Product Description

Along with his parents and other equally maladjusted misfits and eccentrics, Francis Orme lives in Observatory Mansions — once a magnificent ancestral home with beautiful grounds, now a crumbling apartment block. In a blocked-off corridor of the basement is Francis’s Exhibition: a carefully catalogued and private display of hundreds of items he has stolen, all of them once precious to their original owners. But the arrival of a new tenant upsets the delicate balance of Observatory Mansions, and Francis finds himself taking drastic measures to protect the secrets of his past, the sanctity of his collection and his mission of love.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #256222 in Books
• Published on: 2002-02-26
• Released on: 2002-02-26
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 368 pages

From Publishers Weekly
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.

From Library Journal
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.

From Booklist
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

Customer Reviews

The Rules for Gloves
Carey, Edward
Observatory Mansions
Random House Canada, 2000
356 pages

Somewhere in urban Britain, Observatory Mansions is a tenement which was once an impressive country estate. Over time, the city has not only encroached upon it, but has surrounded it. Now it is a mostly empty, decrepit building waiting for the demolisher's wrecking ball. Meanwhile, however, it is home to Francis Orme and his aged parents, members of the wealthy and respected family once owners of Observatory Mansions and the lands around it.

Converted into an apartment block some time ago, it has never been a desired place for anyone to live except the very needy and the very eccentric, and as it deteriorates, a succession of bizarre characters passes through the place: a woman who has adopted the behaviour of a lost dog, a lascivious porter who hisses and badgers the tenants over misdemeanors against cleanliness, a woman whose real world unfolds behind the TV screen.

Told in the first person by Francis Orme, we learn very quickly that he is probably the most off beat of all the characters. He wears white cotton gloves at all times, is a meticulous collector of memorabilia of love - objects which meant a lot to people, mostly stolen by him - and makes his living busking, standing motionless on an abandoned plinth in the vicinity of Observatory Mansions and moving only to acknowledge coins dropping into his can by blowing soap bubbles at the donors.

Edward Carey is a playwright and freelance illustrator and his drawings of the faces of some of the characters of the "mansion" add to the surreal quality of the text. His narrator, an obsessive/compulsive collector and maker of lists and rules, turns out to be the perfect spokesperson for the people of the world whom time has left behind. I would be hesitant to put a theme to the novel - Carey's first - but I was struck mostly by the struggle for meaning in each characters attempts to survive on a shifting sea they barely recognize.

The dust jacket, incidentally, is wonderfully done. All hand drawn and printed, it is of a piece with the books contents, an achievement only the best book designers can rightfully claim.

****

Visit the Mansions
I wanted to curl back up into this book for days after finishing it. The self-contained world Edward Carey creates is so crooked, dusty and credible. One trusts completely what the characters see and experience because one is being guided so kindly by the hand. Think twice the next time you sit next to a myopic albino on the bus; chances are they have a far richer inner life than we tidy commuters.

A thought-provoking book that haunts you after you're done.
Wow. Finishing this book I am overwhelmed and awed that this is Carey's first novel. Very unique characters and situations and writing style. In many places you can see Carey's theatre background with the dialog reading more like a play without punctuation and the book's plot is more in scenes and acts than chapters, but it really works well for this story - it's about life (and all life's a play!) or the lack of life of this group of misfit characters. I really like the way Carey draws the reader in little by little -- reavealing just enough about one character to shock you, to move you, to keep you reading .... and then switches to another character. It's a book that I'm going to keep thinking about long after the reading of it. Yes, these are disturbed characters, but who among us can't recognize themselves in one or more of them? Anyone who collects anything must wonder where is the line that separates my collecting from the bizarre collecting of Francis Orne? I read a lot of books, and I love a book that keeps me guessing right up to the end, and this one definitely does. Bravo, Mr. Carey!