Tough love

The author of The Slap examinines a tentative relationship between two ageing men with much emotional baggage.

- LINDA HERRICK

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.