No Violence, Please, We're Australian...

I had a strange experience when it came to reading "The Slap" by Christos Tsiolkas.

Everybody in Melbourne was raving about it, to one degree or another, earlier in the year. I went to buy a copy in the National Library bookshop... it was sold out.

So off to a local lending library, where I had an interesting series of validations requested before I could become a "bona fide" borrower. So, off home with this weighty tome, only to be stopped in my tracks and generally befuzzled by "the language".

Here we go again. Even in Dublin I have never met characters who spout expletives with such venom, who make such mountains out of molehills, whose objective correlatives are so skewed that they end up in court over a minor event at a party.

I got the references to Voltaire... the best mother in the best of possible worlds.
This ensures that the work sits snugly within the European canon as well as appealing to the Australian readership.
The food was good. I could have happily lapped up a dish of Greek delicacies, they so came to life on the page. However, I couldn't persist. Why upset oneself while on holiday, when there are so many beautiful buildings to look at in Melbourne and so many friendly people to meet.

However, since every city has an underbelly, I have to admit that one experience stands out that reminds me that everything is not rosy in the Antipodean garden.

I have a peculiar dislike of public transport. It never goes exactly where one is going and there is a "cheek by jowl" camaraderie that, to the increasingly aged, is tiring in the extreme. I listen to my equally aging Walkman as the famous Melbourne trams trundle me towards my destinations. However, one day I came across the wretched child straight out of "The Slap", but now in adolescent form.

School was out and, trying too hard to impress a school mate, a boisterous teenager was throwing his weight around. His feet were on a girl's lap, and to my surprise she did not demur. "Confuse" in the extreme, as my French exchange would have put it, I decided to distract myself by taking out my camera. Looking at photos was better than surveying the social disaster unfolding a few seats away.

The effect was electric. The young man shot bolt upright, feet firmly on the floor and he began to behave beautifully.

I was ever more shocked at this.

Do people need to have the fear that their actions will be recorded for posterity before they can behave in a civilized manner?
If one of the characters in "The Slap" had started to photograph the row, would it have been nipped in the bud?

Literature and life collide so often nowadays.

Perhaps we should be reading more?