The Slap
This will not only be the first Booker book to be left in hotel bedrooms (Guardian Books) but the first to be read there with one hand. The first three chapters evoked the same reaction in me as I had as a teenager when some spotty youth would grab my hand and press it against his blue-jeaned erection. He, idiotically proud. Me, baffled and oddly upset. The book gets better but I don’t think having a change of character for each chapter is a successful device. Tsolkias does side-step the danger of narrative stagnation (playing the same incident over and over in each chapter) by pushing on with the fall-out from the initial slap. However, this leaves some large gaps in any chronological understanding and just as you begin to get interested in a character and want to know what happens next, you’re whisked off to another time, place and set of emotions.
The best character in the book never appears. He’s dead. The Connie chapter includes one of his letters to the other best character, his sister and Connie’s aunt, Tasha. (Who doesn’t get a chapter to herself, either.) Mind you, if Connie’s dad had taken a starring role it would have turned into Priscilla Queen of the Desert.
