EMILY TSOKOS PURTILL Matia. Reviewed by Ann Skea

Emily Tsokos Purtill’s debut novel ranges across continents to tell the stories of five generations of Greek women.

Sia’s quick Greek lesson:

µári – máti  :  eye; also a small jewellery charm, usually blue with a black dot, worn to protect the wearer against the evil eye.

µária – mátia (plural)

In 1945, 17-year-old Sia (Anastasia) is given four mátia by Eleftheria, the young village woman who is known for her gift for prophecy. One of these, Eleftheria tells her, is for herself, the others are for her daughter, her granddaughter and her great-granddaughter, ‘whose name is Clara’.

Sia has yet to meet her future husband and she is about to leave her Greek island home and emigrate to Australia to join her father, so she thinks of these three women as ‘new girls who would be part of her journey’. And there are four prophecies, too, that Eleftheria has read from the dregs of Sia’s coffee. Two are shocking for Sia, a third predicts that Sia will put her life in danger, and the fourth is about the four mátia that Eleftheria has given her.

In chapters that range over time and place, Matia tells the story of each of these women’s lives, and Sia links them all, seeing the prophecies come true but never, until the final pages of the book, revealing exactly what Eleftheria had told her.

In the prologue, we meet Athena, Sia’s granddaughter. Athena’s earliest memory is of ‘sitting on her grandmother’s knee at some kind of pre-wedding celebration involving only women’ and her grandmother telling her about four prophecies and a buried treasure.

‘It’s in Greece. On my island. On Aeaea. One day she will go there,’ said yiayia Sia.

‘Who will go there?’

‘I kóri sou,’ she said. ‘Your daughter.’

So Athena always knew that she would have a daughter. And when Clara arrived many years later, it was as if she recognised her.

And it is this daughter, Clara, that we meet next in ‘Clara, 25, New York City, 2035’. Clara is on her way to The Met, her favourite gallery, to meet her mother. Together, they plan to have lunch, then see a new art exhibition, but her mother is late and does not answer her phone. As Clara starts to worry, she phones her twin brother, Sam, but he knows nothing, so we follow her dash across New York to her mother’s apartment and learn of Athena’s sudden death.

However, Athena, Clara and Sia are all very much alive in this book. So, too, is Athena’s mother, Koula, who was born in Australia but whose strong, determined, personal view of the importance of maintaining Greek cultural traditions makes her a constant nagging irritation in Athena’s life.

Athena does not conform to the expected role of a Greek daughter. She can’t cook: ‘You just don’t have the cooking gene, Athena’; she lives in sin with a man Koula disapproves of, then marries him; she goes off to live in London, unlike her close friend Sheila’s daughters, who live next door to their mother; and she ends up in New York with Koula’s grandchildren and refuses to ‘come home’ to Perth. Koula thinks that ‘the problem with Athena was she never did things the right way’:

Clearly Athena had been cursed because of what Koula had done. The máti she had taken. After two sons, Athena was Koula’s punishment.

Often Koula’s views of Athena’s world are funny. Visiting Athena in her ‘house of sin’, she is critical: ‘The boyfriend passed Athena the plates (thick, cheap china from that awful Swedish place – what was it called? IDEA? Bad idea, more like.)’

Koula’s impressions of London and of New York, when she visits Athena in these cities, are equally critical. In London it was ‘wet and cold, grey and rainy for days and days and days’. She liked ‘Harrods and Selfridges and Liberty. They were nice department stores,’ but ‘the rest of it she could do without’. It explained why so many British people moved to Australia. New York, too, was ‘just another big, overpopulated, ugly city on the other side of the world’.

Later, when Athena is pregnant, there are more problems:

Her mother had been driving her insane because Athena wouldn’t find out if the twins were boys or girls and therefore didn’t know whether to buy blue or pink. It was, of course, unthinkable to her mother to buy grey or neutral-coloured clothes. Pink was for girls. Blue for boys. Grey was for elephants. End of story.

Athena’s life is full of change and challenges. As a student at Perth University she falls in love with a visiting American professor who is passionate about the poetry of TS Eliot. He befriends her and they share their love of Eliot’s ‘Prufrock’ but nothing more, and ultimately he leaves her confused about his feelings for her and returns to his wife in America.

Sia is a strong and determined character. She befriends two young women who fall foul of Greek cultural expectations. One, a young woman she meets on the voyage from Greece, is to marry a man as soon as she arrives in Australia. She shows Sia a photograph of a handsome young man, but the man who meets her in Perth – her future husband – is old and repulsive, so she runs away with a young man she had fallen in love with on the boat. Sia’s father is furious when he discovers that Sia has helped her: ‘You will marry the man I have chosen for you before you cause more trouble,’ he tells her. When Sia does meet her future groom she feels sick.

A chill swept over her, like a cold mountain wind. She looked at the slits of his eyes, his crinkled face, his toothy grin. She knew he was a monster before he’d even spoken a word. It was the way he looked at her, more shadow than light.

And he was old. Old like her father.

He does turn out to be a monster, and Sia deals with this in her own way, and in the process fulfils one of the prophecies.

Sia’s biggest secret, however, is the result of helping her older sister, Trina, who steps off the boat from Greece pregnant and unmarried. In the close Greek community in Perth, her condition would ruin her life and bring shame to her family. Sia’s intervention is partly the result of Trina’s death in childbirth, and partly to save everyone from that shame, but it means that some secrets must never be revealed. Athena dreams one of them, and Sia spills out more when she is bedridden and dying, but the family put her seemingly strange utterances down to confusion and the effects of the medication she is being given for pain.

Clara, too, has an interesting life as a young woman growing up in New York, with only fleeting visits from her grandparents, Koula and Evangelos, regular supplies of yoghurt posted from their very successful family yoghurt factory in Perth, and a few memories of her first few years in Perth playing on the beach with her twin brother, Sam:

Sometimes she dreamed of returning to Perth. Clara’s grandparents were still there, and her uncles and cousins. They stayed in touch on social media and email. But her mother had taken her out of Perth long ago. It was probably not the right place for them, having lived all their lives in New York. It was really more for sport and beach people, her mother used to say. They were art and book people.

Clara’s love of art leads her to a career as owner of an art gallery, and a competition she runs offering sponsorship to an outstanding European student artist takes her back to Greece.

There is a richness running through this book that has to do with the importance of family and culture, and the power of tradition and rituals to bring women together for support and pleasure. The disconnection from this brought about by migration and the changes that education, careers and increasing independence bring to the lives of women is also very much part of Màtia.

Athena suffers badly while living London, trapped at home by the constant demands of two difficult babies. And Clara, who lives alone in New York and never cooks, visits her grandparents in Perth, and watches

entranced, as her ninety-three-year-old yiayia and friend Chrissie and Chrissie’s daughters spent the day cooking – tirópites, spanokópita, loukoumádes. They buttered sheets of filo pastry, whipped eggs, sprinkled sugar. They talked and talked.

Food and cooking and marriage rituals; Sia’s close family connections; the effects of war in Greece, which impoverish the people and cause the privations that send them to Australia for a better life; the shock and disorientation of arrival (Sia knew only two words of English when she got off the boat in Perth – ‘thank you’); and the hard work of making a new life and bringing up a family in a country with a very different culture – all this is woven into the women’s lives.

The chapters skip about in time and place, and from person to person, so reading the chapter heading is important; but the characters are beautifully realised, each with their own particular personality, and the story is strong enough to cope with these sudden changes. The book begins, too, with ‘Sia’s quick Greek lesson’, which includes a list of the foods which are ‘Koula’s specialities’ and a mouthwatering description of each of these in English.

Emily Tsokos Purtill Matia UWA Publishing 2024 PB 300pp $34.99

Dr Ann Skea is a freelance reviewer, writer and an independent scholar of the work of Ted Hughes. She is author of Ted Hughes: The Poetic Quest (UNE 1994, and currently available for free download here). Her work is internationally published and her Ted Hughes webpages (ann.skea.com) are archived by the British Library.

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Tags: Australian fiction, emigration, Emily Tsokos | Purtill, forced marriage, Greek families, mátia, mothers and daughters, prophecies