Dark and unsettling, Christos Tsiolkas’ short story collection Merciless Gods veers into the deepest recesses of human behaviour as it tackles the downfall of relationships, fractured familial ties, impenetrable bonds pushed to their limits, and the ability of humans to inflict upon one another unfathomable amounts of pain and suffering.
The title story ‘Merciless Gods’ that kicks off the anthology is a masterpiece in its own right. Drawing readers in from its very first line, “I want to tell you a story about an evening many years ago,” ‘Merciless Gods’ tells of how one man’s revelation culminates in the quick-fire destruction of a longstanding friendship group. The characters in the story are vivid and divergent, with each person in the group of eight exhibiting particular traits which render them memorable and a pivotal piece in the jigsaw puzzle that Tsiolkas constructs in the mere 46 pages accorded to the tale.
The decay of a relationship is narrated from the perspective of a husband in ‘Tourists’. The discombobulated feel of being a visitor in the frenetic streets of New York is the effective backdrop to a gaping crevice that opens up in a marriage after a stray, ill-informed remark.
A fissure of a different kind is dealt another face in ‘Sticks, Stones’ when a mother overhears her son calling a girl with Down Syndrome a ‘mong’. Departing from the concept of unconditional love a mother is expected to harbour for a child, the story details the complicated feelings of revulsion and alienation that arise in a woman grappling to accept the fact that her son is morphing into an individual distinctly separate and unknown to her.
As with many of his past works, gay identity, racial politics, and the dynamics of immigrant families are prominent themes in Tsiolkas’s collection of short stories.
The newest story in the collection, ‘Petals’, is a visceral account of an immigrant’s time in an Australian jail. Penned originally in Greek and subsequently translated into English, the disjointed monologue goes to the heart of a prisoner unable to adequately express the gratuitous violence and dearth of compassion that punctuates his otherwise monotonous existence.
I pull his mouth, he is a frightened dangerous serpent but I am now having the hunger of a dog and I don’t care that he is bite me and scratch me and punch me.
Tsiolkas excels when he dives headfirst into inexplicable situations almost certain to make readers squirm – notable even for a writer known for traversing oft-shocking terrain. In ‘Genetic Material’, Tsiolkas touches upon – with a surprising deftness and tenderness belying the act – how a son masturbates his aging, dementia-riddled father. In ‘Porn 1’, a mother forces herself to watch the porn flick her now dead son starred in before his untimely end.
Many a time in Tsiolkas’s stories, the standard tropes of drugs, sex and alcohol are repurposed and reinterpreted under the guise of paedophilia, parental neglect, and the schism between religion and sexuality – transporting them from the flightiness and frivolity often associated with such encounters into murkier terrain where morality is often forsaken.
In ‘Porn 2’ in particular, Tsiolkas takes readers to the centre of depraved acts that constitute the fabric of our society, as a 15-year-old finds himself trapped in a world of pornography, abuse and sexual violence. Sydney – otherwise known for its stunning waterfront views and sunny expanses – morphs into a sinister central character in Tsiolkas’s account. The dark underbelly of the city is explored with a panache that renders the boy’s world a dank, claustrophobic and morally devoid microcosm of the global metropolis in which it sits.
Tsiolkas’ stories in Merciless Gods borrow themes and ideas from his longer form works, although the brevity of these pieces means they are rendered in a medium that only accentuates the split between reality and make-believe in the writer’s often cruel and unrelenting world.
Merciless Gods
By Christos Tsiolkas
Allen & Unwin, RRP $32.99
