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Edinburgh International Festival: The book that launched Peter Carey's career as an author is coming to Edinburgh in a 'new and strange' form
'AM I AN opera buff?" says Peter Carey, laughing loudly and disparagingly at himself while repeating the question I've just asked. "No, I'm an idiot! I've seen maybe three operas in my life."
Soon he will have seen four, though, because his blackly comic 1981 novel, Bliss, about a man who believes he has died and gone to Hell has been transformed into an opera. It will have its European premiere at this year's Edinburgh International Festival following its debut performance in his homeland, at Sydney Opera House, earlier this month. It is in Edinburgh that Carey, 66, hopes to catch celebrated Australian composer Brett Dean's take on that debut novel, which launched a career in which he has won the Booker Prize twice (for Oscar and Lucinda and The True History of the Kelly Gang), and recently had admiring reviews for his latest, the picaresque Parrot & Olivier.
"I've made so many trips to Australia recently I just cannot have one more even for a world premiere," says Carey, speaking from the New York loft he shares with his third wife, the English publisher and editor Frances Coady. "It's exciting for this to be happening in Australia and then Edinburgh, but it's not about me. My work's done."
Bliss has already been adapted as a film, with a screenplay by Carey himself. It had style and charm, although he's always rather regretted his involvement in it. He says: "The actors were extraordinary and it looked really good but I think what it lost was its moral imperative. Never for a second did you imagine you were in Hell. When I did the film adaptation, I was ridiculously complacent and stupid."
However, as he remarks, it's much less common for novels to become operas. "Films certainly simplify things and I guess that operas probably have to simplify things even more, but, hey, what do I know?" he jokes.
Dean and librettist Amanda Holden (not to be confused with the pouting Britain's Got Talent judge) recently arranged for an aria from the completed score to be sung for Carey in New York. He says: "To me, it was new, beautiful and luminous. I was stunned because it was so moving."
He'd been nervous because the Australian Broadcasting Corporation was filming the event. "So, I'm sitting in this studio next to the person who's made the work and there's a TV crew pointing a camera at me. I'm thinking, 'My God! What if I really hate it? Surely that's going to show on my face.' But it wasn't like that at all. It was thrilling, such a pleasure.
"Brett and Amanda have excavated the book and made something new and strange, and maybe even better, out of something I wrote, so I'm really, really excited about it, although it's a gamble for them. If it works and it looks like it will work and work spectacularly, then that's amazing, but if it doesn't work, it won't be my fault," he says, laughing again.
"I'll come out of it clean. They have permission to take all the risks I took so the best thing I can do is stay out of their way. If they fall, they fall just as I might have done when I wrote the book. But my feeling is this opera is going to be very, very good, in which case I should get no credit at all because it's not mine.
"I'm pleased, though, that they saw something in my work that made them want to create another work of art."
Carey has not read Bliss – a tour de force which was rewarded with two prestigious literary awards in Australia – since it was published. "I think I'll never read it again," he confesses. "I never go back to my books because I know as a writer I've changed a lot; I know I've got better. So I'd rather have an idea of Bliss than the reality. If I went back to it, I'd be self-critical. I'd maybe see what's wrong with it, even be embarrassed by it."
It's impossible to imagine why he should be, because Bliss is a gorgeously complex novel, a surreal, self-conscious work of metafiction that offers an intoxicating inquiry into life, death, sin, hypocrisy, midlife crisis and the fear of cancer. Written in sprightly, energetic prose with a spring in its step – words that aptly describe Carey himself – the book's "hero" is Harry Joy, a 39-year-old Australian advertising executive, who suffers a heart attack on his suburban lawn and lies dead for nine minutes. After being resuscitated and undergoing surgery, Harry believes he's died and gone to Hell and that actors are portraying his family and friends. His faithless wife is cavorting with his business partner, his teenage son is swapping drugs for sex with his Communist daughter, and the silk-shirted, white-suited Harry's career is morally bankrupt because he's making a fortune creating ads for carcinogenic products. Then his wife has him committed to a mental asylum.
Mad Men goes Down Under in the 1970s? Up to a point, but with fewer fabulous frocks, although the novel references the Madison Avenue world of legendary ad men and women, such as David Ogilvy and Mary Wells, for which Harry's wife hungers. Carey writes: "'In New York, there are towers of glass,' said Harry's father, 'it is the most terrible and beautiful city on Earth. All good, all evil exists there.' 'If you know where to look,' he said, 'you can find the Devil, that is where he lives. If you keep your eyes peeled you can see him drive down 42nd Street in a Cadillac.'" These words resonate throughout the novel and the opera, although when I quote them to Carey he says: "There you go! I want to rewrite that now."
A former advertising executive himself, Carey wrote Bliss before he'd been to New York, where he's lived for the past 20 years. In the late 1970s, he was living with his then girlfriend in an alternative community in North Queensland, returning to Sydney for five days a month to work in advertising. In this respect, Bliss is perhaps the most autobiographical of all 12 of his novels, because Harry meets and falls in love with Honey Barbara, who lives in just such a commune in the rainforest.
"It was a wonderful time in my life," Carey remembers. "We were living in paradise, despite policemen coming round to our shaky hippie hut and threatening to plant dope on me if I didn't tell them my name and address. I had to change the locations for Bliss. Everyone was terrified the police might raid the place. Imagine the police reading a novel! Pretty wild, huh?" Carey drew on the experience again in his 2008 novel, His Illegal Self.
Harry and Honey's love story is stronger, deeper and far more emotional in the opera, Carey believes. "But then maybe that's me judging myself for having done something poorly in the first place. If I have one abiding memory of Bliss, it is of the army surplus table I sat at while writing it. I can't remember the actual writing at all. With a colleague we'd started our own agency. We had little money so we furnished our offices with all this army stuff; I can still see that table."
An amazingly prescient novel, Bliss tells how a colleague shows Harry a "cancer map" revealing the tragic cost of many of the lethal products for which his agency creates those dreams of desire. "No-one had even heard of cancer maps 30 years ago, so I think I got that right at least, because everybody now accepts it's true that you have occupational and geographical disease. At the time, people thought it was hippie-dippy bullshit," he notes, conceding that Bliss is a very dark book.
"I wanted to call it "Waiting for the Barbarians" (after Greek poet Cavafy's poem], but JM Coetzee came out with that title just before my book was published. Now that would be a good title for an opera, wouldn't it?"
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