Opera preview: Bliss

Opera Australia's production was much acclaimed at its debut in the Sydney Opera House in March, and its appearance at the Edinburgh International Festival is an opportunity to re-examine Carey's story - which, strangely, seems even more relevant now than at the novel's debut.

The words describe a moment when the wife of an advertising executive has discovered she has cancer and, in an act partly of contrition and partly of vengeance, blows herself and a room full of corporate executives up with petrol bombs.

Carey's book launched him, after some promising collections of short stories, as a major international literary figure. Its story begins with a heart attack suffered by its central character, Harry Joy, in the garden of his affluent suburban home. Joy, an advertising executive, is clinically dead for nine minutes before his revival, and as he recuperates from the crisis, he becomes convinced that the world he inhabits is, in fact, hell. As his family conspires to have him committed to a mental hospital, Joy discovers his wife is having an affair, his daughter is a part-time prostitute who confers sexual favours upon his son in return for the drugs he sells, and most of his friends wish him nothing but ill. His escape comes through Honey Barbara, a kind of hippy earth goddess who lives precariously beyond mainstream society.

The profound existential and political commentary that the novel represents is often buried beneath a biographical interpretation. At the time of its composition, Carey had separated from his wife and largely resigned as an advertising executive. During its writing he was returning to work in Sydney for one week per month, spending the rest of his time living on a kind of hippy commune in tropical Queensland.

Yet while there are clearly resonances with Carey's own life, Bliss is not the simple novel of male mid-life crisis that we have seen so often from his peers. Carey acknowledged the influence of Samuel Epstein's book The Politics Of Cancer upon his work at the time. In it, to simplify a little, Epstein takes to task a medical establishment too enamoured of such matters as share prices of drugs companies, and the comfortable lifestyles furnished to the medical establishment by the treatment of cancer. The spread of the illness is often facilitated, Epstein claims, by the exporting of carcinogenic chemicals both internationally and locally by institutions that belong to the same corporate structures.

Armed with Epstein's metaphor, and several of his own, Carey's novel examines the deceptions disseminated to promote lifestyles and expectations about a consumer "good life" that poison both personal and political relations in our culture. The horrifying discovery that Harry Joy makes about the people around him is as much about his own life and ideals as theirs. This is a novel about the collapse of the basic civility of the world, not through some barbarian intercession of foreign values but through the corrosive effect of the very things we delude ourselves will make us happy: consumerism, property and affluence. And the dating of the novel, in the earliest days of the free market revolution of the Thatcher/Reagan years - a process continued, with recently catastrophic results, to this day - seems significant.

I put this idea to Brett Dean, who wrote the music for the opera. "Absolutely," he says. "This was the beginning of an era that we're now seeing the full effects of, both good and bad. It was a period that brought about a lot of wealth, and no-one wants to forsake that now, but also the economic crisis, and things like the oil debacle in the Gulf of Mexico show that these things do go in cycles. Still, I'm fond of the Chinese word for crisis, in that it relates to both danger and opportunity. There's something of that in Bliss, a sense of crisis and new growth."

Yet no novel, still less an opera, can fully succeed if it is a simple commentary on current ideologies, however dramatically misbegotten they may be. Carey's novel creates a fine balance between the grotesque and the warmly human, amidst a good deal of rambunctious surreal humour. Amanda Holden is keen to stress the story's human dimension in the libretto. "There are some real feelings at stake here, and one of the things I've tried to do is emphasise the problems faced by the female characters. A lot of people might feel for Harry's daughter, who is abandoned by him when he leaves. Also, Harry's wife Betty has made sacrifices. I think he's led a materialistic life, but she's really the ambitious one. When you think about the time that they married, in perhaps the 1960s or 1970s, that was still just about the last time when a lot of women weren't able to fulfil the ambitions they might now. There were old-fashioned wives and some others who went on to work. She has clearly been one of the former women - there's a personal price to pay for that."

The libretto alters Carey's story a little in order to theatricalise it, yet Holden's words seem to capture the spirit more strongly than the film version from 1985. Here, in fleshing out the female characters, Holden creates a strong triumvirate in Harry, Betty and Honey. She has also altered the opening scene: "It opens with a party with lots of voices.

I think it's much more interesting than bloke alone on stage has a heart attack in his garden to have a man having a heart attack in the middle of a party, where you can set the scene. So I made it up, but with total allegiance to the spirit and idea of the text. Also, his parents and all those flashbacks to them in the novel are not mentioned. It's really about him, and in any case I think opera doesn't do flashback very well."

At the centre of the novel is of course Harry Joy, and creating a grotesque in flesh and blood dimensions is a problem, but if the reviews from Australia are to be believed, baritone Peter Coleman-Wright overcomes the difficulty triumphantly. "There's a danger that Harry will look like either a blithering idiot or an opportunist; Carey himself once described him to me as 'a bloody idiot'," comments Dean. "But I think Peter Coleman-Wright brings such a human touch to the character that we avoid that." Holden adds a female perspective to this complex character. "I think Harry is a very attractive man, and something of an everyman. But he's also a bit of a twit, which actually in a way makes him more attractive."

I'm left with the one question all readers of the novel are vexed by, and before I ask, Holden anticipates it. "Are they really in hell, or is it real life? Well I don't know myself, and I wrote it." It will be worth coming along to the Festival Theatre to form your own judgment. v

Bliss is at Edinburgh Festival Theatre, 2 and 4 September, 7.15pm, as part of the Edinburgh International Festivalbc