Dead Europe

By Christos Tsiolkas, Sydney: Random House, 2005, 412 pages, paperback, $22.95. Reviewed by Geoff Parkes in the August 2005 issue.

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It is hard to believe that over a decade has passed since Christos Tsiolkas launched himself into the Australian literary spotlight with his daring and erotic debut, Loaded. The novel was quickly seized upon as a queer, contemporary narrative that reworked concepts of fixed gender and sexuality, skilfully articulating the tensions of urbanity, ethnicity and the Australian identity. My first encounter with Loaded was in a Gay and Lesbian Cultures class in 1996, his book already accepted into the academy where, as a set text, it aroused and infuriated, and finally glowed with memorable fragments, such as protagonist Ari and his best friend's encounter, stimulated by Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire. Tsiolkas had a handle on what it was like to be young, frenetic and queer, in a different Australia to that about to devote whole forests to the Demidenko affair.

However, it is now 2005 and Ari has left the building. Nine years of Howard reign has banished both the word and the concept of multiculturalism to the ethnic armband view of Australia, replaced by years of Hanson, illegal immigrants, terrorists and gang rapists as the face of Australian difference. Tsiolkas is also, quite noticeably, a different writer. After working in theatre and film and 1999's The Jesus Man, he has returned with Dead Europe, a work that quite literally strips the soul from the central character, Isaac, who is exploring his family's roots in Europe. Dead Europe rips the skin from the human/humanist promises of Loaded, and offers a bleak, unflinching look at a world on display to us in the evening news, and the emptiness of the Enlightenment that rivals the stupidity and vitriol of the fundamentalist waves that wash upon 'civilisation's shores'. Dead Europe's depiction of hustler sex, underage prostitution and porn, ex-skinhead gay men and stupefying domestic violence makes Loaded's portrayal of intimate, easily accessible and casual sex seem like a Mills and Boon romance.

Isaac is a photographer, encouraged by a teacher to pursue the 'beauty to be found in art and work inspired by ethics'. (213) As Isaac's photos begin to tell one story, the narrative is woven into Isaac's ancestral webs, spinning and turning through the past where Greek villagers despise the local witch yet seek her wisdom regarding evil spirits, and equally through the present where modern suspicions are played out in anti-Jewish graffiti scrawled across what remains of the Venetian ghetto. From Greece, through Italy, France and the 'motherland' of England, Isaac searches with intensity for answers plaguing the understanding of his own past; inevitably though, a different fire siezes first his photographs, then him, and a lust for bodies becomes something far more dangerous. It is in the final chapters, as Isaac's family, friends, lover and future commingle, where Tsiolkas's mature skills as a novelist, above all else, are most evident, the text encountering the horrors of the Holocaust and the many forms of 'cleansing' that drove the twentieth century to its conclusion.

Dead Europe would be a wasted opportunity, just another search-for-origins tale, if it weren't for the ideological underpinning of the work and the language used to cement the text as stridently political, in the sense of social relations and governance of and by the people. In response to a recurring question regarding his beliefs, Isaac comments:

We will create poverty and illness and we will create obscene wealth and the depravities that arise from it. We will think ourselves just and righteous, faithful and sane. We will hate and kill and piss and shit on one another. We will continue to do so. We will create Armageddon. In the name of God or in the name of justice or, simply, because we can. This is what I believe. (p379)

Citation

• Geoff Parkes. 'Review: Dead Europe by Christos Tsiolkas' [online]. Network Review of Books (Perth, Australian Public Intellectual Network), August 2005. Availability: <please cite the web address here> ISSN 1833-0932. [accessed 25 May 2013].

Back Cover Blurb

• Isaac, a young Australian photographer, is travelling through Europe. His whole life he has longed for the sophistication and wealth of the Europe of his father's stories, the Europe at the centre of civilisation and culture. But behind the facade of a unified and globalised contemporary society, he finds a history-blasted wasteland, a place forever condemned by the ghosts of its unspeakable past. In the mountain village in the Balkans where his mother was born, he unearths ancient terrors that have not been laid to rest, and perhaps never can be.
  
  Part long-forgotten myth, part meditation on the violence and tragedy of European contemporary history, Dead Europe is an unsettling ghost story about blood lust, blood libel and blood revenge; a novel of blazing brilliance about the truths and lies of mythology and history from the acclaimed author of Loaded.

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