Observatory Mansions

By Edward Carey

Observatory Mansions was once the Orme family's ancestral home, a magnificent residence with beautiful grounds. Now it is a crumbling apartment block, stranded on a roundabout and inhabited by eccentrics.

Francis Orme, an odd little man who makes a living as a human statue in the centre of the decaying city, lives in Observatory Mansions with his parents and the other equally maladjusted misfits, all of them taking comfort in their solitude and curious harmony. In the cellar is Francis' treasured Exhibition. Carefully catalogued are all the items he has ever stolen.

But the arrival of a new resident upsets the delicate balance of Observatory Mansions and Francis finds himself taking drastic measures to protect the secrets of his past and the sanctity of his collection.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Oct 9, 2012
• ISBN: 9780307364234

Edward Carey

Edward Carey was born in 1970. Both his novels, Observatory Mansions and Alva and Irva, are published by Picador. He lives in London and France.

Reviews for Observatory Mansions

[catalogthis · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I've read two Edward Carey novels now, and he definitely has a pattern: eccentric agoraphobes in unidentified geographic regions referred to as "our city" and "our country" respectively. Despite the similarities, I enjoyed this much more than Alva & Irva.Although... "enjoy" might be the wrong word. Observatory Mansions was almost painful to read sometimes, mostly because these oddball characters were a little too familiar. The narrator, Francis Orme, puts it better:We who lived in Observatory Mansions were a small and peculiar group of people.... But I liked to think of these people as pure people, as concentrated people, or, to put it another way, as how everyday people would be if they were subtracted from work, friends, family and all the motions of life whicih we are told we should take part in. These people are obsessive; sometimes it is easy to spot them, sometimes not. Sometimes when you see them about the city their eccentricities make you laugh, but more often they make you feel miserable.I felt an uncomfortable kinship with two of Francis' neighbors, though I'm not going to say which ones!

[jlparent · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I tried 3x to get into this and I simply couldn't. The first few pages were intriguing and then it just...petered out for me. I am very particular about British literature (which this is) so perhaps that is why, I don't know. I gave up 1/3rd in, sorry.

[squeakychu · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Observatory Mansions is an incredibly imaginative work of fiction with the most bizarre characters I've ever (and I'm in my mid sixties!) encountered in a novel. The story centers on the few remaining residents of Observatory Mansions, formerly called Tearsham Park and built on the site of a 16th century manor house of the same name which had been destroyed by fire. Set on an "island" surrounded by a heavily used traffic circle, Observatory Mansions was pretty much isolated from visits by casual passersby.The story is narrated by Francis Orme, youngest descendent in a family in which each generation has at least one member of the same name. Our Francis Orme works as a statue by dressing in white (the white gloves are the most important part of his outfit) and maintaining inner stillness and outer stillness while standing on a plinth in nearby Tearsham Park.Said Francis Orme, "I wore white gloves. I lived with my mother and father. I was not a child. I was thirty-seven years old..." Reading those introductory sentences, I felt compelled to read more about this strange man. I learned about his social aversions. I discovered he liked to collect (steal?) and catalogue objects of former importance to others. Strangest of all, though, was he fact that he lived a contented life until a new resident moved into Tearsham Park. Francis Orme then became very unsettled.I won't tell you more. Go read this enjoyable story for yourself! It's a strange and unforgettable trip.

[gendeg-1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Intriguing setting and story concept: a building full of misanthropes and cranky lonely hearts gets their predictable, comfortable world turned upside down when a new tenant arrives. Observatory Mansions has a lot going for it: atmospheric, neoveau-gothic backdrop and a cast of quirky, twisted characters who live hiding behind the heavy drapes of regret and longing. Edward Carey tenderly reveals their stories to us in a meandering fashion, as if to ease us into this uncomfortable, mold-ridden world. So I had high expectations; I expected a kind of parallel, grotty magical universe akin to Alice in Wonderland or something written by Shirley Jackson.Our reluctant hero and narrator is Francis Orme. Francis lives with and cares for his parents and is by profession a "stillness" artist, first working in a wax museum and then as one of those freelance human statues for tourists. When the interloper, Anna Tap, arrives, Francis rallies a few other OM residents, conniving through wonder, fear, and curiosity, to discover who this stranger is. As they investigate her, something happens. They remember things. A kind of fumbling in the dark happens to these sad misfits who have turned their backs to the world, a kind of breaking of the frozen sea inside.Could totally be profound and deep right? Against this setup, Carey weaves a strange world that is dominated by objects. Francis Orme et al. are the things they carry, the things they own. Francis himself collects objects he finds significant; the last few pages of the novel are devoted to an encyclopedic inventory, a cherished listing of everything in Francis's collection. In essence, his life. One of the more discomfiting things about the new arrival Anna is that she doesn't own very many things (they break into her apartment to snoop around), mostly items of clothing. It baffles Francis. One of the more disturbing characters is Twenty, named so because that's the apartment number she lives in. Twenty owns a dog collar, which in a twisted rendering, defines her identity and behavior. (Yes, a feral dog-woman character lives at Observatory Mansions.) Where the book failed for me was in the writing style. I couldn't get into it, even though I thoroughly acknowledge the literary necessity of it. Francis Orme likes objects. People seem to be subsumed by the objects around them. So Carey writes in this repetitive, droning style, which reflects the mental state of the narrator and his sense of order and things-in-their-place-ness. You'll get lists and lists of things, which in their own way is the only way our emotionally stunted narrator can tell his story. In that way, the book almost feels like an inventory of human frailties. It's got a very visual and tactile feel to it, which makes me think this might have worked better as a graphic novel. (Do we need all the text and narration?)Ironically the book's clipped, declarative style is what others found so captivating. Really?! I'm flummoxed. I'm a fan of the postmodern sleight of hand or two, but only when the trickery is filled with a little more intrigue than what we get in this book. You can't carry a story by just throwing a bunch of grotesque characters together, no matter how charming they are. Something needs to happen. Sadly, I was largely immune to the charms of this oddball, but I admire its ambitions.

[dylanwolf · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Observatory Mansions takes you into the bizarre world of an obsessive, Francis Orme, the remaining descendant of a previously flourishing family now esconsed in the old family home with a menagerie of disturbed and unusual tenants. This book reminded me very much of Canetti's Auto-da-Fe and perhaps a little of "The Wasp Factory". Wear white gloves to read it for an authentic experience!

[alfonso809 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

this one started good and with good I mean funny… then I don’t know what happened, I couldn’t get hook into caring for most of the characters… and then they all start remembering a lot of crap, and I just couldn’t get into it… there was a scene at the end tho… that it made me laugh so hard that I have to give this one 3 stars (it was a 2) when the blind chicks is trying to get out of the flat, and she starts screaming and stuff.. and the old lady starts making that noise TVs used to make after midnight and the mother starts singing, and Francis start reciting the gloves rules… dude that was so weird that it was funny! For that and only that… a 3 out of 3!

[damy_4 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Edward Carey's modern gothic novel, Observatory Mansions, starts out with a illustration of the main character, Francis Orme, which looks strikingly like the picture of the author on the dust jacket of the novel. That's when it occurred to me that the author must have modeled Francis after extreme possibilities in himself. And, as a hint to this, he gives the character a last name that, when broken down, is "Or me" ("me" being the author). And, furthermore, there are no quotation marks in the book's dialogue which makes me think that the entire book is internal dialogue. Also, the author does not give the normal statement that none of the characters resemble the living or the dead.The tendencies of Francis Orme, in fact, are very much like the tendencies of a very strange Scorpio-Saggitarius friend I spent a lot of time with last year. Francis displays many Scorpio-Saggitarius cusp tendencies in their extreme, but nowhere could I find anything about the author's birthday other than the year he was born. In Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf, the main character is obviously a Cancer in the extreme. And upon a bit of research, one finds that Hesse is a Cancer; it seems that Hesse wrote Steppenwolf about his deepest fears of what he could become and how to deliver himself from himself. Consequentially, the characters I identified with the most while growing up were the first-person characters in the gothic novels of Victoria Holt, a Virgo (as I am).Francis Orme is quite possibly the most colorful character I've ever met in a work of fiction. He once worked as a living display in a wax museum, but when he loses his job there, he begins making money by standing on a plinth in the park and pretending to be a statue all day. The only hint that he is real is the occasional blink of his eyes. He wears white gloves even when he is not working as a statue in the park. He works hard to keep his gloves clean and keeps a "glove diary" in which he keeps his retired white gloves along with an entry about how he soiled each of them. In addition to the glove diary, he keeps a private museum which contains only stolen objects which are the most loved or meaningful possessions of their original owner. In the exhibit he keeps everything from toy astronauts to a dried newt to a monk's habit to false teeth.Francis lives in the dark and crumbling Observatory Mansions with a colorful cast of characters which includes an amnesiac who thinks she is a dog, a woman who doesn't know that her television friends are not real, a father who has been catatonic for years, and a porter who seems to try to destroy the loves of the women he cannot have. One can see how all of these characters are bound by worlds they've created for themselves. The dark edifice of Observatory Mansions is a metaphor for the dark confines of the characters' minds. Is it possible to escape? Can Francis allow himself to touch a real woman with his gloved hands instead of merely a wax bust of one? Furthermore, will he ever allow himself go out into the world without the false security of his gloves? Can he allow himself to love instead of collecting loved items that belong to everyone else? How does anyone escape the confines of their minds? How does anyone allow themselves to have the emotions they've so carefully sought to hide?