A story that, in the context of this anthology, confirms Tolstoy’s dictum that ‘each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way’. And a story that demonstrates how Tsiolkas’s characters – and by extension, his stories and novels – have conflict running through them like proverbial sticks of rock.

The relationship here is between siblings: the recently deceased, bohemian, gay Leo, living a life at the fag-end of Marxism-inflected hippiedom, and the still living Saverio, living his life in mainstream, heterosexual suburban orthodoxy. Visiting Leo’s home for the funeral, Sav’s grief comes to encompass love, hatred, contempt, compassion and much more. Never accepted by his younger brother’s well-read, erudite social circle, we see through Sav’s eyes that their impeccable ‘Spirit of 68’ socio-political positioning does not prevent them from being either condescending to or dismissive of him, and ‘as moralistic as the old believers’.

The story cleverly plays with our sympathies: readers of this author – an outspokenly gay, working-class Greek-Australian typically keen to admonish orthodox hypocrisy and with a reputation for shocking the reader – are likely to more closely resemble, or at least sympathise with, Leo or his friends that Sav, yet is Sav we are more likely to feel for by the story’s end.

Like most of Tsiolkas’s work, this can be read as a morality tale, and one where punches and kisses are likely to land in equal measure, but there’s a richness of wider context here that’s not always otherwise present. And for all the brutality and conflict, there is still tenderness: Sav’s speech at Leo’s funeral is sensitive and deeply moving, acknowledging that his brother’s friends became his ‘family’ while revealing how left behind he had always felt.

Published in Merciless Gods, Allen & Unwin, 2014