The Book Tower

To recap, the Australian adventure started in Sydney, followed by a detour to Cairns and a flight out to Dunk Island. Returning to Cairns, an hour’s bus ride to Port Douglas, then a short diversion to the Great Barrier Reef and Cape Tribulation. Cairns to Brisbane, and from there to Fraser Island.

Here’s a view of Brisbane taken from something they have that’s similar to London’s Millenium Wheel. In fact this part of Brisbane has many similarities to London, with its own South Bank, although there are some idiosyncratic riverside attractions including a man made beach. What spoils Brisbane is the cavalier approach to motorways and bridge building; you can see from the photograph the busy highway running along the opposite side of the river, a nightmare during a rush hour that never ceases.

Brisbane’s tourist attractions include water parks (looking very empty as we drove past – although remember that the kids are at school in Australia throughout August) and Movie World. This is a theme park similar to California’s Universal Studios, although much smaller and in this case masterminded by Warner Brothers. Like Universal Studios, Movie World tends to cling on to attractions celebrating long forgotten or unpopular films. In California I remember being treated to the Backdraft experience (a terrible film about firemen with Robert de Niro) and the Back to the Future Ride (more than a decade after the film’s release). While Warner Brothers are safe in their investment of Batman and Superman, there’s more of a blindingly obvious problem with the Wild West ride (dismal Will Smith vehicle from a decade ago).

My enjoyment of Movie World was dimmed by tiredness and the amount of Japanese visitors with their camcorders (I caught one of them enthusiastically filming the menu in the Bat Burger Bar). I was a little more geared up for the Australian Experience. This is an extravaganza where guests are compelled to wear straw stetsons and sit in either “red” or “yellow” opposing teams to cheer, whoop and do Mexican waves. Oddly, the majority of team members appeared to be locals. There is a photo of me, which I won’t share, where I resemble an extra from Deliverance.

The drive to take the ferry to Fraser Island is five hours from Brisbane. It’s worth it to see this extraordinary place, a rain forest on an island completely made up of sand. The three day visit was quite intense, including a full day tour of the island (it’s huge) and a morning spent whale watching (another activity spoilt by trigger happy camcorder users – it’s amazing that no small children were nudged off the boat in the making of their home movies).

Island tours are by four wheel drive, the only possible means of transport around Fraser Island. Our driver and guide was a highly informative Australian called Alan, doing the job for many years and a presence I imagine has always been on the island (on returning I was chatting to a colleague who’d visited several years ago. He asked “did you get Alan?” Fact). Unlike the majority of holiday tours, this one was interesting, amusing and I learnt a great deal. And despite the rather rocky rhythm of the tour bus (giving the more violent rides at Movie World a run for their money) I did not succumb to motion sickness.

Like mainland Australia, Fraser Island has gone a little crazy in Dingo awareness. I have a soft spot for the dingo, although alas I did not spot any outside of a zoo. There are warnings not to feed or encourage them (hey dingo, fancy a barbecue?), although they are quite scarce on Fraser. The history of this creature is quite fascinating. More wolf than dog (they howl but cannot bark – although the less pure variety are dog/dingo hybrids), they were originally brought to Australia thousands of years ago by migrant fisherman. The idea was to provide an easy supply of ready food should the fishing go belly up. The Aboriginals semi-domesticated the animals, using them to hunt, and were responsible for bringing them to Fraser Island. But the dominance of the white man brought trouble; dingos became reliant on man, feeding from rubbish tips, being fed, becoming scavengers, eventually becoming aggressive when the supplies of food were not forthcoming. In recent decades Fraser Island has attempted to rehabilitate the dingo, removing the opportunity for them to scavenge and slowly allowing them to become natural hunters again. Unfortunately this doesn’t appear to be an Australian-wide policy, and the animals continue to be a danger to the modern man that changed their behaviour in the first place.

The Aussie adventure ended with a brief return to Brisbane before flying back to Blighty. The returning jetlag is a killer, I have only just recovered, but it was still worth it. And it’s really only half a world away…

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For a while I lapped up James Lever’s Me Cheeta, although its length ultimately reveals its limitations. As a short story it would have been marvellous. Something found by chance in The New Yorker or Granta perhaps, or part of a collection by the obviously highly imaginitive Lever. But novel-sized a definite no.

Now in his late 70s and in retirement as he spends his days mostly painting, Cheeta looks back on his former career which reached its height during the Tarzan films of the 1930s. He begins by recounting a hilarious encounter with Rex Harrison during filming of the ill-fated Dr Dollittle in 1967. The book appears to be taking an immediate and satisfying shape; Lever is witty and the conceit of the monkey narrator well executed. Things however take a frustrating turn, where Cheeta goes back to his jungle roots and appears to take a very long and meandering time to reach a proper narrative. These early chapters struck me as padding, perhaps an attempt to expand a much slighter work.

Me Cheeta is best when looking at the Tarzan/ape dynamic, and when Cheeta meets the elderly and dying Johnny Weissmuller it’s a surprisingly moving chapter. There’s also a very witty account of Charlie Chaplin, although it appears out of sorts with the rest of the book. Elsewhere Lever shows flashes of brilliance, for example Cheeta reaching the States and running wild in a movie theatre showing King Kong (the resulting chaos means he misses the end of the film and he wrongly assumes that Kong’s ascent of the Empire State Building was a wise move). There’s also a grand joke that runs with the well worn theme of giving enough monkeys enough time and typewriters (as the myth goes, one of them will eventually produce the complete works of Shakespeare).

However, I’m perplexed as to why this book has received such praise. The joke wears a little thin after a while, and I was itching for some human company.

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During my recent travels Down Under I became acquainted with the work of Christos Tsiolkas. The Australian author’s latest novel The Slap was the winner of this year’s Australian Book Industry Awards and also the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. This is a book that has brought Tsiolkas to the mainstream, at least if the count of holidaymakers reading this by the poolside is anything to go by.

The Slap is a far more accessible novel than Tsiolkas’s previous work Dead Europe, published four years ago. Although very rewarding, Dead Europe is a dense, disturbing and meandering piece of fiction. I found it at times inpenetrable, reminding me of my recent encounters with Roberto Bolano and Jonathan Littell. There is also a supernatural thread which recalled to me the most difficult to digest of Neil Gaiman’s work, American Gods.

Dead Europe is part ghost story, part disturbing travelogue and part rumination on the nomadic nature of man. It follows Isaac, an Australian photographer of Greek descent, as he follows an uneasy path through Europe, one full of homosexual encounters and disturbing experiences in the dark corners of European cities. Isaac has a knack of stumbling into the underbelly of culture, and a fascinating backstory told in alternating chapters frames his plight brilliantly. Dead Europe is an extraordinary novel. It isn’t for the light hearted and I never felt comfortable with this book, but it is one I may challenge myself to read again.

But onto The Slap. It’s remarkable that the author of Dead Europe could also produce this, an apparently mainstream novel that nevertheless reveals a highly talented author. The Slap begins simply but slowly develops into an absorbing and mulitlayered work. During a suburban Australian barbecue a man hits a small child. Somebody else’s small child, and the fallout of the event provides a hook for Tsiolkas to explore class and status. The events that unfold are seen from the point of view of eight people present at the barbecue, and The Slap takes in different views of life ranging from a teenage boy discovering his sexuality to an elderly grandfather perplexed at the changing world before him. Impressively, Tsiolkas also appears at ease when writing from either a male of female perspective.

Christos Tsiolkas is a highly gifted writer. The Slap is an engaging entry into his world but be warned. Although it is vastly different to Dead Europe both novels succeed in shocking, both in language and sexual reference. His world is an adult one, and worryingly so.

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