Review: Bliss by Peter Carey

 Well… this was a bit of a ride.

I finally read Bliss by Peter Carey as part of efforts to read the winners of Australia's Miles Franklin Awards (it was the 1981 Winner, here is a record of my efforts so far). Honestly, I’m not entirely sure what to make of it. It’s one of those books that made me feel like I had missed something important, like there was a deeper meaning just out of reach, but I couldn’t quite grab hold of it. People rave about Carey, and this one was his debut novel which kickstarted his career and won the Miles Franklin Award, but I just didn’t connect with it.

The novel opens with Harry Joy, an advertising executive, literally dying and coming back to life. After that, he becomes convinced he’s living in hell. And from there, it just gets stranger. There’s satire, there’s surrealism, there’s environmentalism, there’s infidelity, there’s a woman in a tree… it’s all happening, and yet I found myself mostly confused and detached.

Carey’s writing is clever but I didn’t feel emotionally invested. I spent a lot of the book trying to work out what was going on, or more often what I was meant to take from it. I think it was meant to be funny in parts, or biting in its social commentary, but it all felt a bit kooky for kooky’s sake. Maybe it was pushing boundaries at the time, but now it just feels kind of… odd?

There were moments where I caught glimpses of what Carey was trying to do which was critiquing consumerism and playing with ideas of personal transformation etc, but I struggled to care about Harry or the other strange characters. Maybe that’s the point? Maybe it’s all meant to be disorienting and ironic and a little absurd. If so then he met the brief, but not in a good way - at least for me.

That said, I can sort of see why it’s a classic of Australian literature. It’s bold, and Carey clearly wasn’t interested in writing a straightforward story. But I don’t think I’ll be rushing to read it again or recommending it to anyone unless they’re in the mood for something truly bizarre.

So: clever, a bit crazy, a bit kooky. Not really my thing. But if you like your fiction strange and satirical, Bliss might be the book for you.