Seize The Book - An Australian book blog containing book reviews, giveaways and author interviews. I recently mentioned Australian author Christos Tsiolkas in my review of Northside , however despite how much respect I have for the author and how much I enjoy watching him speak in interviews, I've resigned myself to the fact that Damascus just isn't for me.
Blurb Christos Tsiolkas' stunning new novel Damascus is a work of soaring ambition and achievement, of immense power and epic scope, taking as its subject nothing less than events surrounding the birth and establishment of the Christian church. Based around the gospels and letters of St Paul, and focusing on characters one and two generations on from the death of Christ, as well as Paul Saul himself, Damascus nevertheless explores the themes that have always obsessed Tsiolkas as a writer: class, religion, masculinity, patriarchy, colonisation, exile; the ways in which nations, societies, communities, families and individuals are united and divided - it's all here, the contemporary and urgent questions, perennial concerns made vivid and visceral.
In Damascus , Tsiolkas has written a masterpiece of imagination and transformation: an historical novel of immense power and an unflinching dissection of doubt and faith, tyranny and revolution, and cruelty and sacrifice. We are familiar with the misogyny attributed to the region and the period. We may be less familiar with the fact that he was born about 4 BCE, that he was a Greek speaker and his trade was tent-making. Damascus is a tough read. The emotional challenges of the brutality and on-going misogyny grate against the apparently unquestioning and unquestionable acceptance of the need to turn the other cheek and to love thy neighbour.
His attitudes and his actions appear to be at odds with the Paul whom Tsiolkas appears to be championing. If Dixe Wills had written a serious book about the subject matter, with photographs - instead of crazy illustrations reminiscent of Quentin Blake - The Ultimate Bucket List could have been a 5 star read. All I knew about Honeybee going in was the premise. A 14yo boy Sam climbs over the rail of an overpass and is ready to jump.
At the other end of the same bridge is an older man Vic, smoking his last cigarette. The two make eye contact and their lives change from that moment on. Wow, what a premise! I was instantly hooked and the relationship between Sam and Vic slowly crept up on me.
