Observatory Mansions - Hardcover

Carey, Edward

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0609606808 ISBN 13: 9780609606803

Publisher: Crown, 2001

Synopsis

"Easily the most brilliant fiction I've seen this year -- it proves the potential brilliance of the novel form."
-- John Fowles, author of The Magus

Observatory Mansions, once the Orme family's magnificent ancestral home set on beautiful grounds, is now a crumbling apartment block stranded on a traffic island, peopled with eccentrics.

Thirty-seven-year-old Francis Orme lives in Observatory Mansions with his peculiar parents and a collection of misfits. By day he is a street performer, earning money as "a statue of whiteness" in the park, wearing white gloves to ensure that his skin never touches anything. He steals items for his museum of significant objects (996 in all), not for their monetary value but because they have been loved, often bringing grief to their erstwhile owners. His bedridden mother, Alice, who has created for herself an alternative time frame called "fiction," and his father, Francis, are among the occupants set apart from the rest of the busy city by their histories, their memories, and their relationships with the other seven inhabitants of the flats.

Each of the house dwellers has his or her own story, as seen through Francis's eyes, and the careful routine and harmony of the house are shaken when along comes a new resident, the half-blind, vulnerable Anna Tap. She is sympathetic and resourceful, and slowly the desperately lonely residents begin to open up their long-closed hearts. As the delicate balance of Observatory Mansions begins to shift, Francis finds himself having to protect the secrets of his past and the sanctity of his collection, while growing emotionally closer to Anna.

Hailed as no less than a tour de force, Observatory Mansions is a debut novel of immense originality--a strangely haunting landscape occupied by compelling and unforgettable characters.

About this title

About the Author

EDWARD CAREY is a playwright and illustrator in London. This is his first novel.

From the Back Cover

"Edward Carey has an imagination of tremendous range and power.
He transforms the familiar stuff of life into shapes utterly strange and
marvelous. This is a novel of truly startling originality."
        -- Patrick McGrath

"Observatory Mansions is a striking debut, not simply for the skill with which it conjures its bizarrerie but for the way it wrings pity from an incredible setting. When Carey alternates the reveries and recollections of his narrator's parents, the resulting fugue is a tour de force."        
-- Times Literary Supplement

"The humor and ingenuity with which Carey presents his characters and the entropic universe which surrounds them are reminiscent not only of
Beckett, but also of Georges Perec. . . . In his world, there are no ordinary people; everyone is a seething mass of repressed desires, murderous impulses, and obsessive-compulsive tics. While this view of human nature might sound disturbing, it is conveyed with so much sympathy and acute observation that it is hard not to be beguiled. Far from being grotesques, the other tenants of Carey's lovingly built microcosm come across as rather admirable in their last-ditch resistance to the forces of conventional reality."        
-- The Times (London)

"With this extraordinary character, and the appealingly deranged inhabitants of Observatory Mansions, Carey has created an imaginary world brimming with the weird, the wonderful, and the unexpected."
-- The Guardian

"Carey is nothing short of a genius. . . . Brilliant."        
-- Daily Mail

From the Inside Flap

the most brilliant fiction I've seen this year -- it proves the potential brilliance of the novel form."<br>-- John Fowles, author of <b>The Magus<br></b><br>Observatory Mansions, once the Orme family's magnificent ancestral home set on beautiful grounds, is now a crumbling apartment block stranded on a traffic island, peopled with eccentrics.<br><br>Thirty-seven-year-old Francis Orme lives in Observatory Mansions with his peculiar parents and a collection of misfits. By day he is a street performer, earning money as "a statue of whiteness" in the park, wearing white gloves to ensure that his skin never touches anything. He steals items for his museum of significant objects (996 in all), not for their monetary value but because they have been loved, often bringing grief to their erstwhile owners. His bedridden mother, Alice, who has created for herself an alternative time frame called "fiction," and his father, Francis, are among the occupants set apart f

Reviews

Playwright and freelance illustrator Carey's impressive first novel is so steeped in grotesque oddity, warped values and dysfunction that it makes David Lynch's work seem sunny and salubrious by comparison. Veering only occasionally toward painfully obvious symbolism, Carey's debut is a darkly idiosyncratic, sharply observed study of lonely men and women stranded on the bleakest periphery of conventional human intercourse. Narrator Francis Orme maintains a hidden "museum" comprising solely worthless objects pilfered from unsuspecting friends, relatives and strangers. The scion of a once-wealthy clan, Francis is a reclusive 37-year-old who makes his living impersonating public statuary. He wears spotless white gloves at all times and lives with his elderly, semicomatose parents in an unnamed city in an apartment complex called Observatory Mansions, housed in what was once the Orme family mansion. Francis's fellow tenants are hardly less eccentric. There's Peter Bugg, a retired pedagogue who can't seem to stop crying or perspiring; Claire Higg, a dowdy dowager with an all-consuming penchant for soap operas; and Twenty (so called because she lives in flat number 20), a bedraggled migr from an unspecified nation who believes that she's a dog. The inhabitants of Observatory Mansions may not be the happiest of people, but they've come to feel secure in their unflagging misery and in their rigid adherence to mindless routine. Secure, that is, until the arrival of Anna Tap, a feisty, fiercely optimistic new tenant who challenges their ossified notions of self, community and social interaction. Carey's precise, deadpan prose is a delight, effectively filtering the story's bizarre twists through his protagonist's equally oddball sensibilities. Francis Orme emerges as a memorable, even winningly demented narrator. His slow progression from alienation and anomie toward a more functional, openhearted worldview makes for an absorbing, unconventional, seriocomic odyssey. (Feb.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The residents of Observatory Mansions, a decaying apartment building in an unnamed northern industrial city, are extremely odd. Guided by Francis Orme, a 37-year-old man who supports his immobile parents by spending his days as a human statue and only removes his white, cotton gloves in order to change and catalogue them, we meet a group of people living lives not merely thin but emaciated, stripped to barely tolerable levels of action--a woman who believes she is a dog, a man who cannot stop crying and sweating, a spinster who believes in the veracity of television soaps, and the porter who cleans the crumbling building compulsively. Each is missing an object of the greatest importance to them. The unwelcome arrival of a new resident, Anna Tap, a woman going slowly blind, disturbs their "perfect stagnation" and reveals their collective history of love, betrayal and possibly murder. Not merely imaginative and absorbing, this first novel by UK playwright Carey is deftly drawn, never asking the reader to believe for the sake of atmosphere what could not be psychologically true. Sure to be called gothic, and certainly ripe for a Tim Burton movie adaptation and Danny Elfman score, Observatory Mansions is strangely uplifting, positing that there is no human spirit so wounded that it does not strive to heal, no life so hollow that we do not crave, as the narrator's name suggests, more. Sharon Greene
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Francis Orme calls himself the "attendant of a museum...of significant objects." His museum is his family's former estate, now a large apartment building encompassing a city block, the lives of whose tenants comprise one of the most mystifying arrays of eccentricity, experience, and interaction this side of Oz. Francis himself fits perfectly among them, with his adherence to a code of personal conduct that includes constantly wearing white gloves so that he can curate the collection of useless but beloved articles he has stolen. The mystery surrounding Francis's deceased elder brother, born with a life-curtailing genetic disorder, and its effect on his parents, of whom Francis is now also custodian, forms the core of this novel of love and revelation. This unique work, originally published by playwright Carey in England, is haunting in both setting and story and will fit nicely into the collections of larger libraries.DMargee Smith, Grace A. Dow Memorial Lib., Midland, MI
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Our first rumour of the new resident came to us in the form of a little note pinned on to the noticeboard in the entrance hall. It said:

Flat 18 —
To be occupied.
One week.

A simple note that filled us with fear. The Porter placed the note there. He knew what we wanted to know: we wanted to know who it was that wanted to occupy flat eighteen. He placed the note there because he knew it would upset us. He could merely have kept quiet and a week later we would be stunned to hear someone busy about the living business in flat eighteen, unannounced. But he warned us, knowing how it would upset us. His only motive was to upset us. He knew that we would all separately be spending the week worrying over the mysterious person who was to occupy flat eighteen, and that he alone would keep the secret because no one ever spoke to him.

The Porter would not open his mouth, except to hiss. The Porter hissed at us if we came too near to him. That hiss meant — Go away. And we did. It was not pleasant to come too close to the Porter’s hiss. It was not pleasant to come too close to the Porter. So even if we had enquired about the new resident the reply would have been a hiss. Go away. We had to wait. And more than anything we hated waiting. Suspense was bad for our unfit hearts. We were left to imagine the future occupant of flat eighteen — for a whole week.

And for a whole week we were terrified. We slept short nights. We would find each other examining flat eighteen, as if by simply being in that specific section of the building which filled us with disquiet we would immediately understand what sort of person it was that was soon to occupy it. When we saw each other there we backed away, ashamed. If we entered the flat while the Porter was cleaning it, he would hiss us out of the place. We would run back to our own homes, shaking.

… A bespectacled blur.

When I returned from work, I climbed the stairs past flat six, where I lived with my parents, up to the third floor. The door of flat eighteen was closed. The new occupant had occupied. The door was shut and I did not knock to introduce myself. I put my ear to the door. I heard nothing. All that I could hear on the third floor was Miss Higg’s television set.
I returned home.

I had a visitor.

The visitor, who also kept a key to our flat, had let himself in. He was sitting in our largest room, a room that was a kitchen, a dining room and a sitting room. He was sitting on an upright pine chair facing a large red leather armchair. He was holding the hand of Father sitting in his armchair. The visitor was crying and sweating and smelling of a hundred different smells: Peter Bugg. Beads of sweat, islands, a-top his white shining skull.

Peter Bugg proceeded to tell me about the person who had occupied flat eighteen. I knew this was the reason for his visit. He did not usually come to me on that day. He arrived, punctually, twice a week to help me change Father. And he looked in on Father when I was at work (Mother, who lived in the largest bedroom of our flat, mercifully changed herself). Peter Bugg’s visit was an exception then. Peter Bugg spoke.

The new resident in flat eighteen, he explained, was not:

Old.
Dying.
Male.

The first two I had, I suppose, been expecting. It was unlikely that we would be so fortunate. The third was a shock. I had always considered that my imaginings of the new resident might be wildly inaccurate. I tried to allow for that. But I had never considered, even for a moment, that the new resident would be a female. As to whether she was pretty, ugly, obese, skeletal, slim, freckled, fair-skinned or dark, Peter Bugg was unable to inform me. Nor could he remember her age.
I can see her. I just can’t see what it is that I should see, what it is that I should describe.

What do you see?

I see … I see … a vague mass. Blurred. The mass was smoking a cigarette. There was smoke in my eyes. I was crying. Wait! There were two slight reflections around the region of the head. Yes! She was wearing spectacles.

Anything more? There must be more.

The poor weeping bundle had never, he elucidated, never been able to focus his eyes around the female form. It was a complete mystery to him. Even his mother? His mother, yes, he could remember better. She was the one married to his father, wasn’t she? Yes, he supposed that was her. A vague, well-meaning fog.

It transpired that Peter Bugg had met the new resident on the stairs and even spoken to her. He saw immediately, though not precisely, that she was not the sort of resident we could ever be happy with and told her so. He had twisted his face into a mask of bitterness and hate, a particular expression that had always horrified his pupils, and pointed words decisively and unpleasantly around the place whre he believed a head might normally be expected to be placed on the female anatomy.

Go back to your home. Go away.

And Peter Bugg believed that his intentions had been perfectly met in those two sentences. He was quite satisfied. But he had not expected a reply:

This is my home now.

It was her home now, she announced, and apparently she considered it to be. She continued up the stairs. Peter Bugg, appalled by her response, found himself a virtual waterfall of sweat and tears and nervously scrambled back into his home, flat ten.

Frustrated by the selective nature of Bugg’s remembrances, I decided the first night that the new resident of flat eighteen spent with us to call on someone else in Observatory Mansions to try and discover more. We would visit Miss Higg of flat sixteen. But not immediately since it was then the time when Miss Higg would be watching one of her favourite transmissions and we would certainly not be granted admission. We would politely wait until the transmission had finished. We ate. Why, I wondered aloud, and I had never considered this before, why was it that Peter Bugg could so effortlessly spend time with Miss Higg? She was, after all, female. He winced, sighed and then explained:

I have never considered there to be anything remotely feminine about Claire Higg.

Edition details

• Publisher: Crown
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0609606808
• ISBN 13: 9780609606803
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 368