A fledgling relationship seen through multiple gazes
THE IN-BETWEEN CHRISTOS TSIOLKAS 384pp. Atlantic. Paperback, £9.99.
AT THE HEART of Christos Tsiolkas’s ninth novel, The In-Between, is a big midlife question: after fifty, suddenly single, how do you start again with someone new?
Surely there is just too much to explain, too much that ought to go without saying or that cannot be restarted. Won’t your defences, so carefully built up over the decades, be compromised – or be too uncompromising? How do two people, who have taken fifty years to establish, separately, the “music” of themselves, even begin to harmonize? Then there is the question of baggage: do you arrive on day one with all your bags? Or do you shove everything in the eaves and hope – against all experience – that it might just go away. The effort of it all! But, then, the loneliness …
What is true for life is true for the novelist. What chance is there of describing, with any freedom or flow, the tentative first steps in a relationship when every act and phrase might well require pages of expository prose? It is a good challenge, which Tsiolkas meets with great success. The idea, perhaps, is that a solution to the fictional problem might bring insight into the “real world”.
Perry (Pericles) and Ivan, both based in Melbourne, meet on a dating app. Both are recovering from long-term relationships that ended in disaster. Perry was involved with Gerard, an older man, married with children, sophisticated, superior and chilly (and, yes, French); Gerard brought the relationship to an abrupt end on becoming a grandfather. (It would be “unseemly”.) Ivan, a simpler soul than Perry, got a girl pregnant in his youth and now has an ex-wife, who despises him, and a daughter, to whom he is devoted. For years he went out with a younger guy ( Joe) who turned out to be a shit, cheating on him sexually and taking all his money.
It would be ludicrous, of course, to begin a first date with this kind of naked precis. Evidently the problem is proportion. There is just too much past in the present. Tsiolkas evokes this skilfully. His method is to write long scenes (five of them in total) from within the head of one of his respective characters, allowing the reader to follow the push and pull of past and present, the engagement and disengagement with the immediate moment, and the endless stream of self-talk and critical commentary, as each attempts to deal with the day’s events as they happen. The effect is reminiscent of Robert Altman’s films, in which long unbroken shots give the thrilling impression of life-as-it-is, richly detailed, nuanced, fleeting, unedited. The advantage of fiction is that this technique can be interiorized, and it is the cumulative effect that brings Tsiolkas his rewards, rather than a focus on action or even dialogue.
In the fi
