P erry is a 53-year-old translator; Ivan is a 55-year-old landscape gardener. One is of Greek heritage, one Serbian. They are both in recovery from previous lovers, yet tonight they find themselves preparing for an app-arranged date in the suburbs of Melbourne.
Will they find the nerve to fall in love? Christos Tsiolkas’s latest novel takes us on a journey that ranges not just across Melbourne but back into past landscapes of shame and forward into new territories of possibility. Its set pieces include a heart attack, a brilliantly quarrelsome dinner party, a night in a penthouse and a climactic visit to one of the most beautiful buildings in the world. All of them are vividly crafted.
There’s also quite a lot of frank and medium-filthy sex. So far, so Netflix. What lifts the book to another level is not just the sensual polish of the writing but the structuring of the narrative.
As well as leaping across years, the authorial camera repeatedly shifts from tracking the developing affair between Perry and Ivan to following incidental witnesses to their story: people in the background, entirely ignorant of the drama being played out right next to them. These digressions into the lives of strangers are always unexpected, yet perfectly placed; cumulatively, they situate the book’s central intimacy within a provocatively unconcerned world, one rife with cultural complexity and as riddled with happiness as it is with tension. Against this ever-shifting background, the title of.
