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Fledgling lawyer Chipman Smith is still in the closet when he arrives at the Hornbill Palace Hotel at Tlula Leisure Beach in Bomzawe in 1972, but he is well and truly out of it by the end. Or is he? Mr Smith will never be the same again, and neither will you, after reading ''Chipman’s African Adventure'' by Sydney based artist and author Jim Anderson. Channelling Evelyn Waugh and Ronald Firbank, this blackly comic tale combines absurdity and high camp drama in a savage satire on post-colonialism, sexuality, psychotherapy, and the new age.
Bomzawe, an imagined West African country, is on the verge of civil war. Chipman’s dilapidated hotel has become a node on the international hippie trail. A colony of eccentric hippie/new age imports, led by Dr. Starry Sanguini (a drug-crazed Australian psychotherapist) camps by the beach. Sanguini has recently married the Hon. Cerisia Twitchley, middle-aged belly-dancing daughter of a British peer. Leading figures in the native contingent are Fangga, the Snake Fetish Priest, and matriarch Lilibet Lanfal. Everyone congregates at bull-dyke Blossom’s Leisurely Chophouse and Bar where the Hornbill Palace’s deplorably anglicised cooking can be avoided.
Good-hearted, naive Chipman longs for true love. Will he find it with Zach Shaler, the Nebraskan cowboy with Peace Corps dreams? Or maybe with Drift, the mamba snake catcher? But will Sanguini's determined efforts to get to the bottom of Chipman’s sexual hang-ups do more damage than good?
Not everyone escapes alive, sane or uncompromised from Tlula Leisure Beach.
Jim Anderson was at the centre of London’s sixties counter-culture, and became Art Editor of Oz Magazine in time to be put in the dock as a conspirator in the famous 1971 Obscenity trial at London’s Old Bailey. He's also lived in the US, and since returning to Australia has been active in the GLBT community.
''An exuberant, rollicking narrative spiked with sex, drugs, and a thoroughly wicked wit.'' - Graeme Aitken, author of ''Vanity Fierce''
''Outrageous, bizarre, tender and revealing, this close-up encounter with one man’s sixties-style coming out carries the high shockability count of satire. It is moving and hilarious, witty and unscrupulous, lusty and confrontational, a dramatic journey of self-discovery that throws off moralistic sensibilities, strips bare polymorphous desires, and lets a new man emerge from the rubble of his deconstructed ego.'' - Marsha Rowe, founder of Spare Rib.
Featuring ten illustrations by Peter Kingston
Paperback, 454 Pages, Published April 2015
Author: Jim Anderson