Cover
painting Colossal Boy
by John Baird
ISBN 1876044071
Published 1996
173 pgs
$19.95
The Set-Up
book
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19 sections
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Reviews
Set-Up
by Vasilakakos
Michael Hanrahan
Overland,
No. 147, Winter 1997
Reading the first few pages of
The
Set-Up gave me that sinking feeling usually saved for a
Monday
morning. With his story of the migrant experience in Australia,
Vasilakakos has taken an interesting idea and beaten it to a slow and
painful death.
Lakis lives in Sydney in 1978. He has become caught up in the Social
Security Greek Prosecutions Scandal, which involves people fraudulently
obtaining sickness and invalid pensions. It is suspected that Lakis,
who is Greek-born, is exaggerating his various ailments in order to
receive one of these pensions. Sent to investigate is ‘the
Other’, a
man who tries to win the confidence of Lakis in an effort to expose
him. He makes his first appearance at Lakis’
doctor’s surgery, and
later appears in Lakis’ hospital room. ‘The
Other’ wants to find
answers to such questions as what is the secret meaning of
Lakis’
exceptionally long surname? What is the significance of his
underlinings in an article about Cheryl Ladd’s breasts? Who
is
condemned by the misprint in that article? Vasilakakos has hidden any
points of interest beneath his character’s idle ponderances.
Lakis
spends many paragraphs wondering about his feet and toenails, and
giving such insights as ‘this woman’s either
pulling my leg or telling
the truth’.
To add to his flat characters, Vasilakakos has a tiresome style of
writing. The story seems to have been run over with a steam roller. It
is nice and smooth throughout. Nothing to get excited about, no
tension, no drama. Rather strange for a book that purports to be a
‘hand-grenade’ thriller. There is really nothing
going on at all, the
lifeless feeling accentuated by the unchanging sentence lengths and
long paragraphs. Originally written in Greek, there is no way this
level of monotony could be the result of translation. Vasilakakos also
seems to have an obsession with rambling, trivial dialogue. He
doesn’t
always identify which character is speaking, making the conversations
even more difficult to follow.
The potential exists for an intriguing tale, but Vasilakakos began in a
rut and refused to move out of it for 173 pages.
The Set-Up is
supposedly ‘like
Peter Corris re-imagined by Dostoyevsky or Kafka’.
Unfortunately it was
then written by Vasilakakos.
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The Set-Up
Marion Joy Hulme
Social Alternatives,
Vol. 17,
No. 2, April 1998
Vasilakakos’ novel is set in 1978 when suspicion and intrigue
were rife
in Australia. This was the time of the infamous Social Security Greek
Prosecutions Scandal. The scandal saw hundreds of Greek immigrants
accused of illegally receiving invalid pensions and sickness benefits.
Fuelled by speculation of fraud and opportunism, the department of
Social Security set about proving that Greek migrants had an organised
crime syndicate bent on taking advantage of Australia’s
social welfare
system. The department’s ‘conspiracy
theory’ was thrown out of court,
millions of dollars were lost and many lives were altered forever.
The Set-Up is a
story about one of
those lives.
Lakis Papahadjimanolakopoulos is sent on a nightmare journey through an
unknown labyrinth. He is arrested on conspiracy charges while preparing
to be reunited with his wife and son in Greece. Lakis wants to leave
Australia, a land that had initially promised him hope, because he
cannot find his place here. He feels suffocated and believes that
‘in
this country you don’t live, you merely exist...
I’ve been transplanted
into the wrong type of soil. No matter how much I’m watered,
I don’t
grow’ (pg. 69). The department has no compassion or
understanding for
Lakis’ plight, instead he is blamed for his own problems and
put
through humiliating and dehumanising rituals that serve to confuse and
destabilise him.
By blaming poverty on the poor, helplessness on the helpless and
madness on the mad, the DSS creates for itself an inescapable,
ever-expanding and interconnecting puzzle. All through the story the
reader must navigate a system of messages that never clearly lead to
the book’s true meaning. Reading this story is like taking a
hallucinogen, things come at you from out of nowhere, you never know if
what you see [read] is real, and it is difficult to centre yourself.
Lakis is incarcerated in hospital. He is told he has a brain tumour.
The hospital is itself a network of passageways, doors and stairwells.
His orientation is challenged, his feeling of place is clouded, Lakis
is in a void, people he has seen in his doctor’s waiting room
appear
around him, he feels his sanity come and go and does not know who to
trust. It is never clear whether his condition is madness or drug
induced. Is this a ploy by the author to confuse the reader, putting
him/her in the same position as the unfortunate Lakis?
This confusion is reflected through his thought processes and
experiences. During his time in hospital Lakis is beset by an alarming
array of contradicting situations and suspicious people. Sharing his
underground room with a questionable character puts Lakis on guard. He
contemplates the ‘Other’, his room mate:
Looking
now at the flowers, now at the Other out of the comer of my eye, I was
trying to make out what sort of a person this man was, to guess his
character. ‘He’s either great at pretending or very
naive,’ I thought,
without believing the latter too much. Besides, he didn’t
look naive.
‘He’s playing the innocent, he’s playing
this part as naturally as can
be. Here he is now, telling me about the shower to cover up what
he’s
really up to, to draw information from me surreptitiously, as if I
don’t know where it’s at...’
(pg. 61)
He suspects that all is not what it seems. He does not understand what
is happening to him. The more he tries to understand his situation, the
more confused he becomes. Unfortunately this is the position of the
reader. There is no dramatic irony here, the reader is left, like
Lakis, to navigate the labyrinth alone.
The DSS sets about trying to prove his guilt through a series of
interviews, but are hindered by his madness, the very condition under
which he is eligible for government assistance in the first place. The
benign brain tumour causing Lakis’ condition is never fully
revealed by
the author. Does Lakis really have a tumour? Is he under the influence
of drugs? Is the department deliberately manipulating him? Is the
author deliberately manipulating the reader? The confusion experienced
by Lakis is reflected throughout the prose, forging a psychological and
political web.
The
Set-Up
portrays an elaborate and extravagant array of tests and misguided
psychological analysis used to gather evidence. This evidence does
nothing to confirm the department’s theory, because a
conspiracy does
not exist. Investigators grasp anything that may vaguely incriminate
Lakis, including making analysis of his social habits, speech, and idle
drawings on a magazine page.
Even Lakis’ name is enough to make him a suspect, with a
surname like
Papahadjimanolakopoulos the department ‘can imagine how many
alternative surnames or variations he may use officially or
unofficially every time he comes in contact with and has dealings with
the Australian bureaucracy and law, [such] names make it easy for him
to slither and slide away like a snake’ (pg. 25). The DSS is
the dark
force in this novel, using character assassination, intimidation and
dehumanisation to trap the alleged frauds. However, the
‘mad’ Lakis
seems the most sane person among the delirious and suspicious
arbitrators of the social security system trying to prove his guilt.
We are taken through the confused states experienced by Lakis and left
where we started, in Lakis’ mind. There is no plot to this
story, just
a puzzle of experiences and imaginings. A work of fiction,
The Set Up is an
eerie echo of the
increasingly racist climate immigrants fear in Australia today.
Immigration is being blamed, by some, for the majority of
Australia’s
ills; ranging from high unemployment to decay in Christian morals.
Although set in 1978, Vasilakakos’ story was actually written
in 1987
and translated from the Greek (by Mary Mylonas) in 1996. Eighteen years
after its actual timeframe, and nine years after its penning, Lakis
Papahadjimanolakopoulos’ story could well be written
according to the
theories of our most infamous politicians today in 1997.
The Set-Up shows
what can happen
when deranged ideas are left unchecked until it is too late.
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Paperbacks
The Weekend Australian,
26-27
April 1997
The notorious Social Security conspiracy case - a hideous blot on
Australia’s ethnic affairs record - saw hundreds of Greek
migrants
labelled as crooks, allegedly receiving sickness benefits and invalid
pensions illegally. When police swooped on Sydney homes and
doctors’
surgeries in 1978 they set off a legal nightmare that produced 6.5
million words of transcript and cost taxpayers millions of dollars. The
courts found no conspiracy existed - but migrant lives were left
shattered. With a strong nod towards Kafka, Melbourne academic John
Vasilakakos revisits the conspiracy scandal and delivers a rare thing
in Australian writing: the socio-political novel. Lakis is crazy
(‘pissing is a pleasure as significant as eating and making
love,’ he
claims) and manages to obtain an invalid pension. Preparing to return
to Greece and his family, he’s arrested on conspiracy
charges.
Stalinist Russia no, but sunny Australia is where he’s
hounded to an
inevitable and tragic end. ‘After fulfilling this social
duty,’
observes Lakis of his own actions, ‘he would certainly
rest.’
Vasilakakos’s novel turns into a deliberate puzzle,
reflecting Lakis’s
confusion at the hypocritical stance of his adopted land.
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shorts
The
Set Up
Lisa Kerrigan
Australian Book Review,
No.
190, May
1997
Michel de Certeau identifies practices taken up by those outside the
institutions of power as ‘tactical processes’.
These tactics arc
unintentional and quotidian but still effective and, in a wonderful
moment, Vasilakakos gives us Lakis Papahadjimanolakopoulos, a Greek
migrant who is being investigated by a xenophobic government department.
They
become lost, give up straight after Pap, surrendering and saying
‘that’s enough’ finishing off with the
abbreviation etc. And this is
exactly what this cunning Greek exploits; his difficult surname...
[E]very time he comes in contact... with the Australian bureaucracy...
[his] name makes it easy for him to slither and slide away like a snake.
And Papahadjimanolakopoulos needs any small break he can get. Without
any hard evidence the department convicts him, in absentia, on the
opinion of various ‘experts’ who testify to
Lakis’ membership in The
Set Up, a group that the department paranoiacally believe exists solely
of Greek migrants rorting the system. Their
‘evidence’ consists of an
analysis of several words underlined in a Greek tabloid that Lakis was
‘caught’ reading and an analysis of the articles
themselves. In
pre-Hanson, pre-Howard times, the assumptions that these
‘experts’ make
about the character, motivation and toilet habits of the accused might
have been slightly comic. Now they just seem frightening. Vasilakakos
has fashioned an inventive novel using multi-layered texts to talk
about the migrant experience and the ways in which he/she is often
caught in the Kafkaesque nightmare of bureaucratic mentality.
There’s
just too much going on in this novel to cover in one short review.
Anyone interested in fiction, multiculturalism, or postmodern narrative
techniques should buy the book and find out for themselves.
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Weekend Books
Sorry Case
The
Set-Up
Patricia Drivas
Herald Sun,
22 February 1997
It was the longest-running committal hearing in the English-speaking
world and cost $7.5million - but all for nothing. The 1978
‘social
security conspiracy case’ started with a series of
Commonwealth Police
raids on members of the Greek community in Sydney. The Greeks allegedly
were illegally obtaining sickness benefits and invalid pensions, but
the case eventually was closed because there was no case to answer.
Now, Deakin university lecturer John Vasilakakos has created a
fictional version of the case in his novel
The Set-Up. Much of
the novel
centres on the persecution of one of the accused migrants, referred to
as ‘Lakis’, and through him traces the trauma
inflicted on the 1,700
Australian Greeks allegedly involved.
The Set-Up
is a well-written
psychological thriller that closely questions the assumption of the
persecutors - and their motives.
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Author exposes trauma of
’70s conspiracy
case
Michael Coulter
Moreland Sentinel,
2 December
1996
John Vasilakakos’s novel
The
Set-Up
looks at the psychological trauma suffered by those charged over the
Greek social security conspiracy case.
The Greek social security conspiracy case is one of the uncomfortable
episodes in Australia’s race relations history.
Like the white Australia policy and the removal of Aboriginal children
from their families, it raises questions about how tolerant we have
been.
It was April 1978 when federal police raided the homes of hundreds of
Greek Australians in Sydney.
Police believed up to 1,700 Greeks were involved in a conspiracy to
defraud the social security system through invalid pensions j and
sickness benefits.
Nearly 200 people were charged but only five people were convicted, and
these were for minor offences.
Media reports from the period indicate the case cost $7.5 million and
became the longest committal hearing in the English-speaking world,
with an estimated 6.5 million words entered in transcript.
Author and academic John Vasilakakos extensively studied the incident
and reached this conclusion:
‘All this proved one thing - the whole thing was initiated by
a bias
against migrants.’
The case provided the raw material for Mr Vasilikakos’s novel
The Set-Up,
the first English
translation of which was launched in Brunswick last week.
Mr Vasilakakos, who lived in Brunswick for nearly 20 years, said the
novel was a fictionalised account of the psychological trauma suffered
by those charged over the conspiracy.
‘Eventually one person committed suicide because he
couldn’t take the
insult and the degradation to his name,’ he said.
‘What my novel is trying to expose is the psychological
trauma that the
migrant faces.’
Mr Vasilakakos has published nine books, including plays and volumes of
criticism in Greek and English.
He said
The Set-Up
attracted
attention when it was first published in Greek seven years ago.
He believes this English translation could have a similar impact,
particularly in light of the Pauline Hanson-inspired resurgence in the
race debate.
‘The important thing I want to stress is my hook hopes to
prove one
thing: all these extremists who are around now can never lead to a
harmonious society, they can only lead to destruction and social
upheaval.
‘We’ll never be able to have a homogenous society.
The whole world is
heading towards multi-culturalism, not just Australia, and
it’s stupid
to try and stop migration. All those people who think they can live in
a vacuum - it’s just absurd.’
Mr Vasilakakos has seen Australia become a more tolerant society since
his arrival but said racism was a deeply ingrained part of the human
psyche.
‘I came to Australia in 1965 and things have definitely
changed since
then, especially since the time of the Whitlam Government, which did a
lot to create a multi-cultural society.
‘Australian society is more tolerant than it was, but racism
has not
been wiped out and a large percentage of the population is still
against migration.
‘It’s a deep-rooted evil, not only in Australia but
all around the
world. I think it’s quite natural, especially in these days
when we are
going through tough financial times.
‘Once a person is unemployed, he tries to blame others for
his bad
state of affairs, and often he blames migrants, both for his own
personal affairs and for the nation’s affairs.
‘On the one hand that’s not born out by evidence,
which suggests that
more migrants actually means more jobs, because there’s more
people to
feed, more services required.
‘On the other hand I can understand it. I think all people
are more or
less racist but there are degrees of racism. Even I in some ways can be
racist.
‘I think inside all of us there is somebody who
doesn’t like some group
or country but the difference is some people are more racist than
others. It won’t be phased out easily but I believe if we try
we can
make progress. I think Australia is already one of the most cohesive
societies in the world.’
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A Roman A Clef Greek-Australian
Fiction
A Year of Australian
Writing
[Review of the Greek language version of
The Set-Up]
George Kehagioclou (academic, Greece)
Outrider,
1990
The Set-Up
[This novel was
first published in Greek as
To
Kolpo
(which literally means ‘The Trick’) by Elikia
Books, Melbourne, 1987.
This publication was a literary event as it attracted unusual publicity
from the mass media of Australia and Greece. To complete the writing of
this novel, the author received a General Writing Grant from the
Literature Board of the Australia Council in 1984. The English
translation of this novel will be published in Australia in 1990.], a
novel, is John Vasilakakos’ seventh work of fiction, since
1973, and
number four among his recent literary output which has migration
aspects as its thematic core. [John Vasilakakos’ other works
to date
are:
Adumbrations of
the World
(short stories, Petranis Press, Melbourne, 1973),
The Shipwreck of the S.O.S.
(novel,
Serios, Athens, 1974),
The
Identity
(play, Gutenberg, Athens, 1982),
According
to St. John (novel, Gutenberg, Athens, 1985),
Psychology of a Greek Migrant
(prose, Gutenberg, Athens, 1985),
Profile
of Tyranny (prose, published in the same volume of the
English
translation of
The
Shipwreck of the
S.O.S. by Dezsery Publications, Adelaide, 1985),
Attention: Fragile!
(play, staged
in Melbourne in 1985, unpublished). As well as the above works, John
Vasilakakos has also published a collection of essays entitled
Studies in Modern Greek
Literature
(criticism, Gutenberg, Athens, 1980) and numerous articles on literary,
translating and cultural issues in Australia, America and Greece.] It
is not by accident that John Vasilakakos, a noted and prolific writer
of the Greek-speaking world, living in Australia for some time now (and
established as a writer mainly after his first play
The Identity, first
staged in
Melbourne in 1980 and published in Athens in 1982 by
‘Gutenberg’,
became a theatrical and publishing success and was acclaimed by critics
as ‘a classical work of migrant literature’), [Of
the numerous reviews
published on
The
Identity,
the most important are those of Con Castan,
AUMLA, No. 59,
1983, pgs 16-18 and
Australasian
Drama Studies, No. 10,
1987, C. Yiamiadakis,
Antipodes,
Vol. 9, No. 14, 1982, pgs 27-28, P. Bien,
Manual to The Identity,
Melbourne,
1988, Tachydromos, Athens, 22 October 1981,
The Greek Times,
Melbourne, 30
April 1981, and S. Walls,
The
Weekend Australian, 18 December 1982.] deals with issues
arising
out of the migration experience.
His latest novel,
The
Set-Up
is the most recent and greatest achievement of this fruitful and
remarkable literary career. [When an excerpt of
The Set-Up was
included in the
bilingual (English-Greek) edition of
Reflections
- Selected Works from Greek-Australian Literature, Elikia
Books,
Melbourne, 1988, it was highly acclaimed in
The Herald
(‘Exiles in Residence’,
by K. Kizilos, 22 July 1988),
The
Sydney Morning Herald (‘A Sunbaked
Heritage’, by D. Johnson, 3
September 1988) and other newspapers and periodicals. (See also B.
Farmer’s review ‘The ABA of Greek
Literature’ in
The
Age, 8 October 1988).]
The story of
The Set-Up
revolves around the life and adventures of Lakis, a Greek migrant in
Australia, who is the protagonist of the story, and has been inspired
by an earlier, actual event in Australia, the well-known
‘Social
Security Conspiracy Case’ or ‘The Greek
Prosecutions Scandal’. [See
The Age, 19, 20 and
21 July 1982.]
After great hardships, Lakis, who has lived alone for the last four
years and has become a nervous wreck, succeeds in obtaining an invalid
pension. His psychiatrist advises him to return to Greece and be
reunited with his family, which has left Australia and is now awaiting
him. With the approval of his invalid pension, Lakis prepares to return
to his home country. But before he can leave, he is arrested in his
psychiatrist’s rooms on conspiracy charges. He is accused of
being a
member of the ‘Kolpo’, an allegedly Mafia-style
gang which, using
unorthodox means (bribes, false certificates and fraud) attempts to
cheat financially the Australian Department of Social Security. This is
the first ‘Kolpo’, that of the supposed defrauders.
The Government,
believing it can dismantle the network of the
‘Kolpo’ and save millions
of dollars in pensions and allowances, unleashes a relentless
prosecution against the Greeks it considers under suspicion by
implementing at the same time a ‘Kolpo’ of its own,
in order to fight
that of the opponent. It assigns to a Greek agent the role of
pretending to be in the same plight with Lakis, in order to pump Lakis
during the time they are held in the same psychiatric ward and are
watched through electronic devices. Eventually despite all the devices
the mighty government machinery employs, it fails to locate the
evidence it seeks and is forced to fabricate it. Lakis is questioned
mercilessly and put in a psychiatric hospital where he is subjected to
the trial of a relentless war of nerves. Finally he escapes. Realizing,
however, that all links are broken and that the return to his homeland
is no longer possible, he chooses to commit suicide by inhaling
insecticide, as a protest and as the only way of escaping from his hell.
The novel is complex, ambitious and demanding on the reader. The
non-linear structure of narration demands that the reader exert some
effort if he is to follow the development of the events of the plot.
Right up to the end the writer deliberately insists on employing
puzzling but well-aimed allusions in relation to the outcome of the
plot. Thus, although the final paragraph of the novel does not leave
any doubts as to the final exit of the protagonist, the questions about
his innocence or guilt, his mental state etc., continue till the end to
puzzle the reader. An example (pg. 144):
But
perhaps I should get on with it. The truth - the bare truth - was that
I did not simply feel guilty. I was guilty. Lately I was becoming more
and more convinced of my guilt. I may not have lied, of course. But I
had not told the whole truth either. I had left out a small detail, not
out of fear, but because I had thought it irrelevant, insignificant. It
was a plan of action, purely personal, I had made for that day,
somewhat uncertain. An intention only. After posting my mail - which I
would surely do if the prophecy of the Fool that had turned up did not come
true - I
thought I might show up for our now regular meeting of the 7. Last time
everything had turned out wrong. I had left in great agitation. There I
was, at the last moment, everything ready to go, and I missed my train.
It was too much! And as if it were not enough that the Fool’s prophecy had not come true
until that
moment, I also wanted to make sure, on top of everything. So, then,
more out of an obsessive curiosity than superstition, I thought I might
try my luck again at the meeting of the 7. Oh yes, I forgot to say that
all 7 of us were fellow sufferers. Nervous disorders, psychological
problems and the like. The truly ‘philhellene’
doctor had unreservedly
recommended to us this kind of group therapy. To get together. To busy
ourselves with something interesting. To talk, to discuss freely
amongst ourselves whatever was troubling us. So we often followed the
doctor’s advice. We got together and dealt the tarot cards.
We killed
time, we enjoyed ourselves, we tried our luck. That’s right.
About the
meeting of the 7 I had not breathed a word at the Police Station.
Besides I did not know that even intentions count as facts in a
statement to the Police, that they might be interpreted as
incriminating evidence. The lucky thing now was that, at last, I knew
my guilt. Or at least, I suspected it.
The prose of the writer, innovative, exploring psychological states,
reveals a complex and mature talent, attempting to deal with problems
of technique and presentation of theme. And this is an aspect not to be
dismissed lightly, when we take into consideration the fact that a
great deal of the dominant realistic prose in Greek literature today
does not seem to be concerned so much with such issues. Besides, the
theme and its treatment in
The
Set-Up
is free of the outdated and trite motifs of ‘the foreigner in
the
cursed foreign land’ which have traditionally characterized
and may
still characterize the works of the majority of Greek writers of the
diaspora.
In this case the writer’s interest focuses on a realistic and
convincing character and his personal problems - that are collective
and social problems too. However, it should be stressed that the writer
is not simply satisfied to utilize the current material - of a theme
which was a social and political phenomenon of general interest - but
endeavours to render this initially ‘journalistic’
material into
life-like material through the fleshing out of true, vivid, fully
rounded characters.
Such a successfully created, fully rounded character is, of course, the
protagonist. The characters of the ‘agent’ and the
‘interrogator’ could
also have been such ‘fully rounded’ ones if the
writer were not in a
hurry to describe them in their essential, psychological dimension, in
only a few pages. Also, a greater development of the words or actions
of other secondary characters (who are few, in any case) perhaps would
have enriched the human ‘population’ of the
‘fully rounded’ characters
of the novel. Nevertheless the fact is that the protagonist is already
an achievement of narrative technique which owes much to the
‘breaking
up’ of it, achieved by having alternating narrators and
points of view
in the narration (in the novel there are three narrators - an
impersonal one, the protagonist and the agent - so that the point of
view of the narration changes with the result that the narration
attains a multidimensional character).
As well as this, the careful technique of the narrative structure, the
dexterous exploitation of language and of the various figures of
speech, the polysemic and numerous allusions and use of symbolism, the
metaphoric language, the realistic detail and generally the word play
constitute basic and positive characteristics of the novel. The rhythms
of the language here are clear and direct and are tied organically with
the exploration of the protagonist’s psychological world.
These devices
are not striving for effect, but play a functional role by constituting
an inseparable part of the whole theme and by reinforcing, depending on
the case, the whole strategy of the plot and what we might call
‘pervading atmosphere’.
The writing in the novel often reaches remarkable heights of realistic
economy, humour, and clarity which can be seen, for example, in the
description of the protagonist’s christening ceremony:
Air!
He’s drowning! The servant of God Nikolaos...
is baptized...
He’s suffocating. In the name of
the Father... The two
hairy arms,
like cables, plunge him to the bottom, bubbles escape from his mouth
and nostrils, he’s going, suffocating, drowning... Around him
laughter... the little brat... at last the surface, a breath, come on
my darling... My lamb, he’s cold... just look at him, and
of
the Son... oil, snort,
tears, water
all suffocate him but the two cables plunging him into the water again
relentlessly, mercilessly persist in annihilating him, irrespective of
the fact that he’s screeching and writhing, and
of the Holy
Spirit... come on now,
enough ...
Congratulations! to the newly baptized... my baby... come, come to your
godfather my little heart... the birdie, the birdie, there! the little
brat, such stubbornness! Congratulations! Congratulations Godfather!...
Well done, many more of the same... Amen. Air!...
The sharpness of images shows life-experience and a keen ability to
observe, and make the text convincing:
When
I arrived at my Doctor’s room I let the receptionist know, of
course,
that I was there. Then, although there was no one else in the waiting
room, I sat at the empty seat in the corner. I always preferred
corners. I felt greater security there just like a dog won’t
piss
unless there’s a wall there. Next to me was the wall. On it
was a
decorative wall plate depicting some ancient columns - they looked a
bit like those of the Temple of the Olympian Zeus. The Doctor was a
philhellene. Next to me was a wastepaper basket. In front of me the
little table with the magazines. The columns were leaning. Leaning at a
greater angle than the Tower of Pisa. A dull stain shaded the horizon.
A cloud. It might be a cloud or smog. Or dirt due to the age of the
place. It might be an antique, from the times of King Otto, or even
from Monastiraki, who knows...
An interesting characteristic of John Vasilakakos’ writing,
also
testimony of his formal literary knowledge, is the well-used inclusion
of other texts into his own, whose function it is to promote or support
the action. Such passages, for example, are the incriminating text
‘Figure - Goldmine’, which becomes the starting
point of a painstaking
and interesting narrative and historical-social analysis by the
‘hellenist’ interrogators, as well as
‘The Prime Minister’s Message to
the Greeks of the Diaspora’, ‘Coach
States’, ‘Miraculous Tickling
Directions’, ‘How Power Changes the
Individual’, ‘Spring’, and
‘Arachne
and the Goddess Athena’.
The evocation of a psychological atmosphere shows, also, a writer
working creatively in the tradition of Samarakis and other significant
post-war Greek prose writers.
Apart from some sections of the novel which are a bit heavy-going (such
as pgs 21-33, the ‘Kafkaesque’ prolongation of
atmosphere on pgs 47-50
and the words of the interrogators, pgs 87-89), the rest of the text is
extremely well-handled, with climaxes pgs 101-105, where the writer
proves himself a master of internal monologue as well as the dialogue
form through the use of the device of the dream. In a second reprint of
the Greek edition of the novel, some printing and spelling errors,
which detract from the book, should be corrected. Here, however, one
should take into account the fact that the Greek edition of this novel
was published in a non-Greek-speaking country. Generally,
‘Elikia
Books’, a significant Greek-Australian publishing house which
has
recently given us other interesting publications, amongst which the
valuable anthology
Reflections
-
Selected Works from Greek-Australian Literature (1988)
stands
out, was fortunate to be able to publish this work by John Vasilakakos.
From the point of view of quality his novel is of a level exceptionally
high compared to works by other Greek writers of the diaspora, who
naturally live relatively cut off from the linguistic centre of their
homeland and its literary developments. Nor does it lack anything
significant when compared to many recent works of the literary output
of Greece itself. John Vasilikakos’ novel is undoubtedly an
unusually
mature and complex work by a writer still young, who, we believe, may
still have to offer great things to our literature.
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SOUNDING THE DEPTHS
John Vasilakakos’ The
Set-Up
Philip Grundy (publisher and critic, deceased)
Neos Kosmos
(forthcoming) 2008
A few years ago I was invited to Sydney to take part in a function
in connection with a week of cultural activities in that city. I shared
the platform with two other men – Gun Gencer, a distinguished
playwright of Turkish origin, and the Greek-Australian John
Vasilakakos, author of
The
Set-Up.
That is the sort of mixture of people that is now accepted as normal in
Australia, particularly in cultural circles. But it was not always so.
To understand the background to
The
Set-Up,
it is necessary to know a little of Australia’s cultural and
ethnic
history. Most people are aware that the modern nation began as a
colonial settlement to accommodate the overflow from
Britain’s gaols in
that part of the 18th century when petty crime was the inevitable
response to desperate poverty and savage punishment the means adopted
by authority to deal with it. The interests of the native inhabitants
of Australia, the Aborigines, were disregarded for the next two hundred
years.
The eventual success of the fledgling colony later
attracted fresh arrivals from Britain who had come to increase their
chances of prosperity – the so-called ‘free
settlers.’ They, like the
convicts and their gaolers, were a mixed bag. They came from all parts
of the British Isles and spoke not only English but also Scots Gaelic,
Irish, Welsh and Cornish and they were equally diverse in religion and
customs. Tolerance was not a highly valued virtue in those days. The
colony grew in an atmosphere of mutual distrust, division and even
hatred. Later, the differences polarised: the well-to-do, Protestant
Scottish and English establishment on the one hand and the
working-class, poorly educated Irish Catholic on the other. Although by
the 1950s that polarisation was diminishing, prejudice and distrust
were still embedded in society and nowhere more so than in the
bureaucracy and its agencies. Entry to such bodies as the police force
or a number of government departments had become the means by which the
Irish Catholic population had begun to escape from its inferior status
and to rise in the social hierarchy. But they did not, on the whole,
leave behind them the bitterness of former exclusion, nor the
prejudices and resentments passed on to them by their parents and an
education system that was separate from that of all other Australians
and based on religious and ethnic distinctiveness.
Into this
imperfectly assimilated society, thousands of new migrants arrived in
the 1950s and 1960s to help in the government’s aim of
converting
postwar Australia into an industrialised nation. At first the migrants
were entirely from Europe and the Middle East, and predominantly
British or Irish. Only later did the immigration policies change to
allow the entry of people from Asia, Africa and Latin America.
The
history of how a narrow and historically prejudiced society, divided in
itself, learned to cope with this massive influx of
‘foreigners’ is
fascinating, but not capable of being summarised satisfactorily here.
Suffice it to say that eventually there emerged an official and largely
accepted policy of ‘multiculturalism’ which has
proven remarkably
successful. (The Australian word ‘multiculturalism’
emphatically does
not
mean what it means in the USA or is coming to mean in Europe). But in
1978 the policy was still in its infancy. There were still plenty of
ill-educated Australians who viewed all newcomers with deep suspicion
and saw them as a threat to what they supposed to be ‘the
Australian
way of life.’ Above all, the people of Irish-Catholic
background, who
dominated working-class institutions such as the Australian Labor Party
and who were over-represented in the police forces and lower echelons
of the public service, transferred their suspicion of
‘otherness’ from
the established social order to the new immigrants. In the depression
years, it was not unknown for the ‘bosses’ to bring
in unwitting
migrants to break strikes. Bitter memories of that kind inevitably led
many working-class Australians to suspect the new influx of migrants as
a plot by the employers to rob the Australian working man of his right
to a job.
So much for the social mise-en-scene. To summarise the
more concrete historical situation that obtained in 1978, it should be
noted that a conservative government, which was becoming increasingly
unpopular under a prime minister who was widely perceived to be out of
touch with the bulk of the electorate, was facing an election. The
government had taken a position of cutting expenditure, especially on
welfare which it regarded as a wild extravagance on the part of its
predecessors, intended to buy votes by handing out public money to the
undeserving. This was never a theme that went down well with the
Australian public, and government propagandists were always compelled
to bolster their arguments by pointing to examples of the abuse of
government welfare programs. For example, people were alleged to be
collecting unemployment benefits or disability pensions when they were
perfectly well and capable of work. Idlers and fakes were
‘ripping off’
the welfare contributed by honest taxpayers.
It was
unquestionably true that some people were abusing the system. It is
always true in any country in the world, for no system can be so
perfectly designed as to be immune to the ingenuity of those who would
pervert it for their own profit. But in 1978, the government felt
obliged to turn the searchlight on such cases in order to prove how
vigilant they were and how justified in reducing the extent of welfare
generally.
This political imperative happened to coincide with
another. The national police force of Australia was being subjected to
reform and reconstruction and its members were fearful of their future.
They desperately needed some way to prove that they were efficient
watchdogs of the public interest – and it so happened that
the abuse of
social welfare was one area that fell within their responsibility,
rather than that of the State police forces.
What happened next
was complex and in many particulars still unclear. The results,
however, are undoubted. These two political urges combined, took
advantage of the latent xenophobia of the Australian working classes,
and found themselves, a
cause
célèbre.
It was alleged that as many as a thousand Greek-Australian workers were
receiving disability pay from the government although they were
perfectly fit. Worse still, many of them had retired to Greece with
disability pensions that allowed them to live there ‘like
kings.’ This
had all been made possible by a group of dishonest doctors in Sydney,
most of them of Greek origin, who could be paid to supply false
certificates of disability. The complicity of doctors and fake patients
was known in Greek, it was said, as ‘To Kolpo.’
Years later it
turned out that the whole matter of ‘To Kolpo’ was
fictitious. It had
been invented by a Greek with a criminal record, who was mentally
unbalanced, and who offered to ‘tell all’ to the
police if they would
give him a reward big enough to allow him to return to Greece and live
in comfort for the rest of his life. (In fact he achieved this aim and
does now live very well in Greece). He presented this ingenious
invention to a detective inspector of the Commonwealth Police, who saw
the prospects of personal glory and the salvation of his threatened
police force, to say nothing of providing the government with an
electoral advantage which could do his career no harm.
One
morning, at dawn hundreds of Greek-Australian homes in Sydney were
entered by force; the accused doctors were arrested and their record of
patients taken away. The media had a field day with what quickly became
known as the ‘Greek Conspiracy,’ and the police
officer promised that
they had found the names of a thousand offenders among the files of the
Department of Social Security (DSS), and that all these people would be
arrested and brought to trial.
In the event, the number arrested
was only 180 – the police and court system could not cope
with more –
and the names proved to have been discovered by the simple process of
telling the clerks in DSS to extract any files they could find with
what looked like Greek names.
From this point on, the whole
matter quickly descended into farce as far as the Australian public was
concerned. The government and the police had miscalculated. Australian
xenophobia was not so ingrained as to condone what many saw as fascist
activities by the police against innocent citizens, nor did most people
believe that a conspiracy to defraud the welfare system could have
involved more than a handful of people. The check for
‘Greek’ names
revealed gross ignorance: many of the names picked proved not to be
Greek at all and the searchers totally failed to find the files of
Greek-Australians who had anglicised their surnames! But the police
would not let go. Ultimately, the case in the magistrates’
court
dragged on for eight years and was estimated to have cost the
Australian taxpayer over $100 million – the most costly
prosecution in
the history of the English-speaking world. At the end of it all, the
police and their accomplices were exposed, all the accused were
acquitted, apart from a handful who were fined small amounts for minor
offences, and the Australian taxpayer had to find another $10 million
in compensation payments to those who had been falsely accused. There
had indeed been a Greek Conspiracy – it was a conspiracy
against the
Greeks!
The whole sordid affair eventually faded from the
headlines, but terrible harm had been done to a great many innocent
people, whose only crime was to have suffered an incapacitating injury
and to have a Greek name. Several of the victims committed suicide.
Others were mentally scarred for life. Numerous families had to move to
other cities – mainly because their fellow Greek-Australian
citizens
refused to believe they were innocent and shunned or insulted them as
people who had brought shame on the Greek name.
Most Australians
are still aware of these shameful events, so they do not have to be
explained to Australian readers of John Vasilakakos’s book.
They are an
important part of the background, but the novel is not a
roman à clef,
or a piece of ‘faction’ like, say,
Schindler’s Ark.
What Vasilakakos does is to assume the knowledge of that background and
then write a novel which explores the mentality of the people involved.
It
would be unfair to potential readers of the book to reveal too much
about the plot, but a brief summary of its scope and nature may
encourage people to read it for themselves. He main character is one of
the men accused of complicity in ‘To Kolpo,’ and
much of the book
explores the inner workings of his mind, as the author adopts his
persona. But this is interwoven with the thoughts of the chief
investigator and of other characters in the plot, together with the
presentation of ‘dossiers’ and the lengthy
explanation by the ‘Boss’ of
exactly why these investigations must be pursued.
The result is
a powerful and compelling book. Vasilakakos is expert at changing his
‘voices’ so that the reader feels himself inside
the mind of the
various characters. Not only is the psychology of each persona
revealed, but their political and social assumptions, their prejudices
and their fears. At times the writing is Kafka-esque in its nightmarish
quality, for instance as the accused wanders lost and bewildered around
the endless corridors of a mental institution where nobody wants to
know him and where most of the rooms seem to be deserted. At other
times, I was reminded of the internal dialogues that characterise
Samarakis’s
To
Lathos, with
their obsessive determination to find guilt and punish it. And at
times, too, the author strikes a note of humour that serves only to
throw into stark relief the horror of the victim’s
helplessness before
an enemy who is both relentless and inscrutable. The inscrutability
derives from the fact that there is no reason why this particular
victim should have been chosen – although he begins to wonder
whether
he has in fact committed some offence, for how else can he reconcile
what he is suffering with reality? – and the relentlessness
from the
fact that the System demands victims. In the end, we know that all the
characters are, whether or not they realise it more than dimly, equally
victims of the System and of the forces of prejudice and self-interest
that drive it.
But Vasilakakos is not the disciple of either
Kafka or Samarakis. He is his own man. Much of the non-English writing
in Australia since the war has been of the genre known as
‘the
migrant
experience.’ It consists of personal accounts, sometimes
fictionalised,
of the heartbreak of leaving the home country and settling in an alien
land and culture. A huge amount of this has been produced by the
Greek-Australian writers, drawing on the long tradition of threnody
over «μαύρη
ξενητειά»;
but Vasilakakos
does not fall into that trap.
Although his background combines the concrete events of ‘To
Kolpo’ with
the experience of alienation and exclusion in a specific foreign
country, this is a book of universal significance. It is not
anti-Australian, nor is it yet another complaint about exile; rather it
takes the reality of historical events, selects a typical set of
characters and weaves from them a complex psycho-social drama which
speaks volumes about the relationship between the individual and
society.
This could have been very heavy going, but it is a
tribute to the author’s skill that it keeps the reader glued
to the
pages. There is no turgid theorising, no lecturing by the author about
the events that form the core of the story. Instead he lets the voices
of the characters carry the story. The events are described as they see
them, and in the telling their own psyches are revealed. The tale is
sometimes humorous, often painful, always perceptive and written with
the artistry of an author who has obviously thought about his
characters and his plot in great depth before venturing on the writing.
Australia
today is a very different place from what it was in the 1970s. The
growth of religious ecumenism in earlier decades undermined the old
prejudices and was followed by what might be described as social or
ethnic ecumenism. Migrants and the children of migrants from a huge
variety of cultural and ethnic backgrounds have come to take their
right place at all levels of society, and it no longer evokes comment
if, say, the violinist at a concert is an Australian with obviously
Asian features or the medical specialist we consult proves to have an
Arabic name. But the one awkward piece in the cultural mosaic remains
that of literature.
The reason is simply one of language. While
English is of course the essential language of Australia, there are
always likely to be people of a non-English speaking background who
find they can best write creatively in some other language. Naturally,
that limits their audience and hence the effectiveness of what they
have to say. This applies, too, to the work of John Vasilakakos. Now
that
The Set-Up
has been
translated into English and is accessible to all Australians, I have
every hope that this book will take its place among the classics of
Australian literature as a work which does what all great literature
does for the human race: it sounds the depths of our inner being and
reveals it, as in a mirror, for us to see our own true selves and what
we have made of our society.
Philip
Grundy was a well known philhellene, publisher, translator and critic.
Before he died in August 2007, he completed the English translation of
John Vasilakakos’ collection of short stories In
Chloe’s secret parts and other portents and monsters, published in Greece by
‘Logosofia,’ Athens 2007.
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