A Place Where Wolves Fuck.

Christos Tsiolkas, Dead Europe, Vintage, Random House, 2005

At the 16 June launch of Christos Tsiolkas's latest novel, Dead Europe, I listened to the author speaking about his struggle to come to terms with diasporic dilemmas, a globalising world and the punitive hostility to homosexuality of the three major monotheistic religions. He expressed his concern to expose the anti-Semitic fears and hatreds animating the resentment of ancient, modern and postmodern Europeans reacting to their history of displacements, and to depict the ghostly deformities of a European peasantry in its death throes. The audience loved it, but I came away disconcerted. I couldn't help but feel that Tsiolkas was disingenuous in his special pleading for his novel, which is a story about an Australian-Greek man's exploration of personal and social identity in contemporary Europe. This sustained magic-realist work is strong on viscosities, rich in olfactory references and homosexual sex, and recycles grotesque Jewish and anti-Semitic characters in way that begs the questions: is this an anti-Semitic work of art? And, if it is, is it redeemed by sophisticated reading as literary fiction?

Structurally complex and inventive, the novel is scaffolded for a kind of 'ghost-train' ride into the superstitious strivings of the peasant forbears of the main character (in whom they are sustained) whilst travelling through the several hellish level crossings of the globalised here and now. A collision is unavoidable as the tracks of demonic possession begin to merge with those of diasporic exclusion, uprootings and loss. In this danse macabre, hope is a tangential indulgence lacking any substance except where interpersonal love can secure passion with sentimentalism as it somehow simultaneously dispenses with all illusions.

Tsiolkas's protagonist, Isaac, is descended from Greek villagers and a cursed family background as a result of his grandmother's infidelity with, and instigation of the murder of, a refugee Jew during the Second World War. His father's deadly weaknesses were his unsustainable addictions to heroin and communism. Isaac is gay, his sexuality mentored in Australia as a youth, and he leaves his Australian lover to travel to Greece and Europe to reconnect with his Greek-Baltic heritage. His journey takes him on through Venice, Prague, Paris and England while the curse works through him.

He is a photographer and his work has been accepted for exhibition in Greece. Travelling there from Australia he meets up with a female cousin and her lover and they visit the village where Isaac's mother was born. It is here that he discovers the nature of the curse working through him and his photography helps him identify its spiritual manifestations by providing him with mysterious images that were not in the frame when he clicked the shutter. The curse requires him to receive or consume blood to overcome nausea and exhaustion. As he travels on from Greece to the other European cities, he makes contact with former friends and family connections who introduce him to the realities of their desperately compromised lives. These encounters allow him to plumb the political viewpoints of the characters on topics such as artistic integrity and economic reality, ethnic cleansing and the Baltics, the failures of social democracy and Euro-capitalism following the decline of Euro-communism and so on. He has a series of one-night stands and an oral blood transfusion on a train and broods about the strength of his connection to his lover, Colin, back in Oz. Colin and Isaac's mother come to his rescue when he is finally overwhelmed by Europe and the curse.

There are echoes in Dead Europe of Gregor von Rezzori's 1969 novel Memoirs of an Anti-Semite. The main character in Rezzori's work, Bubi, in Bucharest in 1933, becomes exasperated with the Jewish owner of a 'seamy hotel' who repeatedly accuses Bubi of using counterfeit coins to gain access to a room. In his rage Bubi yells at him: 'Du-te'n pizda mati, jidanule!'--a popular Rumanian curse, which made it no less nasty: 'Get into your mother's cunt, you filthy kike!' However, Rezzori's work ironises, satirises and exposes the absurdity of the anti-Semite's efforts to shore up a faltering sense of social acceptance and self-righteousness through resort to race hatred and its convenient symbols. The novel satirises Jews who people its pages as well, but there is care to show the complexity of character and emotion accompanying the tensions of people trapped in tragic times.

Tsiolkas's Jews, by comparison, are not people one can feel any pity or sympathy for, except, perhaps, when Isaac's mother's Jewish male progenitor is condemned to death by Isaac's grandmother in order to deceive her husband and conceal her infidelity. Aside from this pathetic and filthy, but nonetheless sexually potent Jew imprisoned in a stinking subterranean dungeon, all the other Jewish characters in the realist strand of the novel are like Raskolnikov's victim in Crime and Punishment: disposable humans of little worth.

In a typical scene, Isaac, visiting the Venice Ghetto--one of the oldest ghettos remaining in Europe--is in the home of an aged Jew, mute on account of having had his tongue ripped out. The Jew happens to notice Isaac's gold crucifix and suddenly steals Isaac's camera. He escapes Isaac's grasp by biting and then spitting at him. Isaac, enraged by this behavior screams at him:

'Give me back my camera, you fucking Jew.' I had never uttered this curse before. A rush of power surged through every particle of me. It was as if I had been yearning to utter that curse since the beginning of time.

Isaac's deceased, but formerly heroin-addicted, father had instructed his son years earlier that:

'Fucking Jews, fucking traitors, they betrayed us, after all we did for them, after all the Party did for them. Fucking traitorous cunts, that's what they are.' He waved his pouch of heroin in the air. 'Jew powder, Isaac, don't forget.'

Isaac's encounter with the Venice Jew, whom he is provoked to curse, is only one of several encounters with Jews who provoke or disgust him. Earlier, in Thessaloniki, while visiting the Jewish History Museum, Isaac is prevented from taking photographs of the exhibits by the caretaker. When eventually questioned by Colin (also an anti-Semite) as to how he felt at not being allowed to take photographs and what he would have liked to say to the caretaker, Isaac replies that he felt hurt because the caretaker had 'treated me like dirt' and that he wanted to say, 'Fuck off, you paranoid Jew, I have nothing to do with this history'. Is Tsiolkas being ironic here? Isaac's vulnerability to feeling racist rage is offset and tempered by his understanding of the cultural and ethnic antecedents of his upbringing and the education he has acquired. Nevertheless, the provocations to express racist feelings are 'justified' by the Jews peopling the novel. Tsiolkas's Jewish characters overwhelm any recognition by Isaac, or a reader unfamiliar with actual Jews and anti-Semitism, that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion are a forgery, or that Jews might not all be exemplars of misanthropic otherness.

Notable among these characters is Syd, 'King Kike of Prague', who appears in the midst of the novel with his enormously fat body, fierce overwhelming sweat, vodka and cigar-smoking breath, carrying wads of cash with which to pay off his troupe of cocaine-stimulated, pornography-producing flunkies and prostitutes as he commercially exploits their depravity and paedophilia, while indulging, of course, in his own. Syd's father is in jail for murder and Syd himself is a very tough Jew reminiscent of the tough Jews so strikingly presented by Rich Cohen (Tough Jews: Fathers, Sons and Gangster Dreams, Cape, 1998) and theorised by Linda Grant (Defenders of the Faith, the Guardian, 6 July 2002). Paul Klebnikov, in his brave portrayal of Boris Berezovsky's opportunism in Boris Yeltsin's post-Perestroika break-up of the former Soviet Union, gave a much more credible account of a ruthlessly brilliant, allegedly Jewish, criminal without needing to rely on the obesity trope in Godfather of the Kremlin: the Decline of Russia in the Age of Gangster Capitalism (Harcourt, 2000). And Matti Bunz (Jews and Queers, Symptoms of Modernity in late 20th Century Vienna, University of California Press, 2004) would regard Syd as out of date with what he documents as the recent acceptance of Jews and Queers into the post-modern Viennese mainstream: but in Tsiolkas's Prague both are still very demi-monde.

Syd, to use a statistical metaphor, is only the modal value in Dead Europe's frequency distribution of standard deviant Jews. Gerry 'the Hebrew', a people smuggler, is living in Paris and has murdered a man and his wife who sheltered him during the war because the man became enraged when he caught Gerry with his wife. Gerry also breaks his own wife's nose with a swift punch to her face, and it is suggested he once incinerated workers in his business when a mysterious fire broke out in his warehouse, after which he became rich.

These figures of Gerry, Syd and the Venetian and Thessalonikan Jewish characters, are the contemporary representations of Jewry Isaac encounters on his way stations through Europe, but they form the counterfoil to the ghouls that saturate the supernatural theme of the novel.

It's not only the Jewish characters in this novel who are likely to dismay. Isaac, possessed by a ghoul, is antipathetic to most of the people he encounters in his chronic need for the sustenance that blood provides. The Greeks he encounters, particularly his cousin and her anti-Semitic partner, are entrapped by history as are the Jewish characters, but they have not had to deal with a legacy of race hatred like Jews and, importantly, are depicted with some sympathy. The non-Jewish characters in the novel are principally conflicted by either a meaningless and ignoble global proletarianisation or empty consumerism and middle-class 'success'.

Isaac, in his self-confessed 'pampered naivety', guesses that he believes only in Colin. Colin is an ex-builder's labourer waiting, like Odysseus's Penelope, back in Oz. He is eroticised, as are a number of male characters in the novel, as being of 'authentic' working-class background and least stereotypically gay in their tough (but tender) masculinity. Colin has a swastika tattoo, acquired in his angry youth, a time when he achieved exhilaration desecrating Jewish graves.

That one word, Jew. That's what made me feel alive, when I was pissing on that old Hebrew grave. I hated everyone and everything but they were at the centre of my hate.

During lovemaking with Colin, Isaac feels as if the anti-Semitic ink of Colin's swastika tattoo has rubbed off on him, creating the same unbridgeable chasm for Isaac that separates Colin from ever feeling any sense of common humanity with a Jew.

One of the 'achievements' of this 'novel of ideas' is that moribund Europe festers within the perdition desperately shared by the wasted characters encountered by Isaac. They struggle to find some morsel of sympathy or understanding for the thwarting of their aspirations by a brutally indifferent post-Soviet Euro-capitalism. But unlike Michel Houellebecq's novels Atomised and Platform that represent a predatory Europe hell-bent on corruption and torn apart by contradictory pretensions and desires, Tsiolkos eschews humour and parody for a sense of colossal bitterness and lost entitlement. And this bitterness and lost entitlement is sustained through the repulsive characterisations of his Jewish figures and tropes.

Will Dead Europe attract the same controversy that surrounded Helen Darville's The Hand That Signed the Paper? The first hint came in Robert Manne's concerns about the sustained intensity of anti-Semitic excoriation in Dead Europe that appeared in the second edition of the Monthly. In support of his concerns, Manne referred to the sequence of character and situation in this volatile and visceral novel. His review was immediately disparaged by Ian Syson and Jeff Sparrow's News from Nowhere weblog. Manne's credentials were ridiculed and he was caricatured as a kind of obsessive-compulsive censorious misreader of imaginative and complex literary fiction:

Manne's problem is that most of the characters are anti-Semitic, even the anti-anti-Semitic ones are anti-Semitic at points. Manne seems unable to distinguish between this and the politics of the book or the author.

The second hint came when Humphrey McQueen, on Jill Kitson's Book Talk program (2 July 2005), demonstrated that he could not grapple adequately with Tsiolkas's inept attempt to take possession of anti-Semitism and the sensitivities it inflames. Kitson, it might be remembered, was one of the judges who awarded the Miles Franklin award to Helen 'Demidenko' Darville for The Hand that Signed the Paper, celebrating its 'authenticity'. McQueen remarks: Three weeks after reading Dead Europe, I still don't know what I think of it ... My concern and doubts are as nothing compared with the achievements in Dead Europe as a novel of ideas.

But had McQueen generated an abstracted gloss of his own ideas, rather than looked closely at Tsiolkas's ideas as they are embodied in this work? McQueen was subsequently questioned by Julie Copeland on her Sunday Morning Radio National program, after he was heard with Jill Kitson. By this time, McQueen was concerned at the prevalence of repellent Jewish characters in the contemporary realism of Isaac's narration, but denied that realism is intended, saying that that the novel is not a 'realist' work in any significant sense--although most reviewers discern, as I do, a realist counterpointing by Tsiolkas in order to provide a contrast to the curse fantasy of ghostly vampirism. Asked by Copeland about the almost total absence of any redemptive hope in what seems to be a desperately nihilistic cry of anguish--Edvard Munch seem an optimist by comparison --McQueen discerns the tender feelings and love by Isaac for the long-patient Colin as an instance of buoyancy in the poisoned blood of this novel. Copeland reflected that it's the only one.

It is apparent that sections of the Australian Left and their associated literary/ cultural guides have been far too ready to rejoice in Tsiolkas's anarchic nihilistic mysticism because it gestures at a political critique reflective of the crisis on the Left so painfully experienced by them. The novel hits all the buttons of anxiety regarding multiculturalism, migration and economic refugees, nationalist and racist stereotypes, tectonically armour-plated globalisation, and the seeking of relief through sex, drugs and the transcendant moment. It reprises sentimental tropes of masculinist class-consciousness liberated from homophobia through the defiant courage of a Greek tragic figure tempting fate and the gods. Many of these features, as well as

Tsiolkas's artistry in writing pulsing prose and dialogue to bring scenes and ideas to prominence, and the racy momentum of the novel's transitions, have captivated an Australian reading public too willing to forgive his indiscretions because they are starved of material of this type. Tsiolkas's willingness to deal with issues of religious traditions, belief and experience, albeit in a cavalier and prestidigitous manner, but also seriously grappling with their power to enchant and disenchant, is refreshing given the dearth of politically critical creative Australian fiction encompassing these elements. The Left is belatedly recognising the need to take account of religious conviction in more engaged ways than it has managed thus far and Tsiolkas's novel attempts this. Despite all these attractive and even seductive qualities to be found in Dead Europe, there is a need for honesty in assessing the damage the novel may do in reinstating the grossly varicose vein of a vicious anti-Semitism because the Left is at a loss at how to deal with the issues raised by Jacqueline Rose in The Question of Zion.

Michel Foucault, in his second volume of the history of sexuality, posits a noble Greek pre-Christian patriarchal bi-sexuality as a model for a sensibility long since suppressed by Christianity. He discerns a more sexually open and less punitive society as having been enjoyed by pederastic Greek males alongside their heterosexual unions with their female spouses and managers of their household economies. On the night of the book launch at Chronicles, Tsiolkos explained his attempt in this work to bring homoerotic desire and experience into the center of monotheistic religious apprehensions of Manichaean dualism and its claims over sexuality.

It is possible to discern in this novel some sympathy with this lost world of the ancient Greeks as posited by Foucault. The sexual love of an older man for a youth elicited community respect provided that it was conducted with a degree of decorum and proportionality, ensuring that the older lover's dignity was not lost as result of becoming besotted by the youth, or by the youth coming to be seen as 'demanding'. There is an account in the novel of Isaac as an adolescent with his older lover Paul where some echoes of this culture can still be heard:

They must have known, these men, who worked in factories and smelt of tobacco and grease, they must have known what was going on between myself and Paul. But they never asked and they never assumed a liberty with me. In fact they treated me with great affection, as if I were a nephew, as if I belonged to a family of men.

In seeking to attack monotheism, perhaps Tsiolkas has displaced anxieties and resentments regarding homophobia with, perhaps unwittingly, a substitute demonisation of Jews as 'the other' onto whom such anxieties could be transferred. Perhaps this resentment embraces the connivance of Christianity in Judaic homophobia and the crushing by Christianity, through its asexual infantilism, of any claims to uncompromising sexual liberation.

There are epiphanies in Dead Europe that exalt hilarity and exuberance, transient experiences of communion and empathy, sympathy and compassion. These lighter touches are compounded with a carefully constructed device (Isaac's photography in some ways is functionally akin to the music of Adrian Leverkuhn in Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus). This works well to highlight the novel's limited chiaroscuro, despite its default setting of the world as a Judeo-Christian devil's jumping castle submerged in excrement, blood and foul vapours.

Maybe in future works Tsiolkas can confront the devils of homophobia, masculinity and femininity, and their volatile embodiments, without retreading the badly worn pathways of racial stereotyping or blue-collar fetishisation. He is energetic and confronting in his prose, although as suggested above, he lacks some of the humour of a Houellebecq. However, there is comedic pleasure to be had in applying these lines from Dead Europe to Tsiolkas and Helen Darville:

You poor ignorant Australian. You got it. Have they come to any conclusions? Religion's fucked. And capitalism? Fucked. Communism. Fucked. Australia? Very fucked. Europe? Doubly fucked. America? Arse-bleedingly fucked.

Les Rosenblatt is a Melbourne-based writer.