Con Anemogiannis: Medea’s Children. Penguin Books, Ringwood 1999.
	An alluring story of sex, love and identity. This book tells the story of a young Greek boy growing up in Australia in the 1960s and 70s. What makes the book remarkable is not the story but its telling by an adolescent, fuelled not only by a growing homosexual awareness but by the potent myths that inform his Greek consciousness. The boy and his family remain nameless throughout, they remain abstractions, not personalities, to the end. The elements of reality, fiction and myth are fused convincingly throughout the book, so much so that it is sometimes well nigh impossible to discover what is reality, what is adolescent fantasy and what is myth. At times he gives us the clues we need to separate reality from fantasy. The opening sets the scene. I was both born and brought up in a male brothel. Well actually a boarding house, but it felt more like a brothel because my mother only rented rooms to spectacularly beautiful men between the ages of eighteen and thirty. But often the fusion of reality and adolescent fantasy is so complete that it is impossible to tell the difference. Does he merely peep at these young Greek gods through the bathroom door keyhole or does he enter and fulfill his own, and their, sexual fantasies? The coins he had put into the gas meter had long run out and I didn’t bother opening the catch to reuse them. We were too busy, too darkly wet, having fun during an excruciatingly hot summer, ... ... ... But it is with the character of Wayne, beautiful but truly Australian, indeed an Ocker, that the boy’s fantasies reach sexual fulfillment. For the rest of the book Wayne is fused with the old childhood house in sexual longing. The mother features strongly in the book as the other main character forging her son’s erratic development into manhood. They assume and exchange roles drawn from powerful myths: Medea the all powerful sorceress, Medea scorned, Medea humiliated, Jason pursued, Jason rejecting, Jason searching for fulfillment It is a kind of madness which unites them and ultimately destroys them. But this book is not without a strong sense of place and this is what anchors the fantasy and mythological world that these characters inhabit. The dominant place is very much 1960s working class Australia and the house which this family inhabits and eventually leaves becomes the mythical subject of the child’s own search and longing for identity. In those days Newtown was not an area gifted with restaurants, gay bars, fashionable boutiques, dykes or students. Nor was it the extension of the University, of Darlinghurst and the city of Sydney, that it is today. A place for failures, for broken families, drunks, and the immigrants who depended for their livelihood on the nearby factories, a place where life was cheap in terms of mortality and finance. But despite the then seediness of Newtown, I didn’t hate it, I loved it. In the early part of the book it is Medea, the mother figure, who controls his young life, at times aiding his sexual fantasies and at times cruelly destroying them. She uses her mythical powers to remove the desirable young lodgers and to move the family back to Greece. The young boy both hates and fears her. In the course of this journey, which was not atypical for Greek immigrants of the time, both mother and son live out their fantasy lives, but the power shifts in the relationship and it is the son who in Athens takes on the mantle of control and destructiveness and the mother whose power declines. An invasion of Cyprus by Greece and Turkey retaliating fuels his growing sense of control. Going to Mark’s place, hoping to find him alone, to explain how I’d almost willed these events to happen so as to frighten my parents, mainly mother into taking us back. Wanting to explain that the privately despairing believe all pubic tragedies are their fault. Ironically, the return to Sydney which he believes his powers have engineered, brings the family to outer suburban Sydney to a place far removed from the run down houses and streets of Newtown. The teasing search for his beloved Wayne and the lost treasure, their old house, begins so too does his descent into madness, the increasing inability to separate reality from fantasy. I questioned my sanity wondering if the person I was stalking was actually a series of people, whether I’d been the subject of unpleasant coincidences, or my own wish-fulfilling fantasies. Eventually, via a sojourn in London, he finds the old house and produces what for me is the most moving passage in the whole book. Fantasy meets reality head on. "I used to live here." I said. "Really?" she said. Incredulous. "Yeah, really. When I was a child." . "Must have been a long time ago." Patricia said, uneasy, hoping Jeff would arrive. "It was." "Because when we got it, you should’ve seen it." She said, dropping her guard and becoming friendly, trying to be charming. "Gruesome. There was lino everywhere and the laundry downstairs was like something out of Doctor Who. Had a huge old copper tub the sort you see in comic books used by cannibals. It used to be owned by . " and she stopped. "I know," I said. "You do?" "Yeah," I said. "By wogs."
Reviewed by Elizabeth Kelly, 9 August 2002 Also published in CrossLines.