Book review: 'The Bohemian Bourgeois' by David Myers

The book ends, or perhaps more accurately, not quite ends with the author safely moored in relative tranquillity and secure employment at a beach resort, not a long way away from Queensland's Gold Coast. Here it becomes most interesting. The author wants tranquillity, but, like St Augustine of Hippo, not quite as soon as he gets it. It is at this point that the author articulates so well the doubts and self-questioning that any intelligent person asks when the time comes to take stock of a life.

Young people should read this polished and both serious and amusing work to learn how it was to grow up in the 1940s and 1950s. Seniors also should, to help them remember a time of much greater complexity and change than modern historians are prepared to acknowledge. This is a formidable achievement.

David Myers, the David Lodge of Australia, should give us more about academe. He should write both a prequel and a sequel to this excursion into the universities and continue to be untroubled by any need to separate fact from fiction. Dame Leonie Kramer's suggestion at the Sydney launch of the book "that a warts and all account" was no guarantee of the truth reminded me of the famous English judge, Megarry, and his elegant resort to Errol Flynn's autobiography to help him determine the domicile of that stellar man at the date of his death.

"Errol would, I think, have been the last person to claim that it was a serious study. It is plainly a book intended to entertain and to sell; and I do not doubt that it has done both. I am not covertly suggesting that what is said in the book is untrue; but truth is many-sided, and a wrong impression is perhaps more often conveyed by what is omitted than by what it said. Nor is it unknown that in telling a story intended to entertain should grow and be refined. The resemblance between a tombstone and an autobiography may not be very close; but just as in lapidary inscriptions a man is not upon oath, so may autobiographies, even though verified by the oath of a collaborator, fail accurately to convey the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, as the author knows it."

Megarry said that Flynn's performance gave pleasure to many millions. David Myers's The Bohemian Bourgeois should give pleasure to many tens of thousands of Australians at least.