'The Slap' by Christos Tsiolkas

Here at Slightly Read we (meaning I, but 'we' sounds so much more authoritative) have noticed that copies of The Slap seem to have been flying off the shelves in bookshops. Reviews have generally been kind too, and the Irish cover features highly effusive quotes from respected authors like John Boyne and Colm Toibín; the two men nearly tripping over themselves with desire to tell us what a must-read this is.
So why was I left feeling so underwhelmed?

Firstly, the narrative structure of this book is extremely frustrating. The 'slap' of the title forms the starting point of the book as a man - Harry - slaps the child of Rosie and Gary - a properly dysfunctional pair of gobshites. The story is told from the perspectives of eight people who are at the barbecue where this event occurs. There is no apparent reason for this tactic and it renders the book somewhat like a collection of short stories on a theme, rather than a novel. The story progresses as each new section starts, meaning that we never get to discover how one character, who might have been central to events in the previous section, feels about or even reacts to key developments as they occur. Further to this, there are three (arguably four) characters whose sections are more or less incidental to the central plot and do little to shed new light on any character but themselves. If Tsiolkas was intent on examining a broad cross-section of Australian society up close in this manner he would probably have been better served with a book of short stories. One presumes that was less commercially appealing.

Secondly, the characters Tsiolkas chooses to focus on seem somewhat arbitrarily chosen. Why do we need to hear from both handsome,Greek Australian, reluctantly middle-aged Hector and Harry when they are both philandering husbands, casual drug users and obnoxious boors with little to separate them? Unless, of course, Christos Tsiolkas finds something particularly interesting in rogueish Greek men? Why do we hear from ageing, weary Manolis but never his long-suffering, even longer-complaining wife Koula? Why hear so much from damaged, childish Rosie but nothing from her alcoholic, delusional husband Gary? Why no section devoted to aboriginal Bilal, whose conversion to Islam makes him, in my mind, the most interesting character in the book?

Thirdly, the sections where Tsiolkas describes sexual acts and masturbation come across as prurient rather than realistic, giving parts of the book a silly, soft-porn feel. Which is fine, if you're only aiming to write silly soft-porn.

And fourthly, doesn't listing this book's flaws in such a manner make me sound like your mother lecturing you while listing your misdemeanours on her fingers? The Slap is fine, and will continue to sell well for the next few months or so, but unless you happen to be particularly concerned with the faults of modern Australian society I don't see any great reason to go with the hype and buy this book, as it won't really give you anything that hasn't already been better done by numerous authors.

'Akhenaten: Dweller in Truth' by Naguib Mahfouz

In a break with protocol thus far, I'm reviewing the last book I finished. Books about pharaohs would not usually be my bag, but I picked this up a couple of years ago while on holiday in Egypt, where my interest in such matters was always likely to be uncharacteristically heightened. Akhenaten, though, was a name that had first piqued my interest a couple of years earlier when I heard brief mention of him during a college lecture. He was the first person on record for propounding monotheism - the idea that there is only one god. As such, given the course of history and whatever your own religious convictions might be, he might very well be regarded as one of the most significant people to ever live.

The book, written by the Nobel prize-winning Egyptian author Naguib Mahfouz, is a fictionalised look at the repercussions of Akhenaten's insistence on converting the whole of Egypt to monotheism - an act that led to civil war and the terminal decline of the pharaonic dynasty. The story is told from a multitude of angles as Meriamun, a curious young man who can't remember the reign of Akhenaten, questions those who knew him, from palace staff to temple priests to his widowed queen, Nefertiti.
What surprised me about this book was how emotive it managed to be. I've read little in the way of historical fiction and didn't expect to feel such an attachment to the main character. But Akhenaten's insistence on swimming against the tide is a moving struggle, even when recounted in some farly emotionally detached language.
An oddity, this one, but highly recommended for anyone with an interest in ancient Egypt or the evolution of religion.

'The Heart of the Matter' by Graham Greene

When I first took notions that I might like to be a writer some day, around the age of eighteen when I still had less than no idea of where my life was heading, I reckoned that I'd like to write at least one book that was absolutely gut-wrenchingly, heartbreakingly, stamp-all-over-your-soul-and-then-piss-on-it tragic. A book that would leave the reader crushed. David Guterson's Snow Falling on Cedars may have been one of the reasons for this rather morbid desire, but an even greater one was The Heart of the Matter, the only Graham Greene I have read so far.

The precise details of the story of Scobie, a long-serving police-inspector in an unnamed British colonial town in West Africa (with Greene drawing heavily on his own experiences of living in Freetown, Sierra Leone) have long escaped me, as the details of most books I read tend to. What remains with me is the clarity with which Greene evokes the sadness and fear of a man torn asunder by pride, failure and good old-fashioned Catholic guilt. A man who fails everyone by working so very hard to fail no-one.

'Tenderwire' by Claire Kilroy

When the list of the 50 books nominated for best Irish book of the decade was published a few weeks ago I was mildly ashamed to realise that I'd only read three of them. Perhaps I shouldn't have been, the list is a fairly broad one taking in several categories and including things I would rather eat than have to read, like PS I love You and Bill Cullen's autobiography. Still, there are plenty of good authors on the list, and several of those books have been sitting on my shelves for months now, awaiting my perusal.
One such book was Claire Kilroy's Tenderwire. I appear to be reading Kilroy's stuff backwards, having read her third and most most recent one, All Names Have Been Changed (a review of that will no doubt be along soon enough), before Tenderwire - her second.

Tenderwire tells the story of Eva Tyne, a young Irish violinist living in New York who is offered the chance to buy a supposedly rare and valuable violin by a gangster she meets in a bar whilst in the middle of a self-pitying, self-destructive bender. Her life subsequently takes a number of twists and turns as the violin brings triumph and danger to her life in equal measure.
A thriller about a violin? You're probably not gripped yet. But such is Kilroy's skill at characterisation and dialogue that the reader quickly becomes engrossed in the story and comes to understand the redemptive symbolism that the violin holds for the passionate, mentally unstable Eva - a character whom the reader may not necessarily like, but whom they will find themselves caring about. Such are her travails and such is her emotionally fragile believability that there was more than one point during the story where I wanted to wrap Eva up in a blanket, make her a hot chocolate and tell her to cop on to herself.
On this evidence Kilroy deserves her place among the best new Irish writers. I'll let you know for definite when I've read her first.

'Not Untrue and Not Unkind' by Ed O'Loughlin

Not Untrue and Not Unkind came to most people's attention when it managed to make the Man Booker prize longlist last year. Before reading it I saw the author speaking authoritatively and engagingly on foreign news correspondence during a debate in the literary tent at the Electric Picnic. O'Loughlin worked for various newspapers, Irish and otherwise, in reporting on various conflicts in Africa over the past couple of decades. It's therefore easy to suspect that this tale of jaded foreign correspondent Owen Simmons and the various professional and romantic relationships he becomes snarled up in is more than a little autobiographical.

Reading the book would appear to confirm this. Journalist in-jokes abound, some of which hit the spot very nicely and some of which do not (constant lampooning of real-life journalist and author Jon Simpson in the bloated and laughable figure of Timothy Drysdale is hilarious, whilst references to UNICEF as 'Think of the Children' seem a little silly - though that may well be the point). Such details add colour and plausibility to the book, though they can seem a little too anecdotal. More difficult for the reader to contend with is the assumption that O'Loughlin seems to make that his readers will be familiar with the conflicts, politics and geography of central Africa. In reality, even the more informed of his readers are likely to be a little unsure as to where certain cities are in relation to each other and even less sure as to which action the Zairean government took when, and why. Perhaps this is a deliberate tactic on O'Loughlin's part in order to illustrate the confused trekking from pillar to post that war reporters must do, as dictated by those back in western newsrooms who seem to know much  more of what's going on. It's hard to tell.
Where O'Loughlin really earns his advance, and presumably that Booker nod, is in some beautifully written passages - particularly those describing Dublin, and the breakdown of a relationship. The man has a way with words, both visceral and poetic, that save this novel from drowning in its muddy context and would seem to bode well for his future as a novelist.

'Animal Farm' by George Orwell

I read Animal Farm a good few years back. It came in a boxset of Penguin classics that my folks gave me and was the slimmest book in there. I'll get around to reading One Hundred Years of Solitude and On The Road one of these days, probably.

It also happened to be one of the options for prescribed fiction for the English Leaving Cert course, which I was doing at the time, but our teacher preferred for us to read Lord of the Flies. Turned out Orwell's little piece of satire was far more useful for the purposes of my history exam, as it helped me to grasp the intricacies of Stalin's Seven Year Plan and the full betrayal of the Marxist dream in a way that a bare history book never could. And that, I suppose, is chief among the reasons why we'll always need good fiction.

'Bad Day in Blackrock' by Kevin Power

It would be easy for me to hate Kevin Power. The man is less than two months older than me and has already written a prize-winning novel. I had always thought that aspiring novelists, bar Cecelia Ahern, were meant to sit around vaguely mulling life over until they were 35 or so. The fact that this novel is rather good makes it even more difficult to bear.
Bad Day in Blackrock is a fictionalised look at the death of Brian Murphy outside Anabel's nightclub in Dublin, involving three former Blackrock College students. It's a brave topic for any novelist, let alone a new one, and it inevitably left Power open to accusations of insensitivity. All names have been changed, of course, and some details are altered for the sake of narrative clarity, but it remains an immediately recognisable story to any Irish person.

Yet one only needs to read a few pages of the novel to realise that this is a far more respectful, measured way of examining a delicate issue than the oft-seen 'Tell-All Exposés' that unemployed tabloid journalists like to produce about contentious court cases. Power is examining the way of life of affluent South Dubliners at that moment in time, and the factors that can lead to such things happening. As such, he occasionally runs the risk of sounding like Ross O'Carroll-Kelly without the comedy. A morally barren, self-absorbed, hedonistic picture quickly emerges, whilst Power manages to stay sympathetic at the same time. These are young people behaving badly because their schools and their parents have told them that they can.
As someone who has had daily contact with precisely this milieu through teaching in a private school I find it hard to argue against this. Read Bad Day in Blackrock if you have an interest in how much of Ireland is raising its children. Or just read it if you like well-written, perfectly structured fiction that refuses to err on the side of bombastic, even when it must have been ever so tempting.