CQU staff member David Myers has launched a novel, 'The Bohemian Bourgeois: The Confessions of Benjamin B'.

According to Myers, who moonlights as Director of CQU Press, the image on the front cover of this book of "racy memoirs" is by Sydney architectural painter Simon Fieldhouse. It depicts the sandstone Gothic Great Hall of Sydney University. "My protagonist Benjamin B. played the archangel Michael in a German Passion Play in this gas-lit Great Hall and the experience strangely transformed him," Myers said.

"He abruptly changed from a motorbike-riding yobbo in leather jacket to a poseur-aesthete in corduroy trousers and brothel-creepers (suede shoes). ".

Myers uses this pivotal point to evoke the bohemian parties in the student slums around Sydney University in the 1960s. These madcap parties contrast with the much deeper emotions of his first love.

The early chapters evoke a poor but blissful childhood in the mythical Manly suburb of Bluebottle Beach in the 1940s and 1950s.

The seaside lagoon, the sand dunes, the billy carts, the Guy Fawkes bonfires and the blow-up surfaplanes are nostalgia plus for the old post-war Sydney.

The best story here is The Missed Football Tackle and the Painted Surfboard. It evokes the son’s love for his father at the time of his funeral.

After graduation from Sydney University, Benjamin B. becomes a globe-trotting academic.

The scene changes from Sydney to Bavaria, then to Canada and then to India. Happily BB pursues exotic cultures and alluring girls. Like some of the rascally scholar monks of the Middle Ages, BB was a wenching rogue with a roving eye for wine, girls and mischief.

Erotically he was bohemian; career-wise he was bourgeois. His confused skirt-chasing comes to an abrupt end when he is subjected to an ungodly divorce in Sydney in the 1970s and his two little children are taken away from him by brutal Family Court decree.

In the late 1980s, however, a chance encounter with the brilliant Tokyo businessman, Koka-Kola-san, leads to a fresh start in life. Benjamin falls in love with Japan of the shoguns in the Tokugawa era. He hallucinates and sees samurai and ninja and geisha in the sober business streets of today’s Ichigaya. These Japanese stories are the funniest in the book and they say a lot about the average Australian’s bumbling discovery of the cultures of East Asia in recent times.

In 2001, he withdraws, as though to God’s little waiting room, to the gated estates and the artificial lakes and canals of the swampy Gold Coast. Here he seeks refuge in the stoic rituals of bourgeois suburbia and the tipsy circles of a bohemian water philosopher.

These are the erotic memoirs of an accidental philanderer. From Mitzi to Jezzie and from Susie to Ingrid, Benjamin B. falls in and out of love with the ease of a weasel. But neither in the loves of bohemia nor in the pseudo-security of the bourgeoisie does he find an ultimate solace. In the startling epilogue to these confessions, the boredom of his old age is overwhelmed by a kind of comic Armageddon. In a nightmare of angst he experiences the parallel universe of Pharaoh Amenophis IV, thought-control through inserted computer chips and the somewhat imperfect reincarnation of Queen Nefertititi. The world wobbles on its unstable axis and farce and terror envelop all. BB tries valiantly to save the world.

The Bohemian Bourgeois relates the hilarious memoirs of a larrikin Casanova with foot in mouth disease. Its confessions span a lifetime from 1944-2004 and the confessions are disarmingly intimate. This is a very funny read, interspersed with brief moments of infinite sadness.

This book is available via CQU Press for $25.95.