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How will you keep your kids busy this summer vacation?

 Swimming lessons

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Observatory Mansions by Edward Carey is a busy and strange novel about the difficulty of change. The narrator is as endearing as he is obnoxious. Imagine an obsessive compulsive, kleptomaniacal, imbecile Sherlock Holmes who sucks on his bottom lip until it swells. Ew. The book as molded by his perspective is highly structured, each plot transition labeled. “Strange events in the park.” “A word about Twenty, Dog Woman.” “The taming of Twenty, Dog Woman.” “A brief history concerning passport photographs.”

There is too much plot, too much going on, which is necessary to show that the narrator’s character is comforted when he orders his world thus. Living in a city apartment complex that used to be the mansion on his family’s agricultural estate, as traffic and people creep nearer and more densely around him, Francis copes by making rules to control what he can. He establishes epochs of his own time, “The Time of Memories,” “The Time of Silence,” “The Time of Four Objects.” He wears white gloves and submits to The Law of White Gloves, procedures he wrote to dictate how he will change and store glove pairs. Francis also steals things, specifically, objects which have been loved by their owners. These objects Francis labels, tucks into polythene bags, and stashes in a cellar passageway he refers to as his “Exhibition of Love.”

The problem is Francis cannot love. He observes love. He collects love. He does not himself love. He finds affinity with the Porter of Observatory Mansions in this. The Porter is also obsessive compulsive. He is manic in regards to cleanliness, and, he preys on popular female residents in a creepy, silent, phantom of the opera manner. Francis observes of him, “Perhaps he is one of those people who can only love people who are already loved. Perhaps only then does he feel a person is worth loving. Perhaps he needs to see a person being loved in order to imagine what love is like. Then, when he sees it, he wants to steal it.”

Francis is also creepy and this is well-established by Carey both through the narrator’s voice and through the provided dialogue. Right away you know that something is not right with your narrator. He repeats himself. He has a disembodied tone as if he is not actually there but floating somewhere above the scenes in which he is a character. Francis identifies as a glove person, and his description of his personal philosophy at the end of the book is made clear all the way through by his voice: “Glove people are a magical people, wearing gloves, monitoring everything you touched, was like floating above the world, watching everybody in it, watching all the suffering, always observing it but never touching it.” Take for instance, this exchange between Francis and Anna Tap, a new girl at Observatory Mansions who is attracted to Francis (Carey uses no quotation marks), Francis has confronted Anna to insist she leave:

You’d better be out by the end of the week

I’ve no intention of leaving.

It’s been known for people to change their intentions.

I won’t.

It’s been known that people who promise never to change their intentions actually do change their intentions.

Well, I won’t.

We’ll see.

Are you trying to threaten me?

You may come across unforeseen obstacles.

Notice how Francis never makes any “I statements”? How he foreshadows his actions with the subjunctive? How impervious he seems to Anna’s feeling hurt? He refers to himself mostly as part of a plural “We’ll see” and states his own opinions as aphorisms. Also it is curious how objects under his observation take on human qualities. “The park remembered what it once was. It remembered other trees. It remembered grass, acres of grassland. It remembered the feet of cows and of calves. It remembered.” This passage is characteristic of Francis’ constant perseveration. He stalls on thoughts and cannot easily move onto something new—a microcosm of his bigger problem, he can’t accept anything, anyone new. He champions stillness and stagnancy. Accordingly, he goes to work in a wax museum as a wax dummy.

The descriptions of his time in the wax museum are the creepiest passages in the novel, made all the creepier when he enters a church and describes the altarpiece figures (several saints and Mother Mary) with eerily similar language as he uses to describe his wax friends (not real people, but wax figures he stands among in the museum). Saint Francis is among the figures, famous for his love of animals but also for his choice to renounce possessions. Saint Francis, contrary to narrator Francis, had no objects of his own. In a fresh way, Carey seems to be problematizing idols and sacred objects. The reader finds it easy to criticize Francis’s talking to and relating with wax figures in the museum; when he talks to the figures of saints in the same way, something many of us at one time or another find ourselves doing, it is with the shadow of creepiness and sudden doubt that this church behavior isn’t just as strange.

At this reflexive point when Francis’s strangeness bears resemblance to our own, Francis’s peculiar hoarding behavior also begs reflexive examination. We all accumulate stuff. By the folly of Francis, the reader begins to see how silly it is that everyone hoards things deemed precious; we all feel that our objects have meaning and are somehow totems to document different phases in our lives, else why keep them?; we use objects to feel like we have governance and control over our lives; our personal objects are our anchors and our memories and, creepily, our obsession, our idols.

In the end, as in the end of Observatory Mansions, what if everything you had was scheduled for demolition and went up in flame? Would you, too, be cured?