Christos Tsiolkas' new book Seven and a Half looks to beauty and time

Christos Tsiolkas. Photo / Greg Bowker

7 ½ by Christos Tsiolkas
(Allen & Unwin, $37)

7 ½ by Christos Tsiolkas is not quite autobiographical, but it is somehow auto-fiction. Bearing exactly the same name as the author of the book, a successful writer goes to a beach house on the southern New South Wales coast to both escape urban Melbourne and to work. However, the "Christos Tsiolkas' of 7 ½ is not the Tsiolkas of reality, despite any number of similarities.

Tsiolkas is one of the best-known contemporary Australian writers. There have been movies based on his first book, Loaded, and then the later Dead Europe. The Slap and Barracuda have generated two very successful TV series. 7 ½ is his 10th novel. Tsiolkas' themes frequently centre on the Greek immigrant experience in Australia, homosexuality, and left-wing politics. Old Europe is often seen through new eyes. Sexual expression is varied.

The Slap explored the consequences of a physical blow aimed at a young boy during a picnic, filtered through the perceptions of eight characters. More recently, Damascus examined the origins of Christianity in a blood-and-gore revival of the life of the Apostle, Paul – or Saul, as he is called in the book. 7 ½, however, is an infinitely more mellowed work.

7 ½ is also a mature novel. "Christos" the writer is frank about his theme – he wishes to deal with Beauty. He evokes the NSW coast with vivid accuracy. Stingrays flap in the shallows. An octopus attempts to capture a crab. Desirable young surfers sunbathe or swim. Waves collapse in the twilight. A writer's daily life is captured in finely tuned observations, from self-cooked meals to the sound of an opossum on the roof at night. A life-time of recollections arise.

Shuffled into the mix, there is also Sweet Thing, the book that "Christos" is writing. It tells the story of a retired American bisexual porn star, Paul Carrigan, who now lives with his Australian wife and son in northern NSW, but has received an offer he can't afford to refuse. A wealthy man, who has been obsessed with him for decades from old pornographic VHS tapes, is willing to fly him back to the US and pay $180,000 for a single sexual encounter.

Tsiolkas has never been regarded as a stylist, but 7 ½ makes up for this fact. To successfully evoke a landscape and a meditative writer in his contemplations, while sustaining a reader's interest, is difficult – even when Tsiolkas seamlessly intercuts these day-by-day details with youthful memories of growing up Greek in Melbourne and the pulp-fiction B-plot of the book-within-the-book.

While Tsiolkas may state his novel's theme is Beauty, it is also very much a novel about age. Time takes its toll on hair and waist-lines, but it also changes human appreciation of what is important. Tsiolkas might revisualise a fresh Australia, from the ripples of its coastal waters to the people and incidents of a Melbourne youth, but ultimately 7 ½ is story of change.

Light and landscape will alter on a minute-by-minute basis, yet lives also have their variations over their spans. It is to Tsiolkas' credit that he captures both. "Christos", his protagonist, has grown, transforming both politically and in his aesthetic valuations. Paul, the ex-porn-star lead-character of the novel-within-the-novel, has also matured but must journey back to his past in the US to determine just how much. Each man will discover what it is to be human – and to be necessarily living in and against time.

Reviewed by David Herkt