![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Before he is revived from this first medical death, he discovers in his bodiless state that there are many worlds ‘layer upon layer’ and that ‘bliss and punishment, Heaven and Hell ‘somehow exist simultaneously within reach. He runs a moderately successful advertising agency, is offered as the average ‘Good Bloke’, and at thirty-nine has his first coronary. Harry Joy, the central character and intended hero, ‘was to die three times, but it was his first death which was to have the greatest effect upon him’, we are told in the novel’s arresting opening sentence. These characteristics are again to be encountered in Bliss, and it is interesting to see them emerge in the extended novel form, sometimes to their disadvantage. The central figures of his narratives are typically trapped in the labyrinths of their obsessions or delusions, they are solitaries, often, like the fat men in the title story, both victims and perpetrators of their condition. They tend to resist any simple yielding up of their inner meaning at the same time as they touch the nerves of our general experience and social fears. Part of his achievement and, arguably, a sign of his freshness of vision is that his fictions manage so adroitly to slip through the critic’s webs of explication. ![]() The Fat Man in History and the even better War Crimes mark Carey as the most genuinely original of our storytellers – a fabulist and, in some corners of his imagination, a surrealist of disturbing power. Peter Carey’s first novel, Bliss, will be self-recommending to all admirers of his astonishing short stories. ![]()
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