Observatory Mansions
A Novelby Edward Carey
Crown, 356 pp., $23
Francis Orme, the latest in an endless family line of Francis Ormes, wears white cotton gloves. Everywhere. He wears white cotton gloves to protect his hands from everything. He has rules about his gloves, 10 of them (“3. The washing of gloves is not permissible. … 5. The loss of a pair of gloves is a profound misdeed. … 10. It is forbidden to let any person see your naked hands.”). I’m telling you about those gloves hoping you’ll track down a pair as protection from the gray, cakey dust that practically trickles down each page of Edward Carey’s debut novel. You need the gloves because you need to read the book. Francis Orme needs them for different reasons, and decoding those reasons along with him is an exhilarating risk.
In fact, in Observatory Mansions, Carey, a London playwright and illustrator, might be faulted only for taking too many risks, and perhaps for making us uncomfortable. Despite Francis’ aversion to just about everything, we see him on the streets every day, speaking to no one but observing everything. This is for two reasons: to avoid his neighbors and to street-comb for his “exhibition,” a collection numbering nearly a thousand stolen objects ranging from theatre tickets to a “chocolate sculpted penis” to the remains of mice nailed to a board. Each artifact, he believes, means something to the someone who lost it.
Carey’s darting wordplay, elevated slapstick, and outlandish characters converge in a plot unique in its execution rather than its makeup. Francis is our fear and our dread and often our evil, the magnification of our repression as if reflected through a telescope way back when the Orme residence was a mansion and an observatory. It’s now a sagging apartment building where rent is rarely paid. A glorified homeless shelter for Francis, his bedridden mother, his stricken father (“a parenthesis in his own existence”), and a cast of characters reminiscent of Faulkner’s in their development and impact. They have all settled here because, like the monstrous structure itself, their souls have seen better days and face inevitable demolition. Each quirk and distortion, each suspension of disbelief, is eventually resolved with the humbling sense that the characters are not so outrageous after all.
It’s in the lost and found, the forgotten and remembered, that Observatory Mansions gracefully resolves itself with little overextension by the author. At once sophisticated and simplistic, Carey’s joyfully desolate storytelling reveals only that pencil point on the number line from past to future, where we must choose between holding still or still moving. I can’t tell you what becomes of Francis Orme, or anyone else in this novel. But I can tell you that Carey has chosen wisely, with each word and sentence and paragraph.
This article appears in April 6 • 2001.