Word: bahia
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Everyone knows McGee's address, if not his destination. He is usually to be found at Slip F18, Bahia Mar, Fort Lauderdale, aboard The Busted Flush, the old tub he won in a poker game with "four pink ones up and a stranger down." Trav is calls himself a "salvage consultant," but his real business is not in maritime wreck age but rescuing lost souls and money. In recent years, starting with The Dreadful Lemon Sky (No. 16, 1975), McGee has had troubles of his own. He has become increasingly morose, and the cases he handled were no real...
...disreputable but endearing group of squatters on the beach--fight with the police, who are trying to evict the good guys from their village, no one gets hurt. The police are easily defeated, and the victors celebrate happily. It is all obviously staged, obviously a joke. Nothing in Bahia is quite real; even the acting is wooden and shallow. It is all a little too painless, too bawdily carefree, for the audience to quite believe...
...world outside Bahia, nothing is quite so perfect; Camus seems to be suggesting that such happiness could not happen here in the real world--where the poor do worry about getting enough to eat, and don't often beat back the police--and that placing a romantically happy ending in realistic surroundings would be as unrealistic as giving us Bahia's complete happiness...
...Camus's Bahia is something like the green world of the second half of A Winter's Tale, where nothing can possibly go wrong--to the point where a woman who has been dead for 25 years comes magically to life. Happiness, Camus seems to be saying, is as mythical as Orpheus, and even less likely to materialize...
...doesn't really work. Camus's viewpoint is a little too hard to see; as a result, it is largely unconvincing. It is hard to imagine an American audience giving itself up to pure enjoyment of the scenery and the gaiety. Bahia is an idyllic world, where even whores can demand the right to love; it is not a world that reflects our own experience, and it is difficult to take it all seriously. Bahia is gay, joyous, beautiful, but it is not believable. And in the end, it isn't really satisfying, either...