists.  Similarly, Jack reports the fun games he plays with his Ma, such as exercising their voices by yelling at the skylight, flashing the lamp during the night or trying to guess the correct combination on the keypad entry system with a sense of glee whilst we, the reader, feel only admiration for the extremely courageous young mother who has gone to such extraordinary lengths to protect her son that he truly perceives no danger from their horrific and perilous situation.  Jack has no reason to guess that these games are a form of escape as he does not see Room as a place to be escaped from.  Tsiolkas could certainly learn a lot from Donoghue on the use of subtlety in writing. 

The second part of the book takes places outside of Room as Jack and his Ma adjust to the real world.  Donoghue has clearly done a lot of research into the physical and psychological effects of long term interment – especially in one who has never experienced an outside world to compare – and skilfully explores the difficulties encountered by Jack in the real world; from seemingly small details such as how to walk up and down stairs and problems posed by spatial awareness (how do you measure depth when you have only ever seen objects from a distance of 11ft max?) and sudden exposure to sunlight to bigger situations such as the sudden appearance of so many different people and the concept of shopping.  One thing which annoyed me about the book in the beginning was the over-emphasis on contemporary references (Jack enjoying dancing to Rihanna’s music videos on Room’s small tv set etc) but I can appreciate that this was a choice by the author to emphasise that such cruelty does happen and is probably still happening somewhere in this day and age.  Giving Jack and his Ma television was a master stroke as it allows the mother to keep up to date with the world but as a stranger looking in.  Upon release from Room, everyone seems to want to tell her about the black President but of course she already knows this.  In a sense, she has not been away from the world but the world has been kept away from her.  An of course, who in that situation would head straight to this facebook-thing they had heard about to find out exactly what happened to their friends and family members in the intervening years!

 Donoghue also uses Room to attack the notion of celebrity.  The scene where a group of sales assistants accost Jack for his autograph is particularly unsettling, as is the interview that Jack’s Ma gives to an Oprah-style host.  The whole world seems to want a piece of this pair without much consideration for the psychological effects they are experiencing.  Indeed the scrutiny and extent to which the world debates Ma’s parenting skills – was she correct to let Jack believe there was no world outside room and shield him from the dangers within? – leads her to doubt her own actions and outside of Room we see her pull away from Jack to his bewilderment as she starts to crave the life she has missed.  Again, seeing the action from Jack’s point of view means that we, re adult readers are left to draw conclusions and fill in the blanks as to what Ma may be thinking and there is a real collision of viewpoints when Jack insists on bringing items from Room into their new world as a means of familiarity and comfort whereas the same items represent to his Ma a reminder of the horror and struggles endured.

In much the same way as Roberto Begnini’s film “Life is Beautiful” is a study of fatherhood and the choices made to shield children from the ugliness of the world rather than a holocaust film, Room is not a book about abduction, imprisonment and rape.  Yes, it is disturbing in parts but never sensationalist in its approach.

Interestingly, both books rely heavily on the concept of breastfeeding beyond the normal (in the western world) child age to suggest the notion of irresponsible mothers and in both books, the act is depicted as rather sinister and inappropriate whether through Jack’s earnest discussion of which breast tastes creamier and constant lifting of his mother’s shirt to “have some” or the precocious Hugo arguing with his father over possession of Rosie’s “boobies” and Rosie herself deriving some sexual pleasure from Hugo’s suckling.  Breastfeeding in general continues to be a contentious issue even when it involves very young infants yet saying it may be distasteful is one of our society’s last taboos  (see Kathryn Blundell ‘s infamously controversial article and the vitriolic backlash on “creepy” breastfeeding) .  Indeed, I got into a heated debate with a close friend of mine (a mother) last year when I described how a woman had recently wandered around the tables of a fairly upmarket restaurant with her baby attached to her breast, much to the discomfort of other diners including my elderly father-in-law.  Now I am a supporter of breastfeeding but felt this woman was being deliberately provocative and it was not acceptable to carry out this action in this setting, in the same way as it would have been unacceptable to brush one’s hair at the table or display any normally private body part.  I certainly wouldn’t have had a problem with the breastfeeding being carried out at the mother’s own table with her party of friends.  My friend however went straight to the “you clearly hate children and mothers because you choose to be childfree” argument and proceeded to tell me how breastfeeding mothers are victimised and the baby had just as much right to have his dinner in the restaurant as the rest of us.  Yes, I countered, by the rest of us didn’t wander around tables of strangers whilst masticating.   But I digress and it is fair to say that most westerners do find the breastfeeding of a more advanced child quite distasteful.  In The Slap, Tsiolkas uses this to demonstrate Rosie’s new age approach to parenting and inability to say no to Hugo, instead pandering to his every whim and it is noted through the novel, at least when the central plot s remembered, that all characters, even Rosie’s husband, find this to be quite unsettling and unpleasant.  Without a counter argument from Rosie herself however, the reader is not given the opportunity to weigh up both sides of the issue and decide for him/herself.  Indeed the only concession to this is the aforementioned incident where Rosie seems to be enjoying the tug at her nipple just a little too much for comfort.  Again the unsubtle Tsiolkas hits us with the full force of the message that Rosie is an unfit mother who has turned Hugo into the monster he is.  By contrast Donoghue bravely dares to question the rights and wrongs of Jack’s suckling habit.  When this issue is raised during Ma’s interview she laughs in the concerned face of the sanctimonious presenter saying “In this whole story, that’s the shocking detail?”  This makes the reader question our own already formed opinions about not only the breastfeeding issue but our desensitisation to horrific ordeals such as abduction and rape through media saturation.  Instead we may choose to believe that Ma did the right thing in continuing to provide extra nutrition for her son beyond the meagre meals supplied by Old Nick or we may resolutely claim that this continued reliance on the breast may have damaged Jack’s social skills, perhaps irrevocably. 

It is obvious that I much preferred Room over The Slap but would be interested in others’ takes on the same books.  Do feel free to comment.