The Age from Melbourne, Victoria, Australia • Page 27

27 EOOJCS 7 weekend review mm The Age, Saturday 3 October 1 98 1 BLISS, by Peter Carey (University of Queensland Press; JOHN TRANTER ministrators, sadistic policemen and many others. It is when Harry meets the beautiful hippy and hooker Honey Barbara that the magic glue of Carey's imagination runs out of grip and the story falls, apart. It is here that the author puts aside the theme of life as a literal Hell and, though brief references are made to it later, it never regains its central thematic importance. Harry's son bribes two corrupt doctors to certify Harry insane; he is locked up for a long time but escapes with puzzling ease. His faithless wife Bettina gains a sudden success in the advertising world, learns she has cancer, and commits suicide by blowing up a room full of agency clients with three (only three?) bottles of petrol.

Though the hero of Bliss' Is named Joy, there's little of either emotion in the narrative. Harry Joy's experiences involve spiritual lethargy, self-doubt, loathing, fear, madness, horror, death and resurrection. At the end of his tale the author bestows on him a mellow old age in a hippy commune and a peaceful death. Perhaps that's the least he could do, having put Harry through so much in the service of a tangled plot. To say that the second half of the story strains the reader's belief is not really the point.

After all, it is clearly a fable. But even a fable has to hold the reader with a logic of its own, and Carey seems to have tried on three different systems, only to abandon them one after the other. There's the story of Harry's HelL the story of his son's adventures gun-running in South America, the one about the woman's discovery of her cancer and eventual suicide, the mental home story, the hippy commune story, and so on. I can find at least six, and perhaps ten; quite different stories in the book, and their failure to work either in tandem or in sequence is what wrenches the overall narrative -out of shape. A deeper problem and one I feel hesitant about criticising is an apparent lack of moral range and depth.

I'm not talking about moralising, God forbid, but the sort of profound questioning that lends depth even to a writer as lunatic as Celine or one as cynical as Maugham. 'Bliss' begins and ends with a death, and between them at least a dozen others are reported, but what brand of eschatology sees unethical advertising as its main focus of evil, and vegetarian communalism as its only salvation? At times Carey seems like an aqualung diver without enough weights on his belt, trying to reach the depths, but bobbing back up to the surface again. But the novel does have a brilliant surface, and tells us terrible and necessary things about the world we have made for ourselves. Whatever its faults (and bad proof-reading is a minor one), it is a brave book throughout, and a rewarding one for much of its length. 1 JOHN TRANTER is a Sydney post and critic.

tlon-like short stories, and moved on to novels- that mixed SF, magic, life after death, com-munalist religion and a critique of admass society. But this doesn't help us understand the flaws in Carey's work Von-negut's are essentially American nor the virtues. And there are many good things in this novel. Two gifts stand out clearly an. ability to- describe vividly, and a manic energy.

Carey can convey the sight, smell and feeling of a landscape, a lamplit in-, terior, a police beating, an expensive restaurant, with power and accuracy. There are few Australian prose-writers his ability to set up a scene and make you believe you are there. The dark energy that drives much of. the narrative is a more, worrying, thing. At its best it is like a blast of bad speed a ruthless power drags the reader along on a boiling current of fear, cancer, perversion, torture and death.

For a while you believe that Harry Joy is right, he is living in Hell, and the world is a sick conspiracy of torment and horror. But the energy does flag, allowing the narrative to stumble to a halt and appear to lose direction a number of times. I see two possible causes for this, and for me they are the two flaws in the book. One is simply technical, and when I began to read 'Bliss' I hoped I wouldn't have to end up saying this but it must be said. I see this novel as a collection of the-matically very disparate short stories, yoked together by an inadequate narrative structure.

It fairly cries out to be made openly "BLISS IS Peter Carey's third book, and follows The Fat Man in History and War Crimes, both collections of short stories. The earlier books were rightly praised for the bizzare intensity of Carey's imagination, although my second reading of each left me. vaguely dissatisfied. The very shortest of his early stories, 'She Wakes', impressed me more than most of his other work it was subtle, sharp, written with perfect economy, and humane without being simplistic. his first novel, has few of these virtues, though a mass of vivid and often grotesque incidents keeps the story moving for much of its length.

It begins with a neat trick the death of the hero, Harry Joy, a successful 39-year-old advertising man. He survives the heart attack that had left him dead for nine minutes (medically unlikely, but never, mind, this is fiction) and survives a dangerous heart operation, but emerges from it all convinced that he has realty died and is living in a Hell peopled by malevolent beings who act out the roles of his wife, son, daughter, business partner and friends. Their purpose is to torment him, and he is duly tormented for much of the book's length. It is an -existential fable, or is it paranoia writ large? It's an old theme, and for at least the first half of the book Peter Carey makes good use of it to flay various targets unscrupulous advertising agencies, their clients who manufacture poisons and carcinogens, ambitious women, fascist hospital ad Carey: two gifts stand out The book opens with a type of existential paranoia reminiscent of some of Saul Bellow's 'Herzog', a complex and gripping system based on betrayal and self-hatred. A simpler urban paranoia takes over the motivating energies midway, based on fear of cancer, police and psychiatric brutality.

The close of the book attempts to resolve this unhappy conglomeration of phobias with a lengthy and (to me) unconvincing paean to vegetarian food, hippy communalism and tree-worship. Kurt Vonnegut is an obvious comparison. Like Carey, he started out writing science-fic- 1 I II Pi aa I'JV Mi'turs I Heady moralism gives THE JOGGERS PRAYER 1 1 ILgl I l.y UO OWU fUtll 1 VI UUr UlLlXer.O. LTUOl- 1lG.f pWIC U.f g'W-b UK, WII.IbVI.kW jwwv f.w.w,.w UUCbK-fWUb lirea WU tflC.I ncu Lfcl vui rMwwbtw.f nirffwiw story strong enough to survive muddied telling rusting hips ana slipped discs ana aesiccatea lungs, pasi ineir impiacaoie inema ana inaouuy to 'persevere and rise above the fully pensioned world they live in and to push themselves to the. limits of their capacity and achieve the White Moment of slipping through the Wall, borne aloft on one's Third Wind, past their Cruisomatic cars and upholstered lawn mowers and their gummy-sweet children already at work like little fat factories producing arterial plaque, the more FOR THE RECORD: SELECTED STATEMENTS 1977-80, by Henry Kissinger (Weidenfeld; CORAL BELL quickly to join their parents in their joyless Ducnei-seat lanaau nae towara ine grave neip us, dear Lord, we beseech Thee, as we sail past this cold-lard desolation, to be big about ft." c' Tom Wolfe The right stuff of the seventies IN OUR TIME, by Tom Wolfe (Picador; JOHN LARKIN hangovers The way these concepts may be related to the events of the Carter years emerges clearly' from the successive pieces in this book, though the earlier ones temper the wind of critical comment on the new policy makers.

By 1980, Dr Kissinger is writing: It is no accident that an Administration that three years ago proclaimed its emancipation from "the inordinate fear of communism" allegedly afflicting its predecessors has brought us to an historic low-point in our relationship with the Soviet Union. An Administration mora emotionally, even sentimentally, devoted to arms control than any other, that proudly proclaimed that arms control could stand on its own feet without linkage to other issues now finds its SALT Treaty stymied perhaps for that very reason. No doubt the principal fault is the Kremlin's insatiable tendency to exploit every strategic opportunity But it seems to me also true that we have confused the Soviet leaders by inconsistent pronouncements and unpredictable reactions. He is not yet publishing much in the way of reactions to the Reagan Administration, but probably a similar volume is in preparation for 1984 that year of sinister omen. It seems all too.

likely to be along the lines of a couple of sentences in this book: We always tend to think cf historical tragedy as failing to get what we want, but if we study history we find that the worst tragedies have occurred when people got what they wanted and it turned out to be the wrong objective. Let us hope that will not prove an epitaph, not only for the Reagan Administration but for us all. Dr CORAL BELL is senior research fellow in the Department of Foreign Relations at the Australian National University. PREMEDITATED MURDER is one of the most interesting of deaths, nowhere more so than when it occurs in domestic circumstances. A gangland killing or a political assassination moves us less than the calculated extinction of an ordinary person because while they involve headlines and photographs (and that newly-perfected form, the freeze-frame of the moment of death), much general consternation and hubbub, the domestic murder frightens us with its quietness.

We identify with its victim. Quite possibly, there is a novel in each of them. I am wilfully misleading you about the facts of Margaret Clement's disappearance in Gipps-land in 1952 and the discovery almost 30 years later of the bones of an old woman, for murder was never proved. For a coroner, and frustrated Victorian detectives, there was, ultimately, no case. Yet a novelist would easily recognise all the signs of a murder story: a person defeated by time and circumstances; the inundation of her farm; Kafka-esque delay in the law; dispute over inheritance and, eventually, the disappearance of the old woman into the flood that surrounded her house, and which laps through this story with the menace of one of Thomas Hardy's heaths.

It is, in other words, a strong story, and it is weakened no whit by the coroner's open finding. It is one, I predict, that novelists will return to. It is not, however, well told by Richard Shears in this book. Or, rather, it is oversold. A scruffy stuffed owl remained on the shelf, its dusty eyes startled as if by the sudden flight of the small bird.

Or this, from the same page, opened at random. Thick velvet drapes shut out the night beyond the long windows and candles, cast soft, wavering shadows on the faces of the guests. Writing like this calls to mind Tom Wolfe's line, the complaint allegedly insufficient zeal in promoting human rights, and other desirable ends; and from the Republican right, on the basis of his allegedly insufficient zeal in foiling Soviet plots. But time brings in its revenges, and after successive four-year batches of these two equal and opposite varieties of foreign policy moralism in Washington, the case for something more subtle in the way of a policy based on calculation may again become apparent In that event Dr Kissinger's mode of analysis may be back in fashion. He has, at least, a coherent vision of the way the world might be managed, so as to avoid both war and defeat without war, until the irreconcilable power and value systems of our day settle into accommodation and compromise.

But the technique involves both detente (which is a dirty word in Mr Reagan's Washington) and balance of power calculations (which are regarded with suspicion by the Left practically everywhere). So its time is clearly not yet Kissinger: a coherent vision mm' vi EACH OF the decades of the 20th- century has had a distinc tive Dersonalitv. vet none re mains more elusive inan ine one just -past. Whether that is because we are still -close to it, or whether it has been obscured bv the blaze of romantic elorv and freedom of its predecessor, probably onlv tuna will telL But Tom Wolfe, the1 modern anthropologist of American customs, habits, styles and fashions, who expresses his understanding with a dazzling and noisy pen. hat had a 20 at it.

Hi exposition. In Our Time. is lust as vivid as his many ear ner the most popular being The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, recently re-released in paperback. He is a clever and perceptive writer in his field; he defined and was a master of the technique called the New Jour nalism, which involves the ob server acting also as participant. Rather than setting stuck in the tirades about objectivity and sub jectivity, tne reporter simply ndes the ranse of experience, and has a 200a time coin? it.

One has to be a good writer to Bet awav with it. which is no proDiem ior Mr woire wno is wide in his vision and original in his presentation. Unlike other satirists, he is usually eentle in his mocking. He is also able to be excited about what he sees. and this is one of his greatest qualities.

Yet in" his role as witness-re porter, ne remains mucn more IN THE SWEET BYE AND BYE. Reminiscences of a Norfolk Islan der ov P. Marrinzton (Reed: WOOL EM WARTIME. A Study In Colonialism, by Les White (Al ternative Publishlne Co-operatiVei HEROIC AUSTRALIAN AIR STORIES, by Terry Gwynn-Jonej (Rigby; FOREIGN policies, of whatever country, are normally blended, like cocktails, from the gin or vodka of power calculation flavored by the vermouth of moral or ideological assumptions. Even in a "bush-league" capital like Canberra, the tincture may have its sophistication, and will tend to vary according to the taste of successive chief "decision makers.

(Normally, for us, the Prime Minister of the day rather than the Minister for Foreign Affairs). From Moscow, what is on offer may usually seem to be the neat vodka of power calculation, but that is not quite the case: ideology is normally waved over the brew at each successive gulp. In Washington, on the other hand, the moralists have won the day more often than has historically been the case in any other great-. power capital. That may sound like a compliment, but it is actually rather a complaint, and both the present and the last Administration seem to me to offer manv illustrations of why that should be so.

A group of well-intentioned liberal Democrats with firm moral views about foreign policy moved into the White House and the State Department on Jimmy Carter's coat-tails. Another group with even firmer (though different) moral views havp nnur mov ed in Ronald Reagan. The new lot even proclaim themselves the Moral Majority, and so in a perfectly real sense they are. That is, they genuinely represent the value systems ruling in the average small town in America. And they assume that those values provide an adequate basis for judging policy makers as exotic as the Ayatollah or Colonel Gaddafi.

All that may seem a long way round to get to Dr Kissinger's new book, which Is a selection of lectures, interviews and articles which he produced during the Carter period. But the point is that Dr Kissinger was a as American foreign policy makers have gone, in not being assignable to either of those two dominant traditions of American foreign policy moralism. That was in a sense his political weakness, for it left him open to at-; tack both from the liberal democratic left, on the basis of his lWf Villi THE LADY OF THE SWAMP, by Richard Shears (Sphere; ROBERT HAUPT of desperate book editors down the ages: "What am I supposed to edit this with, flea powder?" If its faults could be given a name, it would be adjectivalism. Shears is on the right track with the contrast he wants to draw, between civilisation and the swamp. It is one of the rich veins of literature.

To a person of any sensitivity, it is a recurring thought, the skull beneath the grin by which, according to Eliot, Webster was possessed. It is discomforting for anyone to contemplate how easily he might be despatched, and for how tawdry a motive. But this other death of civilisation (how revealing it is that we should so often call that a veneer) is more difficult to think about. It is the force not Art, or Beauty that attracts us to ruins. We are only beginning to understand the effects of our vague Australian landscape on our European behavior.

It is an important matter, worthy of our most accomplished writers. In no other part of the world is nature so ambiguous. The elements in Australia fight guerilla warfare: constantly disengaging and reforming. Rarely do they so directly tyrannise a person as they did Margaret Clement. Upon her death, the swamp was drained, the land reclaimed, her house restored, and the whole nasty problem resolved sanitised.

The house's new owner said, "We opened up all the windows and let the south-west wind blow all the ghosts out." I wonder what a first-rank writer would make of this story. It is so strong that it survives this telling. ROBERT HAUPT is the editor of The Age' Monthly Review. UUUU it! stoned out of their skulls In 'The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test', one has assumed, perhaps quite wrongly, that Wolfe's personal sympathies leaned to the liberal. But he is savage about the Americans leaving South Vietnam.

In Our Time is quite small: 120 well-spaced pages set in magazine style, much of it taken up with drawings by the author. Unlike The Right Stuff, in which Wolfe lets his ideas on modern heroism run on for ever, this is really a scrapbook a collection of bits and pieces with an essay in front That does not take away its quality, but it does suggest that the most mysterious decade of them all so far, with materialism battling even harder against the awareness of spirit, is still perceivable only in bits and pieces. The seventies, he says, was the least of the narcissistic decades as well as the most. The strange progress, as he maps it, from sexology has taken us into an amazing age of theology, a great awakening to the things of the spirit. We wait to see what he makes of the eighties, and perhaps also what they might make of him.

JOHN LARKIN is a feature writer at 'The Age'. Life, by Patrick Cosgrave (Quartet Books; THE FLINT LORD, by Richard Herkey (Heinemann: RACE AND POLITICS IN THE! BAHAMAS, by Colin A. Hughes (University of Queensland Press; BOOK BARGAINS NEW and USED GENUINE REDUCTIONS EX EVANS AND OTHERS BATMAN 370 LITTLE BOURKE ST. (up from Elizabeth St) 215 SWANSTON ST (Cnr. Littla Bourkt St.) THE UNIVERSITY OF WHY Ph.

elusive than his subjects. We are never sure of the extent of his participation in the games he covers; what he believes and loves and aspires to cannot be gauged by his writings. The most we can' say is that he seems to regard his subjects with affection. Certainly, his attempts to contact the underbelly of America are mere of a wicked tickle than a thump of the sort Norman Mailer might administer. An exception to this is found in the new book in which he goes quite sour on a couple of subjects: a shock after his usual sweetness.

The first is a very prickly slap at Jimmy Carter, including a dreadful drawing of him curling into the lap of Lillian, his mother. Jimmy Carter wore the picnic clothes of the Atlanta suburbs and never seemed to understand the power that flowed through his pineywood veins. He dissipated the power and the glory and threw away all his trump cards. The people yearned for hallelujah, testifying and the blood of the Iamb, and he gave them position statements from the Tele-prompter. The other situation he gets in his sights is the fall of South Vietnam.

Because of his constant association with freaks and crazies such as Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters who were so often MEET THE SHIP PAINTERS AND DOCKERS, written and published by Lew Hillier (hardback paperback GUNS OF THE REGIMENT, by SJV. Gower (Australian War Memorial; R. BUTLER, An English aV (Postaga $2-50) 1st edition Australiana collectors. TRADING GO BACK INTO THE HONS' DEN IF THE LIONS ARE STILL THERE? An Address by Dr. Francis Macnab Collins Street Uniting Churdt SUNDAY 10 am Special Entry Scheme for 1982 Under the Special Entry Scheme at La Trobe University a number of places are made available annually to students who have not met university entrance requirements, but who are able to demonstrate academic potential.

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