Not a bad rogue.(Book Review)

The Bohemian Bourgeois: The Confessions of Benjamin B, by David Myers; Central Queensland University Press, 2004, $25.95.

I REMEMBER ONCE asking an Oriental academic of my acquaintance about the tradition of the wandering, drunken scholar poets, so celebrated in the poetry of Li Po and Tu Fu. "Do they still exist.'?" I asked. "Oh yes," he said. "We call them graduate students now."

In the West the comparable literary tradition was that of the picaro, the itinerant trickster, enshrined in the picaresque novel Lazarillo de Tormes. Tobias Smollett adapted the Spanish original into English with Roderick Random and Peregrine Pickle. Like the Asian version, the tradition of such figures persisted into modern times in the world of the university.

David Myers' novel The Bohemian Bourgeois is the true inheritor of that line, his protagonist's name appropriately alliterative, his behaviour equally roguish. He is not a bad rogue, not even a mildly wicked frandster like Felix Krull. He is just your average academic of the late twentieth century. From humble beginnings and by hard work he becomes the first of his family to enter university. The childhood scenes, in particular the memory of his mother, are movingly done.

University provides Benjamin an entrre to a whole new way of life. Avant-garde drama, world-class poets, future political journalists, bohemian parties, libertarian young ladies and sexual discovery are the stuff of his dreams made tactile. He plunges with avidity into the delights of inner-city Glebe and the University of Sydney in its heyday. The prospect of such a life stretching endlessly ahead lures him into ...