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Manchester or Liverpool, for all that matters. The building was subdivided and rented out when the
Ormes fell on hard times, and flourished for a while. But now only a handful of tenants occupy the
decaying structure. There's the Dog Woman, a half-mad canine-ophile; Claire Higg, mesmerized by her
television; the basement-dwelling porter named Porter, who maintains whatever livability exists; Peter
Bugg, ex-schoolteacher with a ruler fixation; Mr. and Mrs. Orme, the husband catatonic, the wife
confined to her bed; and finally, the central figure, thirty-seven-year-old Francis Orme, our highly
unreliable and bizarrely idiomatic narrator.
Francis is a bundle of tics, hatreds, perverse loves, and ill will, wrapped up in a wounded intelligence. He
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wears white gloves 24/7, fearful of contamination (a fear whose roots we finally uncover three-quarters
of the way through the book). He works in a wax museum as a mock statue. He maintains in the
basement of Observatory Mansions a mysterious collection of nearly one thousand trivial objects, all
stolen, including his prize, an enigmatic item referred to only asThe Object . But whatever Francis's
problems, he is self-sustaining. He has reached an accommodation with life. That is, until a new lodger
arrives, a young woman named Anna Tap. Anna is slowly going blind, and has come to the Mansions to
be close to a church devoted to Saint Lucy, the patron saint of eye problems.
A lady quite pitiable and laudable, one would imagine. But not to Francis. The introduction of a
newcomer into his delicate machinery of survival motivates him to a campaign of terror. How this struggle
between Francis and Anna plays out, how it transforms both of them, along with the fates of all the other
residents, is the gist of Carey's tale, which becomes ultimately a lesson in how prisons of the mind are
self-constructed and self-demolished.
Carey imbues his characters and settings with such a density of invention and particularity that their weird
world bootstraps itself into existence. While not quite up to either Peake's or Miville's linguistic and
ideational fecundity, Carey can hold his head up high. The warped syntax and halting sentences employed
by Francis add up to a genuinely innovative style.
This novel plants a mortar shell of cognitive dissonance right in the middle of the camp of hobbits, orcs,
and dragons.
* * *
Accomplished as both the Searcy and Carey novels are in their individual ways, they both lack one
outstanding element, and that's humor. (Although of course some of Francis Orme's more outrageous
opinions and observations might draw a sad chuckle.) For that essential quality we now turn to Andrew
Crumey'sMr. Mee (Picador, hardcover, $25.00, 344 pages, ISBN 0-312-26803-3). This is Crumey's
fourth novel (from internal evidence, I suspect that his earlierD'Alembert's Principle [1998] might be a
prequel to the current work), and his mastery of the long form stands in contrast to the occasionally
baggy journeyman work of Carey and Searcy. This book is an easygoing delight to read, while still
offering intellectual challenges.
Mr. Meehas three narrative lines, each thread popping up in sequence as the chapters advance. Let's
take them in order of appearance.
Our initial protagonist is the title character, a quiet and retiring, eighty-six-year-old gentleman of some
small means, who is a bibliophile of the first order. His housekeeper, Mrs. B, sees to all his simple earthly
needs, freeing Mr. Mee to pursue his literary researches. One day, Mr. Mee becomes intrigued by a slim
reference to a sect called the Xanthics. He learns that further facts about this cult will be found in
Jean-Bernard Rosier's massive eighteenth-centuryEncylopedia . One problem: no one anywhere has a
copy of this apocryphal book. Determined to track it down, Mr. Mee vows to become computer literate.
He purchases a machine and gets online. But his Web researches lead him into a complex and laughable
tangle involving lots of naked women, and two minor characters from Rosier's lifetime named Ferrand
and Minard.
Our second strand bops back in time to follow the slapstick antics of this very duo. Simple and
somewhat simple-minded copyists living in Paris, Minard and Ferrand unluckily take the assignment of
copying Rosier's masterwork, which includes a complete explication of quantum physics (in pitch-perfect
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