Loaded by Christos Tsiolkas is one of my favourite books ever, and Ari one of my favourite characters, so I was really pleased – and amazed – to rediscover him in the pages of The Slap.

Ari in The Slap is grown up but still recognisably the same character, and I love that Christos revisited him. How unusual is it for writers to keep thinking about their characters, to allow them to grow up and be included in different texts? How brave. In an interview with Readings, Christos said this:

Loaded‘s Ari makes a cameo appearance in The Slap. What made you decide to do that? Was a bit of fun for you to revisit that character from your first novel?

Initially Ari was to be one of the character voices in the book. Ari is a sort of alter-ego for me, brasher, more courageous than I am, so it felt interesting to return to him. He’s an alter-ego a decade younger than myself, so I wondered what he would be like at 30. I started to write him in the book but he didn’t fit. He didn’t quite belong to the milieu of The Slap and his inclusion meant that the narrative lost momentum. I’m tempted to return to him again in short novel form. He’s a perfect age for a music-obsessive like myself. He’d be 33 1/3rd. That’s a possible title, no? I did think of omitting him altogether once I made the decision to not have a chapter in his ‘voice’, but then decided a cameo was a small enough indulgence. And I like the fact he’s still obviously using and dealing drugs; that he hasn’t succumbed to our contemporary neo-puritanism.

Read full interview

I discovered Loaded a short while after it was released. I was at high school in rural Victoria and I was captivated. At that time, I was yearning to live in Melbourne, I was very wild, I was very rebellious and I loved and understood deeply many of the things that Ari was experiencing, thinking about. I had not yet read any of the Beats, and the writing in Loaded was stimulating and exciting and new. I read it over and over.

When Head On came out, I loved that, too. I was in first year uni and living in Coburg, and liked that the movie was set on the streets around me, my new city. Like many teenaged girls my age, I also had a big thing for Alex Dimitriades (hilarious fan site link with early photos).

I’ve wanted to revisit Loaded for a while now, and reading The Slap recently got me looking for my copy. Sadly I can’t find it. I had this copy:

The latest version looks like this, which I don’t like, but can appreciate where they’re going marketing-wise:

I think I can remember a cover with Alex Dimitriades on it at some point as well.

Anyway. There’s a lot of love in this post. I just wanted to say that I would love to see Ari reprised in a new novel. He is a great literary character.