Julie Szego
July 23, 2011

HAVE you heard about the ”A-list”, ”red carpet” event at this year’s Melbourne International Film Festival? It has been described as a slick marketing coup to create a buzz around a new ABC mini-series, The Slap. The first two episodes of the series, an adaptation of Christos Tsiolkas’s novel, will feature on the big screen one night during the festival. For a TV drama, The Slap has heavy-hitters in its credits; several accomplished directors and a stellar cast, including Melissa George, Alex Dimitriades and Jonathan LaPaglia. This is unsurprising, given the heady success of the novel, which won a slew of gongs and had large sections of the literati gushing.

But The Slap also polarised readers like few other books in recent memory. And if you belong, as I do, in the negative column, if you experienced the novel as little more than a tedious and unrelenting assault – as misanthropic nonsense – then the impending mini-series will have you gnashing teeth and boycotting the national broadcaster until the publicity storm blows over.

To be clear, I was favourably disposed to The Slap, having found Tsiolkas’s first novel, Loaded, about a young gay Greek-Australian, exhilarating, authentic and in-your-face (I have not read his two other novels). In one memorable passage the book’s narrator, Ari, skewers the pieties of political multiculturalism by describing Melbourne as a microcosm of ethnic tensions around the world, where ”everyone hates everyone else”. The book suggested a writer comfortably on home turf.

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