Book Review: Dead Europe By Christos Tsiolkas

Isaac, an Australian Greek photographer whose professional career is in the doldrums receives a grant from the Greek Ministry of Culture that he travels to Europe with. He is going back to Europe after a long hiatus and plans to visit his mother’s birthplace, a secluded village. Europe has been transformed by the end of four decades of justifiable paranoia.  Isaac backpacks through the ruins of communism and finds an austere continent swamped by sour milk and filthy money where everything is bought and sold in a sordid, punched black and blue economy.

Dead Europe shifts between the past and the present where superstition, witches and demons are slipped into the narrative. The story becomes so infected by its own viciousness the reader is left breathless. The story of Isaac’s mother and grandmother is set against the tragic landscape of history seething in hatefulness, remorse, bastards and slaughter. The isolated village is a place of rabid delusion, greed, and resentfulness a somewhat self-imposed anguished hell that at one time or another is infected by Nazis, starvation, demons and deformity. The village is haunted by meaningless ambition, hate and jealousy. So much so that Europeans disdain of ‘other’ is revealed to be completely self-righteous and contradictory when Americans are condemned as an arrogant, inward reflective nation.

Dead Europe could easily be titled Dead World because of its universal appeal as an argument against progress. The story echoes Rousseau’s view of civil society, “The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, [and] said, this is mine.” Isaac’s mountain village embodies the schism between technology and superstition that set in motion the routine slaughter of millions as each generation built upon the fallacies of preceding generations. The Europeans Isaac meets mock him for his soft Australian demeanour, yet, it’s Isaac’s society they seem to desire and despise at once. It is also evident that Europeans are ignorant of the bloody and nasty history of Australia. When Isaac’s photographic exhibition is poorly attended and critiqued he remarks,  “Australia is very far away. I understand.”

Isaac spends much of the novel engaged in sex, amongst them very young men. One of whom Isaac said; “ [I] had found him in the park.” He also experiences bizarre psychotic sexual encounters with two women. One woman for her blood the second, to murder. He completes his European sex tour in bed with a former High School teacher. Isaac has got to have it all even a ‘straight’ guy and one who Isaac says, “We made slow, fumbling love, the kind of love possible between a straight man and a gay man.” Considering the sexual intimacy they shared it further reinforces the shallowness of Isaac’s disposition. They are unable to, “fall asleep in each other’s arms [it] didn’t feel comfortable. We ended up on separate sides of the bed.” Isaac’s world revolves around the superficiality of the flesh and everybody is game. Isaac gets what he wants because his appetite is impossible to satisfy. His cringing phone calls to his lover Colin in Australia are a constant source of character irritation. Isaac’s love for Colin is terminally and psychologically separated from his insatiable sexual needs. He lives by the creed of anybody, anywhere anytime. His drug use, alcohol consumption, sex addiction, relentless smoking and there is a creeping suspicion he suffers from Renfield’s Syndrome (he sucks the blood from a menstruating victim). “Her blood was calling me.” The narrative consistently confronts the reader’s disposition as Isaac’s life takes on the misery of his parents and ancestors.

Tsiolkas’ story makes for an exhausting and occasionally interesting but risky read. Though, he drains your support with his increasingly non-productive narrative where the monotonous whirlpool of misery, sex, illness and lunacy twists Dead Europe into a stinking carcass far from the maddening crowd. Tsiolkas’ crafts his disjointed novel with some chunks of quality where the narrative flows free and unsullied. The story is written in efficacious language and a provocative narrative crammed with wicked characters. It’s an audacious attempt at creating an original and an interesting story of immigrants.  But Dead Europe is a beast of burden that isolates the reader from its narrative by overwhelming the senses with far too many foul unlikable characters, repetitious motifs and an unremitting atmosphere of ghastliness. Tsiolkas’ Dead Europe is a novel that weaves words and narrative for a ‘big night out’ and in the end it fashions a nauseating hangover.