Christos Tsiolkas’s new book stinks. The In-Between revels in the dank erotics of the human animal, the “fecund odours” of desire – a novel of sweat, musk and brine. Tsiolkas has always been a pungent and unsqueamish writer, one of Ozlit’s boldest id-wranglers. But this book – the Melbourne author’s eighth – balances its carnality with quiet. Tsiolkas has never been more gentle on the page. It suits him.
The premise is elegant. The In-Between traces a love story through its pivotal moments: not the milestone decisions or cataclysmic quarrels, but the encounters that deepen intimacy. The moments of grace. As Tsiolkas skips from one scene to the next – jumping weeks and months ahead – readers are left to fill the narrative gaps, to imagine the “in-between” for themselves.
Our lovers are Perry and Ivan, two heartsore men in their early 50s who are struggling to “negotiate the ever-shifting terrain of contemporary courtship” (how decorous Tsiolkas makes the post-Grindr era sound). The app-matched gents agree to an old-fashioned dinner date at one of Melbourne’s trusty Italian bistros. As they trade backstories over tiramisu, Ivan reaches across the table to steady Perry’s hand. It is a simple, tender gesture. A beginning. The men are lonely, but brave enough to admit it.
The next time we meet Perry and Ivan, they will be entwined in each others’ lives. By the end of the novel – years after that fateful pudding – their bond will seem unassailable (“a love that is not possession, anchored in kindness”). The question that beats at the heart of this novel is not whether the couple will stay together, but how? For a terrible “red hot rage” simmers in Ivan, and Perry is mired in regret. There are reckonings to be had, sins to absolve, secrets to relinquish, wounds to salve. How do you build a love that can bear the weight of the past? Tsiolkas asks. How do you turn your burdens into ballast?
For our lovers, these questions play out across sociopolitical faultlines – a cultural in-between. Perry is a translator who has spent years working in the EU. He is cerebral, cosmopolitan and disgusted with Australian solipsism (it’s hard for him to stomach the lockdown gripes of Melburnians after witnessing the carnage of Covid in Europe). Ivan is a landscape gardener who owns and runs his own business. He is practical and plain-speaking, a man who invites double-barrelled descriptors: “elemental solidity”, “optimistic masculinity”, “callused symmetry”, “brutal handsomeness” (in short: a prototypical Tsiolkas love-object). Ivan has left the country once and only once, for a beach holiday in Thailand. He doesn’t trust the news.
There are so many ways our lovers might diminish and enrich one another, so many sites of intra-class friction. This is prime Tsiolkas territory: the rough hands/smooth hands divide. But which version of the author has shown up? The fearless cultural vivisectionist from The Slap or the weary, petulant cynic from his last novel-cum-manifesto, 7½? The answer is a bit of both.
There is a dinner party scene in The In-Between that is so monstrously awkward and gloriously well-observed, it could be a one-act play – a study in the quiet tyranny of consensus. It’s the kind of veiled cruelty that would make Edward Albee whoop. A night of empty shibboleths and awful(ly) good intentions. Here is Tsiolkas the watcher: sharp-eyed and peerless. The fly on our wall.
But then there is the sex: ferocious and sensory and relentless. Underneath all the bodily noise – the fug, fetor and pong – these scenes often read like anatomical Ikea (insert part X into slot Y). It feels performative – almost weaponised – like a game of erotic chicken: blink and you’re a prude. I’m tired of that pernicious little trap; I’m not scandalised, I’m weary. Here is the Tsiolkas of 7 ½, a writer so intent on shocking that he tends to bore. (It’s hard to forgive that sour strop of a book, which aspired to beauty and settled for reproach.)
I have an editor (not this one) who scrubs the word “liminal” from reviews. He thinks it’s a gauzy wank-word and most of the time he’s right. But not here. The In-Between is a tale of halfway places and emotional purgatories: of middle age, middle politics and the middle classes. This novel is liminal in content but also in craft: evidence of a writer making the transition from cage rattler to elder statesman.
“Something must be abandoned,” Tsiolkas writes, “in order for something to be affirmed”. What has been jettisoned in The In-Between is grievance. The rancour of 7 ½ is gone. In its place: loneliness, compassion, awe, doubt. The result is a novel that feels transgressive in its hope, rather than its bitterness. A humble book. A generous book. Perhaps his best. It feels like the book he set out to write in 7 ½: “a book about beauty”. But Tsiolkas does not hector the next generation of writers in these pages; he begins to light the way.
• The In-Between by Christos Tsiolkas is out now through Allen and Unwin (RRP$32.99)
