Let’s get right down to it: The In-Between, by Australian writer Christos Tsiolkas, includes some really intense descriptions of rough male-on-male sex. That shouldn’t be a surprise. As a prominent gay writer, he has written books over the past 20 years that have always been explicit. Though, at the age of 58, perhaps he could consider dialling it back. He’s made his point.
Aside from the sex, a familiar Tsiolkas technique is a narrative presented through a prism of perspectives. His 2007 novel, The Slap, centred around a barbecue in Melbourne, was a classic in which eight characters built a multidimensional scenario to great effect. It was a huge critical and commercial success.
The In-Between offers a tighter cast, split into two alternating narratives featuring a pair of lonely, middle-aged, gay Melbourne men: Perry, a well-educated translator of Greek heritage, and Ivan, a landscape designer whose parents immigrated from Serbia.
Both are in between relationships and still caught in the past. Ivan, who was married, has an adult daughter with an infant child. He is scarred by the messy collapse of an affair with a younger man.
And Perry, who lived for 20 years in Europe, can’t get over his former lover, Gerard, a closeted married Frenchman who dumped him.
We meet these two vulnerable men on their first tryst, arranged through an app, in a restaurant, where they eye each other up, make awkward conversation and drink too much.
It’s a finely attuned portrait of two damaged people trying to assess their potential. But there’s a warning bell when Perry sees “a flash of red-hot rage” in Ivan’s eyes.
Nevertheless, lust prevails and a relationship ensues, bringing in other figures, including Ivan’s former wife ‒ a caricature ‒ and their daughter. They lack substance and quickly float away.
One other character is never seen but lurks constantly in Ivan’s memory. It’s Joe, his former lover, the source of his unresolved, frightening rage.
The book, divided into five sections, has time gaps. So despite an awkward start, Perry and Ivan somehow morph into a tentative couple, still living apart. They are on the brink of change. Perry is longing to return to Europe, while something is missing for Ivan, who is secretly addicted to online porn, which we have to share. Always, he is burning with “shame”, a word flung around in Tsiolkas’ works.
A welcome glimpse of the outside world is introduced in the form of a dinner party and some new characters: two of Perry’s oldest friends ‒ a lesbian couple – and a heterosexual couple.
But these dinner party guests seem one-dimensional “types”, with no dynamism. Apart from Ivan, toiler of the soil, they are all academics who argue about the state of Australia as if they were ticking boxes: racism, climate change, politics, misogyny, homophobia.
The inevitable row, boring as it is, leads to Perry and Ivan’s decision to show unity and move in together. By which time, whatever.
The next chapter, graphically depicting Ivan’s final session with “Troy”, a young male prostitute whose services he’s been using for some time, represents a fundamental betrayal of Perry.
It’s a gruelling section. Because Ivan is paying for Troy’s body, he feels entitled to use it as he pleases. It’s a mess of overheated writing that needed a stern editor’s hand.
Does Ivan ever tell Perry about “Troy”? Tsiolkas doesn’t tell us, leading the shaken reader instead into the final section, set in a stinking hot Athens. Refreshingly, this episode is told from the point of view of Lēna, a gay woman who is the daughter of Gerard, Perry’s former lover.
Gerard has died and Perry and Ivan have travelled to Greece to help Lēna scatter his ashes. This farewell ‒ which includes a long letter, never posted, from Gerard to Perry, now called Pericles – is set in the grounds of the Temple of Poseidon, near Athens.
It’s a setting so ancient and beautiful that Ivan is moved to tears, lifted into exultation by the sight of the ruins outlined by the sun.
Lēna, in a heightened state of grief, shares his sense of wonder until suddenly she hears a click. “Someone behind them, a tourist, has snapped the view with their phone.”
That touch of wry humour is all too rare in The In-Between. There is also some softness, at last. As Lēna watches Ivan and Perry together, she realises that these two men, weary with age and emotion, are fundamentally good people.
“She wonders if kindness is a quality that can be cultivated at any time, or whether it finds its true expression only with age?” It’s a fair question. But in between the various stages of their relationship, there are many blanks and Tsiolkas hasn’t offered enough to let us work that out for ourselves.
