Kindly leave the stage
Francis King
STARES by Roy Fuller
Sinclair-Stevenson, £12.95, pp. 202
Since the narrator, William Toyne, of Roy Fuller's fine new novel, his first for 20 years, is a well-known actor recovering from a nervous breakdown, it is under- standable that, although ostensibly set in a Victorian mansion (the Stares of the title) dedicated to the private treatment of neuroses, it should also, in a sense, be set In the theatre. 'Being here's rather like being in a play,' one of the characters observes. 'You get to know people just Well enough to be highly conscious of their idiosyncracies.'
On the first page, Toyne comes on a fellow inmate reading Mansfield Park, a novel in which the chief characters are involved in the amateur production of a play. Toyne eventually himself attempts to mount an amateur reading of a play, Chekhov's The Seagull — which, as every playgoer knows, contains an amateur pro- duction of a play-within-a-play, Constan- tin's 'decadent' drama of an age, thousands of years hence, when, as after some nuc- lear war, 'Life, all life, has died out at last,' and 'All is cold, cold, cold.' In giving their reading of The Seagull, these inmates of a modern asylum are undertaking a task similar to that of the inmates of Charenton when they put on their performance of the Marat-Sade play. As the patients speculate about the mysterious absence of the director of the hospital and the assumption of his duties by a deputy, Toyne inevitably thinks of Measure for Measure, in which the 'fantas- tical duke of dark corners' first hands over his authority to the seemingly incorruptible Angelo and then returns, disguised, to see how he is using, or misusing, it. Angelo's attempt on Isabella's virtue in the play is paralleled, in comic fashion, by an incident in the novel in which one of the inmates, a young girl, accuses the deputy director of having goosed her on the darkened terrace of the hospital. When Toyne, inflicted with insomnia, decides to leave the hospital for a midnight walk, the night porter puts him in mind of the porter in Macbeth.
Not suprisingly, then, in the last para- graph of his narrative, Toyne sums up life both in this small, rigorously ordered community and in the wider, more chaotic world beyond it: 'All's an illusion, all's a play.'
Novelists and actors equally have the task of storing up details of other people's lives, appearances and idiosyncracies of speech and behaviour, in order later to reproduce them. Toyne, being both novel- ist and actor, is therefore unusually inquisi- tive and observant in this respect, soon uncovering the various neuroses of his fellow inmates. A middle-aged widow has taken refuge at Stares from a crude and domineering sister who, on the death of her own husband, has insisted on making her home with her. An elderly man is 'Dangerous Sports: Plugholing.' consumed with grief and guilt at the death of his grandson in a terrorist attack, which he himself survived, while they were holi- daying together in Istanbul. A young man is similarly consumed with grief and guilt for having survived a car accident in which his girl-friend was killed. A young girl is one of life's constant drop-outs. A man has been condemned to treatment at Stares, instead of a prison, for having groped the pubescent daughter of a neighbour. Toyne himself has come to Stares in the hope of being cured of the depression which he has suffered ever since the suicide of his male lover, a failed composer, with whom his relationship went awry.
Although so much smaller and less complex in scope and so much less ambi- tious in its demands on the intellect of the reader, this novel bears similarities to Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain. Here also is a heterogeneous collection of people, united in isolation by a common illness. In each case these people are conscious of a world even 'sicker' than their own sheltered little one, so that at one point Toyne asks himself: 'Should we all eventually go out into the reality of religious and nation-state maniacs, or re- treat further into the asylums of the wholly potty?'
Like Mann's Swiss sanatorium, so Full- ' er's English hospital is 'a 'sort of limbo, temporary shelter for souls who might return to life or fall over into incarceration or oblivion.' At Stares,' the narrator declares, 'one begins to see most things as symbolical.' The same is true of most things in Mann's masterpiece.
Toyne is a youngish narrator, but from phrases like 'I debated whether to partake of its meagre gastronomic rewards' and `Fred Boraston had initially been adum- brated as the other man', one might guess him to be an oldish one. He himself is clearly aware that he has more gravitas than his age would warrant:
The somewhat Jamesian turn to my words brought home the part I seemed to be playing at Stares — the detached observer, outrageous emotions diluted by his judicious mind and balanced prose style.
His fellow inmates are given to the same kind of ponderous formality of speech. `When I was absurdly young,' declares one of them, 'I married an estate agent who turned out to be very successful, and then lost him, with too much of my life un- expired.' Another declares: 'Having to peruse the play has confirmed that my mind is ruined.'
Despite all the theatrical parallels, little that is dramatic happens at Stares until, at the close, a young man kills himself. But one is constantly aware of past dramas bereavement, shop-lifting, financial and sexual peccadilloes — in the lives of the inmates. These are treated with a rueful and amused understanding which gives to a short but intricate and beautifully con- structed work its highly distinctive tone.
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