I actually felt trapped under water while reading Barracuda by Christos Tsiolkas. This is both a compliment and a complaint.
As a novelist myself, I’d prefer to engage my reader to the point where they can no longer endure my company than to merely engage their polite attention. I read many contemporary novels without getting caught up in a groundswell of emotion, but rarely do I love and resist fiction simultaneously. Rarer still do I realize my objections are being triggered by a writer doing too fine a job rendering a character or a world that I simply find hard to take. That said, I never even considered putting down Tsiolkas’ 5th novel (the follow-up to his widely read and praised Slap). This one follows a young man from an Australian working-class family aiming to secure a place in a more socially privileged world by achieving cult status as a champion swimmer in a country that follows swimming the way we Americans follow football.
Barracuda caught my attention when I read a favorable review in the New Yorker. I, too, published a novel about competitive swimmers who happen to be gay. I also noticed that, while Barracuda was widely reviewed in the UK, it has so far received scant attention in the U.S. In the case of this captivating novel, I don’t believe it’s lack of review space, but rather perhaps its very Australian sensibility hasn’t traveled well across the ocean, as has Richard Flanagan’s Booker Prize-winning The Narrow Road To The Deep North.
One discomfiting element of Barracuda is the constant, often unbridled rage that seizes its protagonist, Danny (sometimes Dan) Kelly. Danny grows up in a working-class family; he’s the son of a Greek hairdresser mother and a Scottish truck driver Father. Early in the novel Danny describes himself as a WOG, (Wily Oriental Gentleman) a racial slur that evolved from the British towards South Asians (Somerset Maugham uses it frequently). In Australia, WOG refers to people of Mediterranean extraction and is sometimes used as a cynical term of endearment. I would imagine that these linguistic nuances are lost on most American readers who, like me, would assume that the son of an olive-complected mother and a pasty white father perhaps might look faintly Latino or a bit swarthy.
So the harsh discrimination Danny endures at a place he calls “Cunt’s College”, a patrician, lily-white private boy’s school that he attends on a swimming scholarship, is puzzling.as is his resentment toward his left-leaning working-class parents for bringing him into a world that skews socially and economically toward Caucasians. Despite this, Tsiolkas brilliantly captures the tension, the conflict, the sexual repression and the adolescent competitiveness and bullying that goes on at private school. As you’re reading this novel, many first-rate boy’s private school novels come to mind: A Separate Peace; Brideshead Revisited. Danny is admirably dedicated to his school swim team and its drill master, coach Torma, who belittles his swimmers into performing at the top of their ability, sometimes with disastrous results. Also beautifully rendered are Danny’s edgy relationships with the swimmers themselves, in particular Martin Taylor, Danny’s handsome upper-class rival who becomes his best friend and almost lover but who eventually retreats from their claustrophobic friendship.
And it makes perfect sense, Martin’s rejection of Danny, whose relentless, angry pursuit of athletic excellence earns him the nickname “Barracuda” and underscores this novel’s paradoxical quality. For as unsettling and incomprehensible as Danny’s rage can be, it evinces the best sequence of the novel. To avoid plot spoilers, I will only say that it involves the opening night of the 2000 Sydney Olympics, when the whole nation of Australia seems to be out getting drunk in bars and watching the ceremonies on television, and chanting a mantra that drives Danny crazy: “Ozzie, Ozzie, Ozzie, Oi, Oi, Oi.” The end of this evening is such a shocker, that as much as I saw it coming, dreaded it coming, and admired its deft execution, I still found it bewildering. And thinking about it further, I realize it’s hard to stay astride a relentless, self-destructive character when you don’t really understand the reasons underpinning his self-destruction.
Which brings me to complain about a British critic who, in reviewing Barracuda, compared Tsiolkas to Faulkner, which will probably look great on the paperback but really does the author a disservice: it invites those of us who love Faulkner to make an unfair comparison. Of course I did make the comparison, and I came up with the similarly self-destructive Joe Christmas, of Light in August. But the difference between Christmas and Kelly is that we come to fully understand what underpins the former’s rage. Again, it may be a cultural gap here, but I felt I just didn’t understand what brought Danny Kelley to Barracuda’s true moment of horror.
On one hand it’s refreshing that Tsiolkas seems to studiously avoid the coming out aspect that much of gay fiction feels it must cover: Danny’s sexuality is treated as rather incidental. But this is confounded by graphic descriptions of sex, making one think the author is succumbing to the temptations of the “coming out” novel. While I was reading the more lurid scenes in Barracuda, I both admired the author’s audacity and cringed, cringed not so much at what he was writing but more at why he felt compelled to spare us no detail. The early writers of contemporary gay fiction, minting a new genre, understandably felt the need to reveal the fast and furious details about the sex act between men—the anatomy of it, body fluids, scatology and all. But most of these writers like Andrew Holleran and Edmund White were born in the 1940s; Tsiolkas was born in the mid-60s. And yet he can certainly write a sex scene, which is saying a lot more than many of my contemporaries (I am thinking of a famous one in particular) whose descriptions of same-sex sex are like face slaps with a wet, dead fish.
Swimming as gay eros has been powerfully explored by other writers: by people like Jennifer Levin in Water Dancer; by Carol Anshaw in Aquamarine; by the late John Fox in The Boys On the Rock. Tsiolkas dedicates a lot of verbiage to the relentless training that the sport requires, but it is pretty clear to me that he has had very little firsthand experience as a competitive swimmer. He doesn’t really convey the monotony of having to log in 12,000 yards a day in practice or the nauseous, febrile experience of competing. Coming late as he does in the tradition of erotic gay swimming novels, Tsiolkas’ descriptions of strokes and breathing and hyperventilation bring nothing new to the table.
And while there are certain cultural differences that may obscure the author’s true terrain to somebody such as myself, I would argue that a more universal concern to any reader might be the numerous switches in time and P.O.V. The book veers between first person and third person, (a tricky high wire act for any novelist), and while the third person admirably maintains the intimacy of first person, there are times when you simply don’t know where you are or why Tsiolkas is giving you a particular piece of the story. And yet in the end the book has such a propulsive narrative that he gets away with it. I finished reading Barracuda dazzled, a bit disgruntled, but realizing that the sort of book that provokes a whole range of emotions tends to stay with you a lot longer than novels that have lovely construction but just not enough soul.