The bloater of Rosemary Tonks’ title is an opera singer, and The Bloater itself is a bit like Così fan tutte updated for the Swinging Sixties. Min, married to George, who seems to have a bird on the side, is being pursued by the Bloater (he never gets a real name), while she contemplates if she wants Billy the musicologist as a friend or lover. Claudi, another one of Tonks’ older men of ambiguous European origin, flits in and out to offer advice and moral support in the role of Don Alfonso.
Meanwhile, her friend and co-worker Jenny wonders whether to sleep with the guitar player with the soulful eyes or the poet with the long brown hair. And in between we have sessions in the studio where Min, Jenny, and that clod Fred are setting a poem about Orestes to electronic music. So it’s all very hip, cool, and sophisticated — and yet nothing more than a bit of kissing actually goes on.
Tonks seems to have learned to tone down her wisecrackery from the relentless pace of her first novels Emir and Opium Fogs. As a narrator, Min is every bit as wise in her cracks as Tonks’ earlier authorial personae, but this time Tonks is in far better control:
Brahms is good for exercising, if you’re not in love; if you are in love of course, you will simply swoon off after the first knees bend. Beethoven has too many ups and downs, the music gets awkward and thrilling, and you strain your back and make grandiose plans which waste your brain for several hours afterwards.
Reviewing The Bloater in the TLS, Sarah Curtis showed how Tonks wrapped things up as neatly as the ending of a Mozart opera: “It all works out happily, with the unsuitable suitor rejected, husband fobbed off with a convenient lover, and even a little reference to ‘the moral dimension,’ so that the reader is not too outraged by all this mini-skirted flippancy.”
Yes, it’s lightweight. In the Birmingham Daily Post, Michael Billington called it “a slight, amusing, unpretentious book that passes an hour or two quite painlessly.” But there are times when we all need a bit of elegant comic relief. As Dominic Le Foe put it in the Illustrated London News: “If they still make hammocks, and if they still grow trees from which to suspend one, and if the sun ever shines again — given all those circumstances, with an optional cooling drink to hand, then The Bloater will pass a pleasant hour or two.”
You’ll have to rely on Interlibrary Loan to get a copy of The Bloater: there are no copies available for sale at the moment. Fortunately, there are almost 60 copies held in libraries worldwide, so all you need is a library card and a little patience.