欧宝娱乐

CRITIQUE:

From the Suburban to the Subtropical (to the Subversive)

In the late 1970's, when this novel is set, Harry Joy owns an advertising agency in some provincial Australian city, possibly modeled on Sydney and/or Brisbane.

I suspect it's Sydney (rather then Brisbane), because Harry's clients include multinational oil and chemical companies (like Mobil and the fictitious Krappe Chemicals), from whom he generates hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees and commissions each year.

On the other hand, despite their income and lifestyle, Harry's wife, Bettina, hates "its wide colonial verandahs, its slow muddy river, its sleepy streets, its small town pretensions", all of which sounds more like Brisbane at the time.

About half of the novel is spent in the suburban city, while the rest takes place in the subtropical hinterland inland from Byron Bay on the north coast of New South Wales, where there are communes of hippies and religious cults like Ananda Marga.

"On the Outposts of the American Empire"

The narrator says of Harry and his ad agency:

"Here on the outposts of the American Empire, he conducted his business more or less in the American style, although with not quite the degree of seriousness the Americans liked...

"His great talent in life was to be a Good Bloke...

"He could walk into a room and sit down and everybody would be happy to have him, even if all he ever did was smile, for they imagined behind that moustache, behind the smile it hid, something sterner, more critical and yet, also, tolerant, so that when he smiled they felt themselves approved of and they vied with each other to like him best...

"It all came down to the feeling that he was intelligent enough to be critical of you, but was not."

The Americans, Barbara

Bettina, a capable creative in her own right, is obsessed with moving to and working in New York. She can't resist its allure.

Harry's now deceased father, Vance, once said:

"In New York there are towers of glass. It is the most beautiful and terrible city on earth. All good, all evil exist there...If you know where to look, you can find the devil..."

Advertising is at the centre of this good and evil, because it promotes capitalism, colonialism, imperialism, and globalism.

The narrator explains the attitude towards Americans in the Australian city:

"The town had an ambivalent attitude towards Americans, envying their power and wishing to reject it and embrace it all at once."

Bettina thinks of herself as -

"Marooned on the edge of the Empire, [where] she had spent ten years waiting for Harry's promise that they would go to New York."

"Refugees of/ from a Broken Culture"

Harry Joy dies of a heart attack on the first page of the novel, when he is 39 years old. However, he is revived in hospital, despite believing, when he recovers, that he has died and gone to Hell.

Everywhere the Good Bloke looks, both at home and away, he sees Evil.

North America becomes synonymous with the evils of advertising, capitalism, colonialism, imperialism, and globalism. It makes him question his profession.

The Making of a Counterculture

Harry's political awakening begins when he discovers that his daughter, Lucy, has been a member of the Communist Party, after which he meets Honey Barbara in the Hilton Hotel, where he has been staying since his release from hospital.

Honey Barbara works for two months a year as an escort (she meets Harry in this capacity), then returns to her environmentalist commune in the country (Bog Onion Road, "past giant fibreglass pineapples and bananas surrounded by buses and people with secret pimples on their arses") for the rest of the year. Bettina describes her personal style as "California, 1968".

Harry quickly falls in love with Honey Barbara:

"He knew he would have to find Honey Barbara and leave the city. He could not live here [in the suburbs]"...

"She was Honey Barbara, pantheist, healer, whore...

"For the rest of his life he would remember the night when Honey Barbara drove out his devil. Then he thought it was gone for good and she was the rain on the roof, the trees he had never seen, the river he had never tasted."

When Harry obtains a copy of a cancer map, Honey Barbara is quick to realise its significance. It reveals the toxicity of various products, and areas where they have a carcinogenic effect on residents.

"This Was No Bullshit Story"

Lucy tells Honey Barbara:

"My mother has swallowed the whole thing. She believes the whole American myth. She believes General Motors are nice people. She thinks Nixon was unlucky. She thinks I.T.T wouldn't lie. She believes in what she does [in advertising]."

Ironically, Bettina gets cancer from exposure to the benzene in petrol over a long period of time, and decides to wreak revenge on the local Mobil executives.

David, Harry's son, escapes to New York, and Harry tracks Honey Barbara down to Bog Onion Road, where he builds a hut for himself in the rain forest.

Harry becomes obsessed with trees and their collective consciousness. Honey Barbara's father tells Harry:

"When you talk about trees, it sounds like you want a fuck."

"(Filial) Love Story [The Story of the Children of Harry Joy and Honey Barbara]"

Honey Barbara initially resents Harry's arrival at the commune (without warning her he was coming), but eventually changes her mind:

"I am not going to waste my whole life hating you."

Inevitably, nothing will happen in this last story, nothing but death (though children are adverted to). Harry dies again when he is 75, by which time he has "talked to the lightning, the trees, the fire, gained authority over bees and blossoms, told stories...and conducted ceremonies."

"Bliss" is full of such stories, all of them wondrous and told wonderfully.

Harry's stories promote a greater closeness to nature and a greater distance from urban Americanism, even if it could be said that Peter Carey was (and potentially remains) situated in this Americanism and New York City in particular.



VERSE:

Lunch at Milano's, 1977

At Milano's, he always drinks fine wine.
The waiter likes his pencil thin moustache,
A Sydney socialite lies in his bed,
Though her very name he can't remember.
Well, it's a sign of these forgotten times,
There's an ounce of grass from his Byron stash,
He's got an appetite that can't be fed,
'Til late in the last week of September.


SOUNDTRACK:
(view spoiler)[
Cold Chisel - "Cheap Wine"



Simple Minds - "Love Song"



Crowded House - "Locked Out"





Neil Finn:



(hide spoiler)]