REVIEW: Seven and a Half by Christos Tsiolkas

Reading the work of long-established and celebrated Australian writers as they publish during locally and globally unfolding cataclysms has been a remarkable spectacle for readers like me. New works, including Helen Garner’s Lockdown Diaries, Richard Flanagan’s The Living Sea of Waking Dreams, and Michelle de Kretser’s Scary Monsters have helped form a kind of cultural looking glass through which to look back on a strange, dangerous and alienating new Great Southern Land. Seven and a Half, a daring and tender new novel from Christos Tsiolkas has a place, too, in this new class of literature written on the edge of oblivion but the multi award-winning Greek-Australian author’s journey through the tempests of our time, like those of the writers mentioned above, has been made in a uniquely isolated and personal context.

Christos Tsiolkas (Photo by John Tsiavis).

For me, it’s essential to note that with Seven and a Half, Tsiolkas has taken up the pen for the first time following the decade-long project of his last novel; Damascus. Damascus saw the writer researching for more than three years before writing his first sentence, completely isolated from the world of contemporary literature and totally immersed in the ancient. Damascus is a truly epic novel in its intensity and scope based on the turbulent life of St. Paul and the beginnings of the Christian church. Violent, astonishing and vividly told, it grapples with love, devotion, race, class, masculinity, colonisation, displacement, and so much more.

A startling compliment to Damascus, Seven and a Half is a novel in which the narrator, an author indistinguishable from Tsiolkas, shuts himself away from a country in perpetual crisis in a holiday rental on the NSW South Coast. His goal is to write something (not necessarily a novel) that eschews the political and moralist qualities of contemporary fiction, in search of beauty in a time of rage and confusion. The pages that follow see the writer go hunting for that most enigmatic of qualities, with chunks of memoir that recount early years in a crowded household in Melbourne’s Greek working class community, entangling the discovery of the erotic with the joys and transcendent experiences of love and family. This is accompanied by sumptuous descriptions of the narrator’s movements about his empty house and along the stunning coastline by which it resides (if you know Christos, you’d know he loves a swim).

There is also a narrative told inside this narrative which has the title ‘Sweet Thing’ after the 1969 Van Morrison song. This is a story about a recovering addict and former adult film star who leaves his wife and son to return briefly to his old life and pay visit to his troubled brother. Showcasing Tsiolkas’ gift of real empathy, this is an interesting narrative to contrast with the tender moments from the narrator’s youth and it carries with it a disquieting darkness that’s hard to put my finger on.

Guiding the reader throughout Seven and a Half is a clarity of language and brutality of truth-telling that I would say verges on that of Helen Garner. This is what I believe completes this jumbling, joyous and, in a certain way, heretical novel. Some of the polemics against the state of contemporary fiction were exhilarating and speak to a concerning trend in which authors and other creatives are trundled out ceaselessly to give opinions on and make sense of whatever is happening in the news cycle – rarely getting asked about their creative process or to read from their supposedly essential work. Tsiolkas dares to ask the question: what’s all this even about?

It’s nothing like Damascus, but I feel that Seven and a Half would not have come into being without it. It’s an astonishingly intimate, form-defying novel that searches for beauty and dives into the mystery of art and its genesis. I’m still trying to wrap my brain around this fearsome, joyous explosion of expression and I find myself returning again and again to the novels epigram, which is taken from Jean Genet’s Miracle of the Rose:

Novels are not humanitarian reports. Indeed, let us be thankful that there remains sufficient cruelty, without which beauty could not be.

—Seven and a Half by Christos Tsiolkas (Allen & Unwin) is out now.

Seven and a Half

by Christos Tsiolkas

A man arrives at a house on the coast to write a book. Separated from his lover and family and friends, he finds the solitude he craves in the pyrotechnic beauty of nature, just as the world he has shut out is experiencing a cataclysmic shift. The preoccupations that have galvanised him and his work fall away, and he becomes lost in memory and beauty …

He also begins to tell us a story … A retired porn star is made an offer he can't refuse for the sake of his family and future. So he returns to the world he fled years before, all too aware of the danger of opening the door to past temptations and long-buried desires...

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Ben Hunter

Ben is Booktopia's dedicated fiction and children's book specialist. He spends his days painstakingly piecing together beautiful catalogue pages and gift guides for the website. At any opportunity, he loves to write warmly of the books that inspire him. If you want to talk books, find him tweeting at @itsbenhunter