Alex Pheby's extraordinary novel takes us inside the darkness of Lucia Joyce - gifted dancer, lover of Samuel Beckett, daughter of James - who spent her last thirty years in an asylum. In sharp, cutting shards of narrative this novel evokes the things that may have been done to Lucia, for her and against her

Alex Pheby, Lucia, Galley Beggar Press, 2018.


Alex Pheby's extraordinary novel takes us inside the darkness of Lucia Joyce - gifted dancer, lover of Samuel Beckett, daughter of James - who spent her last thirty years in an asylum. Since her death her voice has been silenced, her correspondence burned and her story shrouded in mystery. In sharp, cutting shards of narrative this novel evokes the things that may have been done to Lucia, for her and against her. Yet while it tells these stories in vivid and heart-breaking detail, it also questions what it means to recreate a life.


“Her case is cyclothymia, dating from the age of seven and a half. She is about thirty-three, speaks French fluently… Her character is gay, sweet and ironic, but she has bursts of anger over nothing when she is confined to a straitjacket.”
So wrote James Joyce in 1940, in a letter about his only daughter, Lucia. It is one of the few surviving contemporary portraits of her troubled life. Most other references to her have been lost. An attempt has been made to erase her from the pages of history.
We know she was the daughter of the famous writer. She was the lover of Samuel Beckett. She was a gifted dancer. From her late twenties she was treated for suspected schizophrenia – and repeatedly hospitalised. She spent the last thirty years of her life in an asylum.
And, after her death, her voice was silenced. Her letters were burned. Correspondence concerning her disappeared from the Joyce archive. Her story has been shrouded in mystery, the tomb door slammed behind her.
Alex Pheby’s extraordinary new novel takes us inside that darkness. In sharp, cutting shards of narrative, Lucia evokes the things that may have been done to Lucia Joyce. And while it presents these stories in vivid and heart-breaking detail, it also questions what it means to recreate a life. It is not an attempt to speak for Lucia. Rather, it is an act of empathy and contrition that constantly questions what it means to speak for other people.
Lucia is intellectually uncompromising. Lucia is emotionally devastating. Lucia is unlike anything anyone else has ever written.

In his review for the Guardian, Ian Sansom wrote “Pheby is a writer possessed of unusual – indeed, extraordinary – powers”. Lucia Joyce, the daughter of James, is not a new subject for fiction. What is new here, and startlingly so, is how Pheby decides to tells her story. Psychological cruelty has rarely been rendered by such a cool hand. In this novel nothing is real; everything is real. Biographical fiction at its most honest. - The Republic of Consciousness Prize 2019 longlist




This book”, reads the prefatory note to Alex Pheby’s third novel, “is intended as a work of art. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in an artistic manner. Any representations of actual persons are either coincidental, or have been altered for artistic effect.” Erm, OK.
The Lucia of Pheby’s book is Lucia Joyce. She is a dancer, inmate of an asylum in Northampton, sister to George/Giorgio, niece to Stanislav, daughter of James and Nora, lover of artists … Sound familiar? The real Lucia Joyce was born in Trieste in 1907 and became a professional dancer. She was the lover of the artists Alexander Calder and Albert Hubbell. She died in 1982, having spent most of her adult life in psychiatric care, and more than 30 years in St Andrew’s Hospital in Northampton.
Pheby is not the first writer to have been drawn to Lucia. Her life has been the subject of a number of novels, plays, scholarly studies – and much speculation. What was the exact nature of her mental illness, if any? Was there abuse? Incest? Whose fault was it that she was confined and so poorly treated for so many years? The prefatory note to Pheby’s book suggests that answers to these questions remain contested. Some names and other details have been changed, and in one chapter, one name has been entirely redacted – whether the result of lawyers’ interventions or an act of literary licence, it is not entirely clear.
Pheby is a writer possessed of unusual – indeed, extraordinary – powers. His Lucia is a fully accomplished account of a troubled and troubling life. Most importantly, he does not spare himself from the accusations of appropriation and exploitation that are levelled throughout the book towards others. The chapters concerning Lucia are connected by short, apparently unrelated interludes about the opening up of a Pharaonic tomb, which are clearly intended as a commentary on Pheby’s own procedures. Is he anything more than another ghoulish grave-robber, a despoiler? “First, the corpse is eviscerated. They enter the skull by breaking the ethmoid bone with a metal implement, and stir the brain until it is liquid enough to be drained through the nose. The interior is then rinsed with palm wine and frankincense. Having no further use, the brain is discarded.”

The book focuses on the indignities wreaked on Lucia’s body – as a dancer, a lover, a patient, a woman, and as a subject for other writers. We first meet her “ready for the box”, a corpse in the Northampton asylum, “translucent and matt, dead to the touch, pliable and inelastic, utterly without substance”. We then see traces of her life being horribly extinguished by a nameless Joyce descendant – thousands of letters being burned, the ashes “smudged into everything” – before Pheby pieces together the remaining fragments of what may or may not have occurred during the course of her life. Furious and often disturbingly detailed, with accounts of asylum treatments using bovine serum and cold baths, the novel does not make for comfortable reading.

Pheby’s justification for inventing and imagining scenes of abuse is perfectly simple: “All things that are possible are, in the absence of facts that have been destroyed that might have proved them incorrect, equally correct.” Since all things are possible, all is permissible. Which was, of course, exactly the problem for Lucia among the Joyces and their associates
Of James Joyce: “Say he is sitting in the living room and there is the proper object of his affections – his wife, Nora – and he is aroused by her, but then she leaves while he is reading the paper, and you, Lucia, replace her in her chair. When he puts the paper down he sees you, in his state of arousal. Is it any wonder, in the blurry world in which he exists when he has his reading glasses in place rather than the glasses he has for distance, that his arousal is transferred to you?”
Of Stanislav Joyce: “Also understand that a man’s brother will often have an unspoken desire for his brother’s wife, and what could be more natural? […] bearing in mind that a brother can never come between his brother and his wife … perhaps the girl?”
All the Joyces come off badly; Samuel Beckett comes off badly; so do Calder, Hubbell, the doctors and attendants in the asylum; and all the writers and readers who have followed in their wake, exhuming Lucia from her sarcophagus, examining her as if she were an exhibit. “Gawping wax-faced idiots who drag themselves past your body because they think it is the thing to do […] They watch through the glass, their desire for something of the afterlife, so prurient and formless, peering in the windows hoping for a glimpse of someone else’s death, to somehow understand what theirs might be.” Read this with your eyes wide open. - Ian Sansom
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jul/12/lucia-review-james-joyce-search-daughter

In 1934, at a party held to celebrate the 50th birthday of her father, James, Lucia Joyce picked up a chair and threw it at her mother. Her brother, Giorgio, subsequently escorted her to the sanatorium of Dr Otto Forel in Nyon, Switzerland, and Lucia spent the remaining half-century of her life in various mental-health institutions.

In 1988, at the International James Joyce Symposium, Lucia’s nephew, Stephen Joyce, caused much shock when he announced that he had destroyed all his letters from Lucia Joyce, and had destroyed the correspondence between Lucia and Samuel Beckett at Beckett’s request. Stephen Joyce, who is at the end of the family line and the executor of the Joyce estate, maintains a strict level of privacy about the family papers, and academics who have tried to publish on the Joyce family have often been followed by lawsuits.

A gifted dancer in the bohemian Paris of the 1920s, Lucia is ripe for mythologisation, especially by those prone to sensationalism, because of her mental health, alongside rumours of incest and lesbianism, and the pressure of a litigious estate. The burning of Lucia’s letters, creating an effective gap for speculation, has only added to her allure. In just the past 15 years she has been the subject of numerous novels, including Alan Moore’s Jerusalem (2016) and Annabel Abbs’ The Joyce Girl (2016); a graphic novel, Mary and Bryan Talbot’s Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes (2012); a biography, Carol Loeb Shloss’s Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake (2003); and a play, Sharon Fogarty’s Lucia’s Chapters of Coming Forth by Day (2015).

The novel itself begins with Lucia’s funeral, in Northampton, in 1982, and homes in with an unsettlingly close gaze on her body

With publication set to coincide with Bloomsday today, Alex Pheby’s Lucia treats Lucia with an unusual degree of critical nuance and empathy, setting the standard not only for intellectually uncompromising fictional biography but also for rigorously questioning narrative experiment. Pheby’s second novel, Playthings, published by Galley Beggar, also focused on a true case, this time of Daniel Paul Schreber, a 19th-century German judge who was struck by a sudden onset of paranoid schizophrenia in middle age. In Lucia his engagement with such a controversial history, and such a controversial case of male appropriation, has prompted a searching and fascinating book.

The novel is broken between chapters, or fragments of narrative, by an account of the discovery of an Egyptian tomb, and the funerary rites of ancient Egypt. This unsettling and detached account of the discovery of a female body and its dissection, dismemberment and preparation for the Duat (the Egyptian “realm of the dead”) works as a slant commentary on the ethics of the male gaze, being made even more uncomfortable by the clinical, matter-of-fact manner of the account, in which the body is entirely passive.

The novel itself begins with Lucia’s funeral, in Northampton, in 1982, and homes in with an unsettlingly close gaze on her body: “Lighter. Bony like a bird. Swan. Long neck. Three and six on the box and half a crown on silk. Save on the wood – no reinforcement. Save on the wadding – no need, can’t weigh more than a child – halfway to a skeleton.” This is a stark opening. Lucia is almost absent; she is there but hardly even acknowledged – she is the subject of other people’s lives, their jobs, their gaze but not their empathy.

Lucia also probes at the litigious nature of the Joyce estate. In an early scene, during the infamous burning of the letters, Pheby writes, “There were words in a row, but they were meaningless. How many, he thought, would break the law against reading? What makes meaning?” Pheby’s talent is for prizing open the ethical, literary and philosophical matrix of Lucia’s case and resituating her at the centre of both an emotional and intellectual sympathy.

The novel deals with the rumours of incest, and invents an episode in 1917 in which Giorgio tortures Lucia’s pet rabbit, but then inverts these falsities, with Pheby turning the gaze back on to both the reader and himself. In a remarkable passage the author seems to step into his book and examine both its project and the canon of “Lucia” literature it addresses: “ If one has secrets, and then burns the evidence of those secrets in a pyre, one invites speculation, and speculation is infinite in a way truth is not [. . .] Why shouldn’t Giorgio have tortured Lucia’s rabbit to prevent her from speaking? All things that are possible are, in the absence of facts that have been destroyed that might have proved them incorrect, equally correct.”

An emotionally powerful and constantly questioning novel, Lucia probes speculation, truth and the fraught ethics of history, biography and narrative itself. - Sean Hewitt

https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/lucia-by-alex-pheby-a-novel-that-rethinks-james-joyce-s-daughter-1.3524070

The eponymous Lucia was the daughter of James Joyce, one the twentieth-century’s most revered writers. Relegated to the role of ‘the mad daughter’, the little that is known about Lucia, by anyone without more than a passing interest in her father, are but the bare facts of a tragically wasted life, one that fell through the cracks of Joyce’s genius. She was a talented dancer; had a ‘thing’ with her father’s protégée, Samuel Beckett; was treated for suspected schizophrenia by Carl Jung (who hated her father) and spent the last thirty years of her life in an asylum.
How do you solve a problem like Lucia? The Joyce family’s answer was to exile her to a Northampton asylum and, after her death, her nephew Stephen – executor of Joyce’s estate – had all of her papers and letters burned. Lucia Joyce is one of history’s great (many) silenced women, and she wasn’t just silenced, she was virtually obliterated. Alex Pheby’s answer to the ‘problem’ of Lucia has produced an astonishing, beautiful and thoroughly audacious novel.
So, how could we not choose Lucia as our book of the month for June? A new and innovative take on biofiction, Pheby places Lucia at the heart of a story which is not just hers, but that of all women subjugated through the ages. It’s a novel which is difficult to describe – in turns shocking, hilarious, heart-breaking, dark, and utterly, utterly brilliant. The reader doesn’t need to know anything about James Joyce to read Lucia and be completely eviscerated by the scope of Pheby’s writing and the sadness of wasted life and talent.
Lucia opens with a short passage narrated by an unnamed archaeologist, with hieroglyphics lining the base of the page. The archaeologist’s continuing narrative fragments, which are interspersed with the chapters on Lucia, detail his discovery of the desecrated tomb of a female pharaoh.

This novel is not just about Lucia, but about all women who have been defamed and removed from history – often on the grounds of mental illness and sexual delinquency – for daring not to kowtow.
Lucia offers a searing interrogation of textual ownership, control and legacy. Pheby, importantly, never attempts to speak for Lucia – that is not the book’s intent. Her presence haunts the novel, offering the reader perturbing and profound near-glimpses of her potential and possible lives as well as well-encapsulated microcosm of society at the time’s (and indeed at any time) attitude  to ‘problem’ women.
Destined to be a book that divides readers – especially Joyceans – this is none-the-less one of the most vital and talked about novels of the year. - Rachel
https://theturnaroundblog.com/2018/06/04/june-botm-lucia-by-alex-pheby/


The AI sheet that accompanied my proof copy of Lucia informed me that

“Lucia is intellectually uncompromising. Lucia is emotionally devastating. Lucia is unlike anything anyone else has ever written.”

I concur. This, his second work of creative fiction based on the life of a real person, establishes Alex Pheby as a literary talent deserving close attention.
The eponymous Lucia was the second child of James Joyce and Nora Barnacle. The bare bones of her story are easily verifiable but little else is known. She was born in Trieste, Italy and lived across Europe, her peripatetic parents moving the family from hotels to shabby apartments depending on their financial status. Lucia was a talented dancer. She was Samuel Beckett’s lover. She spent the last thirty years of her life in an asylum. Following her death her remaining family strove to erase her from the public record. They destroyed her letters, removed references to her from the archives. Even her medical records were taken.
In this novel the author does not attempt to create a detailed biography. Rather he presents Lucia’s story in fragments and told from a variety of points of view. Between each chapter is a motif detailing the discovery of an ancient Egyptian tomb that is developed to serve as explanation.

The story created is shocking and affecting, presented in a manner that makes it all too believable. The voice throughout remains detached, the needs of the narrators evident even when they presume they are acting in Lucia’s best interests. The reader will feel outraged at her treatment.
The tale starts at Lucia’s end, in 1982, when undertakers arrive to collect the body of the deceased. Six years later a student is employed to burn the contents of a chest filled with letters, photographs and other effects. The thoughts of these characters offer a first glimpse of Lucia. Mostly though they focus on their subject as they go about the tasks assigned. Lucia is subsidiary, often something of a nuisance. This sets the tone for how she was treated in life.
Lucia is depicted as an object that others must deal with. If she will not comply she must be tamed. Children are expected to behave, denied agency ‘for their own good’ with resulting complaints dismissed. Troublesome little girls can be threatened to silence them.

Lucia’s relationships with various family members, especially her brother, are vividly dealt with. Whatever other’s behaviour, it is she who will stand accused of spoiling things for everyone if she protests.
As a young woman Lucia was considered beautiful. She clashed with her mother which led to her being incarcerated. The cutting edge treatments for mental illnesses at the time were experimental and horrifying.
Lucia was moved around as a cure for her behaviour was sought. After the war she was transferred to an asylum in Northampton where she spent her remaining decades. She was buried here, away from her family. Even in death they sought to silence her.

The fragmentary style of writing and the distractions of the narrators are effectively harnessed to portray the instability that was a signature in Lucia’s life. The reader is offered glimpses but always at the periphery. There is a sense of detachment, a tacit acceptance that those who will not behave as society requires are a nuisance to be subdued and hidden away.
Yet this is a story that pulses with emotion. Lucia rises inexorably from the page. The author has filled out the gaps in her history with a story that whilst unsettling resonates. That he does so with such flair and aplomb makes this a recommended read. - Jackie Law
https://neverimitate.wordpress.com/2018/06/13/book-review-lucia/

This year I had been craving for a different reading experience, and if you have taken a look at My Best Books of the Year, you will notice that many are from small presses. That’s not surprising. Small independent publishing houses take greater risks in releasing extremely interesting titles from upcoming or forgotten authors, in a way mainstream publishers do not.
Besides the publishers displayed on my Best Books list, Galley Beggar Press is another publishing house to watch out for. A few years ago I had read one of their titles – Randall by Jonathan Gibbs – and was quite impressed.
So I decided to try out another title, and eventually settled for Lucia.
Here are the bare bones of Lucia Joyce’s life as is known to the world:
Lucia was the daughter of the famous novelist James Joyce and Nora Barnacle. They also had a son named Giorgio, who was elder to Lucia. At a young age, Lucia blossomed into a talented dancer and had the makings of a wonderful career in front of her, but it all careened to a halt. She stopped dancing. It is possible that she was forced by her family to abandon it, or maybe she did it of her own accord. No one really knows.
We also know that she had fallen in love with Samuel Beckett who was an apprentice with James Joyce, but this love was not reciprocated. Lucia also had a difficult relationship with her mother Nora, and increasingly became prone to throwing tantrums.
Her family quickly put her in a mental asylum for suspected schizophrenia where she remained for the last 30 years of her life till her death, well after both her parents and her brother died. Her family did not bother to visit her in all this time. We also know that all her correspondence and all material concerning her was destroyed by the subsequent members of the Joyce family.
She was relegated to the margins and silenced. The exact circumstances surrounding her fate remain vague and mysterious.
Those are the facts as we know it.

Lucia Joyce, the Dancer, in 1929 (Image Source: Guardian)

Lucia by Alex Pheby is an attempt to recreate her story. But this is no ordinary biography. This is a fragmentary and questioning narrative, and told from multiple points of view, but never Lucia’s. That said, while Lucia’s voice is not heard, she remains the vital centre of the novel even when absent.
When the novel opens, it is 1982, Lucia is dead, and her funeral arrangements are being made. Even in her death, she is belittled.

Skinny. So skinny. Not in the way all corpses are, but translucent and matt, dead to the touch, pliable and inelastic, utterly without substance.

The second chapter is set in May 1988, where all of Lucia’s papers, correspondence, letters are being burned and obliterated by a man hired by a member of the Joyce family to do so. The name of that family member is struck out in black in the novel, but you would not be wrong in assuming that it is Stephen Joyce, Lucia’s nephew.
We are then taken many years back to a time when Lucia was young and attached to her pet rabbit, which at that moment is being tortured by her brother Giorgio. Why is Giorgio committing this heinous act? So that Lucia will keep silent about his incestuous relations with her, or his sexual abuse of her for that matter. This chapter is particularly harrowing, and sets the tone for how badly the men in the Joyce family come across.
Incest does not stop only at Giorgio. Pheby implies that James Joyce and Lucia’s uncle are guilty of it too.

Lucia and her father James Joyce (Image Source: TLS)

Of James Joyce…

Say he is sitting in the living room and there is the proper object of his affections – his wife, Nora – and he is aroused by her, but then she leaves while he is reading the paper, and you, Lucia, replace her in her chair. When he puts the paper down he sees you, in his state of arousal. Is it any wonder, in the blurry world in which he exists when he has his reading glasses in place rather than the glasses he has for distance, that his arousal is transferred to you?

Are the Joyce men as horrible as Pheby makes them out to be? There’s no proof, but that’s irrelevant because the evidence has been extinguished. That gives Pheby or any other writer enough license to give their own take on how the events played out.

If there are those of you reading this who know Giorgio, you might say that this never happened. But how do you know?
If one has secrets, and then burns the evidence of those secrets on a pyre, ne invites speculation, and speculation is infinite in a way that the truth is not.
Why shouldn’t Giorgio have tortured Lucia’s rabbit to prevent her from speaking? All things that are possible are, in the absence of facts that have been destroyed that might have proved them incorrect, equally correct.
The moral of the story is: do not destroy documentary evidence of the truth, since it will come back and bite you in the arse.

Indeed, what goes around comes around. So, if the Joyce family went to great lengths to destroy Lucia’s real story, they are hardly in a position to complain if people frame their own versions, and show the family in a bad light. After all, no one can corroborate anything, so speculation is bound to run rife.
Lucia being silenced, cut out, snubbed by all is the dominant theme that runs throughout the novel, not only when she is alive but even after her death. It’s not just her family though. Her lovers marginalize her too. And so do the staff at the mental asylum where she is subject to horrific experimental treatments and where she is kept for most of her later life.
And of course, there’s Samuel Beckett, who pretended to take an interest in her only because he wanted to have a closer bond with James Joyce and further his career.
Sprinkled between all these chapters are the Egyptian sections, showing an archeologist discovering a tomb, which has been desecrated. The archeologist sets out to clinically examine what could have possibly led to the tomb being disturbed, consequently snuffing out any possibility of a smooth transition of the diseased into the afterlife.

A Glimpse of the Egyptian Sections in the Novel

In a way, these Egyptian sections mirror Pheby’s own task of examining Lucia’s story from all angles, however disjointed they may be. Essentially, he is looking at narrative shards, piercing and shattered, that offers a glimpse of Lucia but can never be pieced together into a linear and coherent whole.
Throughout the novel, Pheby’s prose is detached, searching and incredibly compelling. Incest, animal cruelty, and crippling mental asylum treatments can be gruesome topics, and a detached tone possibly helps blunt some of the ghastliness of these acts. At the same time, the disturbingly detailed accounts also display anger and fury simmering under the surface, and can be heartbreaking one moment, and uncomfortable the next. But the writing remains wonderfully edgy, immersive and absorbing throughout and never lets up. The Egyptian sections are also brilliantly done and help tie up the chapters together.
Then there are quite a few chapters on the Little Match Girl. The obvious inference was the silent film adaptation made by Jean Renoir called La Petite Marchande d’Allumettes (The Little Match Girl) in which Lucia was cast as a toy soldier. But it was also originally a disturbing fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen, about a dying child’s dreams and hopes. In a way Pheby is drawing parallels between the Match Girl’s heartbreaking plight and that of Lucia’s, whose dreams of becoming a successful dancer and retaining her individuality were cruelly thwarted. And as has been the trend all through her life, eventually her part in this film is edited and cut out.

The dancer Lucia Joyce, daughter of the famous writer James Joyce, performed for the famous director Jean Renoir at Les Ateliers du Vieux Colombier, Paris, France in the summer of 1927, and her performance was filmed.  She had been commissioned to perform for a role in Renoir’s La Petite Marchande d’allumettes, based on Hans Christian Andersen’s La Petite Fille aux allumettes, but her dance was cut from the final edit. She was removed.
This is apt.
 Truth and beauty, perhaps they are inseparable, and so lies and ugliness.

Lucia then is another worthy title from the Galley Beggar Press list and makes for fascinating reading. Highly recommended!
https://readersretreat2017.wordpress.com/2018/12/25/lucia-alex-pheby/




In 1988, James Joyce’s grandson Stephen destroyed all letters he had from, to or about his aunt Lucia Joyce, the novelist’s daughter. Many saw the destruction of documents pertaining to Lucia, who had spent the majority of her life in asylums and had been close to her father, as the destruction of keys to understanding her father’s work. Stephen replied: ‘No one was going to set their eyes on them [the letters] and re-psychoanalyse my poor aunt.’
Stephen, still alive today, appears — though with his name blacked out — in this novel, an imagining of the life and legacy of Lucia. ‘A silly old cunt,’ he is called by a character we are made to sympathise with. He is a villain; his destruction of Lucia’s letters is an act of vandalism — the silencing of Lucia’s voice.
In the absence of truth, and within the safe confines of fiction, Alex Pheby picks his way through surviving information as though through bones, and adds imagined flesh. Lucia’s brother Giorgio sexually abuses her and tortures her rabbit to ensure her silence. Her father drunkenly mistakes her for her mother, his ‘arousal transferred’. Her uncle is ‘in her bedroom with an erection, borne of a fever dream of mermaids’. Through these violently sexual passages, a strange, constricted picture of Lucia is created — a woman defined only by the brutality of men. Concurrently, the men in Lucia’s life are painted as demons, their characters made to contain all possible iterations of cruelty towards women in the 20th century.

‘Do not destroy documentary evidence of the truth, since it will come back and bite you in the arse,’ Pheby writes, hinting that this novel is less an attempt to reconstruct Lucia’s life than an act of vengeance. This feels unfair — in particular to James Joyce who (all substantiated evidence suggests) was not abusive, and to Lucia herself. It seems like no coincidence, too, that imaginings of the relationship of Giorgio (Stephen’s father) with Lucia are particularly sadistic. It is, in a sense, literary trolling.

In the final chapters, possible scenes of a joyful childhood are presented like gifts to Lucia, so that, like the woman in a defaced tomb an archaeologist tries to repair in parallel passages, she ‘might at least have these as memories’. So exquisitely written are these chapters, in one of which she plays out of doors with her father, that we almost forget the questionable ethics of the novel.
These quietly moving passages are sad, however, and not for the reason most likely intended, for they remind us that at the core of this novel are a father and daughter whose relationship is being played with, speculated on and twisted for the sake of art. There is a well-known story that says that Lucia’s happiness was the price her father paid for Finnegans Wake; while he struggled to finish it, she was sent to an asylum. There is a similar exchange in this book; Lucia’s and her family’s characters and privacy are sacrificed for a work of fiction.
‘Truth and beauty, perhaps they are inseparable’ — the line appears in a passage on the burning of evidence. This novel criticises the destruction of truth, and therefore of beauty, but itself exists in a place — as a work of fiction — where truth cannot be found. - Claire Kohda Hazelton
https://www.spectator.co.uk/2018/06/lucia-by-alex-pheby-reviewed/


There are times when beauty trumps truth, but these are very few, for truth is beauty and even in the fantastic there are forms of truth – fabular truths, allegorical truths, wider human truths – that are beautiful in an universal manner.  In this, a dancing puppet can exceed any philosophy in approaching both universal truth and perfect beauty – who could say otherwise after a visit to the Louvre, or the Musee d’Orsay, or the ballet, or the countryside, or the, or the, or, all the others.
The dancer Lucia Joyce, daughter of the famous writer James Joyce, performed for the famous director Jean Renoir at Les Ateliers du Vieux Colombier, Paris, France in the summer of 1927, and her performance was filmed.  She had been commissioned to perform for a role in Renoir’s La Petite Marchande d’allumettes, based on Hans Christian Andersen’s La Petite Fille aux allumettes, but her dance was cut from the final edit. She was removed.
This is apt.
Truth and beauty, perhaps they are inseparable, and so lies and ugliness.
Lucia is another excellent novel from the wonderful Galley Beggar Press, publishers (astonishingly for such a small operation) of, among other books, We That Are Young, Forbidden Line, A Girl is a Half Formed Thing, Feeding Time, Tinderbox, and, also by Alex Pheby, Playthings.
There are already excellent reviews, listed below — including a brilliant review by David Collard in The Times Literary Supplement where he describes Lucia as “an ambitious and daring investigation of consciousness, agency, selfhood, mental disorder, medical callousness and misogyny,” which sums it up perfectly — so rather than cover the same ground I will focus on what I saw as the development of Lucia from Pheby’s previous novel Playthings.
Playthings was based on the real-life case of Daniel Paul Schreber, who was diagnosed with what was to be later known paranoid schizophrenia and who described one of his periods of mental illness in a memoir Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken. The memoir became famous mainly because Freud drew on it heavily in his work, giving Schreber’s condition a, well, very Freudian interpretation. But for Schreber, a distinguished jurist, the book was actually intended to answer the moral and legal question: “In what circumstance can a person deemed insane be detained in an asylum against his declared will?”
Playthings, although written in the third person, is told from the perspective of Schreber and draws on his work and on the considerable volume of analysis of his case and Freud’s interpretation. Indeed the one drawback of an impressive novel was that I felt it perhaps required, for a full appreciation, much more prior knowledge of the case than I had (which was precisely zero).
Lucia by contrast is a much more accessible novel, at least to this reader. And Lucia herself is the absent center of the novel, which is largely written from the perspective of those who encountered her during her life. And, far from having a wealth of documentary evidence to draw upon, very little is known about Lucia. A surviving 1936 letter from James Joyce one of the few mentions that remains in his correspondence:

Her case is cyclothymia, dating from the age of seven and a half. She is about thirty-three, speaks French fluently . . . Her character is gay, sweet and ironic, but has had bursts of anger over nothing when she has been confined to a straitjacket.

This requires, but also enables, Pheby as a novelist to fill the gaps. As he explains after one particular anecdote where the novel has Lucia’s brother Giorgio torture her pet rabbit to ensure her silence as to his incestuous relations with her:

If there are those of you reading this who know Giorgio, you might say this never happened. But how do you know? How does one ever know what it is that occurs outside the range of one’s experience? You may not know that it did happen, but this is not the same as knowing that it did not happen. Perhaps if there were documentary evidence; but who keeps such records? Is it even possible to keep evidence of things that might happen that someone wishes to keep secret? If one has secrets, and then burns the evidence on a pure, one invites speculation, and speculation is infinite in a way that the truth is not. Speculation is limited only by the sick imaginations of those who speculate, where truth is not. Why shouldn’t Giorgio have tortured Lucia’s rabbit to prevent her from speaking? All things that are possible are, in the absence of facts that have been destroyed that might have proved them incorrect, equally correct.
The moral of this story is: do not destroy documentary evidence of the truth, since it will come back and bit you in the arse.

This last a reference to the Joyce estate and their destruction of much of the relevant material including Lucia’s own letters. In 2003, Carole Schloss wrote a biography Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake, stating that “this is a story that was not supposed to be told,” and found herself in a legal battle with the Joyce estate, which initially forced her publishers to redact significant parts of the book (in turn leading to early reviewer’s arguing some of her claims were unsubstantiated) but which she eventually won.
An article from Jezebel, “The Disappearing Act of Lucia Joyce” (here), provides both a good summary of Lucia’s life, but also suggests the need for an appropriate fictional treatment. Pheby’s wonderful new novel rises to the challenge he sets himself:

This woman had gone into the afterlife friendless and I resolved to address that lack.

http://mookseandgripes.com/reviews/2018/07/26/alex-pheby-lucia/

The shadowy figure of Lucia Joyce, James Joyce’s supposedly schizophrenic daughter, offers a fascinating and underdeveloped topic ripe for imaginative reconstructions of who she was and what she may have experienced. A number of fictive portrayals of Lucia have been instigated by the only biography written on her, Carol Shloss’s Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake (2003). This text remains a principal reference for those curious about Lucia despite the fact that it has been unfavourably critiqued by Joyce scholars. A noteworthy passage in Shloss’s book describes the time when the Joyces were living in Locarno in 1917. Here she wonders about the possible ‘sexual dynamics between a brother and a sister accustomed to being locked up together’ and invites readers to ‘imagine them enclosed in a private world drawn from the loneliness of their life circumstance.’ In Alex Pheby’s new fictional biography, Lucia, we don’t have to imagine: in a chapter he has dated to coincide with Shloss’s suggestions of possible incest – Locarno, November 1917 – he describes Giorgio, Lucia’s brother, molesting her at night before then going quite a bit further.
In order to prevent Lucia from telling anyone that he is sexually assaulting her, Pheby has Giorgio torture her pet rabbit (vaguely alternated with a chinchilla) to death – demonstrating what will happen to her if she tells – in a particularly disturbing scene. Along with Giorgio, the text also finds both Lucia’s father and her uncle Stanislaus equally guilty of sexually abusing her, and intimates that two abortions (one involving tapeworms, the other a curette) were carried out in order to get rid of the evidence. Violations continue as Lucia is taken to various sanatoriums: she is forced into a tub of 105º F water in order to induce fever; swaddled so as to restrict movement before prolonged submersion in an ice bath; injected with bovine serum derived from a premature cow foetus; and rendered unconscious so that all of her rotting teeth can be removed by a dentist.
Pheby describes scenarios of this register and many more in uniquely visceral, decisively rendered and unforgiving prose. Importantly he refrains from indulging in the popular reading that portrays Lucia as a free-spirited, dancing muse for her father; he instead highlights the disconcerting levels of trauma involved in the not-so-distant history of medical psychiatry that Lucia, along with countless others – particularly women – would have endured. But why has Pheby chosen to depict Lucia as one who lived out her life as a series of bodily violations – from brute incest to forced acts of medically sanctioned violence so gratuitously? A chapter that begins with the question ‘Under what circumstances may James Joyce beat his wife? [...] Under what circumstances may James Joyce beat his daughter?’ implies a self-referentially telling, thinly disguised aim of its own. The thematic quality of Lucia suggests that Pheby seeks to violate forms of censorship or imposed sanctity, however indirectly, by blaspheming the once impenetrable environs of Joycean biography.
Following the rabbit/chinchilla scene, Pheby writes: ‘All things that are possible are, in the absence of facts that have been destroyed that might have proved them incorrect, equally correct.’ This book, resoundingly graphic from beginning to end, launches a veritable Molotov cocktail of prose at the hallowed preoccupations of the Joyce Estate and the censorship concerning Lucia administered by her nephew Stephen Joyce in particular – who infamously burned material concerning her in the late 1980s. Pheby’s novel demonstrates that if access to facts is denied then problematic fictions will take their place. In the number of macabre and nightmarish scenes that make up his book, several of which depict James Joyce with considerable brutality – drunk on sherry, beating his wife and bearing himself down on his daughter – Pheby desecrates the tomb of traditional and more sanitised approaches to Joyce and his life, usurping Stephen Joyce’s stubborn attempts to protect them. In a number of scenes we find Lucia playing with matches, setting things alight. In the doll’s house of the Joycean legacy it seems Pheby has a box of matches of his own. Yet the garish prurience of Lucia recalls the paradox we find in reading Marquis De Sade. The sheer excess of De Sade’s depictions of sexual cruelty had the effect of neutering his prose; his exhaustive depictions of deprivation eventually desensitise the reader.
In fictional biography, especially one as graphically rendered as this, what responsibility is owed to the historical subject that informs the author’s central protagonist? Perhaps the answer is none. As Pheby writes in the acknowledgements section, ‘I have drawn on areas of expertise freely and without consideration for anything other than the artistic requirements of this book.’ (Lucia Joyce is not mentioned by name.) The artistic quality of this novel, with its tactile, penetrative and starkly disturbing scenes accomplishes its task: if its main character were not inspired by Lucia Joyce this novel would still stand as a work of commendable literary merit. But it is derived from her and her experience, and I believe this should have been forthrightly addressed either before or after the text, in order to preserve the dignity of the subject who inspired it.
One of the most formally interesting things about Lucia is that its chapters alternate with brief scenes of the excavation of an Egyptian tomb along with illustrations taken from priest Imhotep’s Book of Coming Forth by Day. Two explorers find a tomb of a mummified woman, though it appears that the sarcophagus has been opened, exposing a swathed face splattered with red paint, which also runs across the breasts and between the thighs of her etched depiction on the lid of the sarcophagi. These passages also progressively describe the process of mummification, including the method by which the corpse’s viscera are removed and placed in Canopic jars: in preserving the body so too is it emptied. While the Egyptologist in Pheby’s text ultimately seeks to venerate the disturbed site, this is done through the author’s own centrifugal method of desecration. Pheby renders his protagonist just like that unidentified mummy – preserved, but hollowed out. - Genevieve Sartor     

http://review31.co.uk/article/view/564/in-the-absence-of-facts

Alex Pheby, Playthings, Galley Beggar Press, 2015.


Read the first chapter here


Paul Schreber is a man who wants to go home – but can’t. He is a man crippled by an illness he doesn’t understand – and sometimes doesn’t even know he has. He's no condition to face the worst - but the worst keeps on happening to him. His family is disintegrating, past traumas are coming back to haunt him - and so are those troubling, seemingly laid-to-rest fears of persecution...

Paul Schreber is paranoid - and they really are out to get him. 

Playthings, Alex Pheby's astonishing second novel, delves deep into a disturbed mind - and in doing so, also unearths the roots of the great ills in the twentieth century, the psychological structure of fascism, the cancer of anti-Semitism, and the abuse of institutional power.  

Based on the true story of a man who became a case study for Freud and a foundation stone in the psychological make-up of the twentieth century, Playthings is an intense and poetic exploration about what it means to be human. It will shake you to the bone. -


He pulled his coat around his shoulders and hesitated, thinking that he might turn back and have the girl bring him the calfskin gloves and perhaps even the Russian fur hat, but when he looked back down the street it was not there. His house was not there.


"If Playthings is a neuronovel then it's arguably the best neuronovel ever written, particularly in its depiction of memory and the instability of personality. But it transcends any such category and is simply a superb novel tout court, Kafkaesque in its nightmarish fluency and a powerful exposition of Kant's celebrated view that 'the madman is a waking dreamer.'" --Literary Review

 

"Playthings gets into the head, with tender attentiveness, of a man having a psychotic breakdown and takes up the story where the Schreber left off." --The Lancet

 

"An incredible work of fiction, all the more fascinating for being based on an actual case. The writing is taut, intense, the everyday world a phantom which Schreber tries so desperately to attain. His disturbance of mind is not so much explained as experienced. This story is powerful and moving; I would recommend it to anyone with an interest in the humanity behind mental illness." --Never Imitate

 

"Writing of the highest order." --Neil Griffiths

 

"Creating something out of this nothing is not an easy task but with this most unusual novel, the author has succeeded in doing just that." --Irish Times

A highly detailed, emotional plunge into the mind of a disturbed man.
Englishman Pheby’s (Grace, 2009) unique second novel draws on a famous psychiatric case from the 19th century for its main character, Daniel Paul Schreber, a judge of the High Court of Saxony. In 1903, Schreber wrote Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, which became a subject of interest to other novelists as well as Sigmund Freud. Pheby’s novel picks up Schreber’s story later, when he suffers a third bout of mental illness. There are echoes of Nikolai Gogol’s “Diary of a Madman” and Franz Kafka’s nightmarish writings. Writing in the third person in a semi–stream of consciousness manner, Pheby invites us to enter deep into Schreber’s mind as he experiences frustrations, delusions, and fantasies. The novel opens with Schreber frantically searching his house for his wife, Sabine. He finds her on the floor; she’s had a seizure: “What was this? This panting thing? Moaning...grinning mannequin...his wife’s form, but without her soul.” He leaves the house and wanders around, encountering various people on the streets. His daughter, Fridoline, tries to get him to come back; he refuses. He then finds himself in a hospital under the care of Müller, an orderly, and Dr. Rössler, who has read Schreber’s memoir. Pheby meticulously chronicles Schreber’s treatment and his recurring nightmares and tortuous memories of his strict father, who probably mistreated his children. Schreber ruminates on religion—was he a mere “plaything of the Lower God?” A mysterious Jewish gentleman, who may or may not be real, haunts him. Schreber is the book’s sole focus, always front and center, but that center is askew.
An intense, immersive reading experience that provides real insight into those afflicted with severe mental illness. - Kirkus


This intricate and intelligent novel by Pheby (Grace) is based on the true story of a respected 19th-century German judge, Daniel Paul Schreber. In 1903, he wrote about his experience with the midlife onset of a delusional mental disorder and treatment in an asylum in Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, which was later interpreted by Freud. Pheby opens the novel as Schreber’s wife suffers a stroke, precipitating his third major psychotic episode. Readers learn that Schreber is not always convinced that other people are real: they are “playthings” of various gods, and stop existing when they are not being witnessed. Through Schreber’s interactions with orderlies, doctors, family members, and other asylum inmates (who might or might not be real), readers learn about his difficult childhood, in particular his strict, demanding father. Pheby uses a close third-person perspective to zoom into Schreber’s mind during his periods of lucidity, or semi-lucidity. He’s keen to return home in time for Christmas, and seemingly held more or less against his will. Gradually, readers realize that he has been ill for some years and does not even always recognize his own family. The effort to discern what is real effectively transports readers into Schreber’s experience and tragedy. - Publishers Weekly


In 1903 Daniel Paul Schreber, a high-ranking judge coming to the end of a severe psychotic episode, published an account of his illness. It has become one of the most studied books in psychiatric history. Sigmund Freud wrote a case study on Schreber (pictured), as did Jacques Lacan, and Playthings is not the first novel about him. Alex Pheby puts us disturbingly close to this troubled individual, but pointedly opts for third person instead of first: throughout this compelling novel the space between reader and Schreber becomes a sombre reminder of how alone we all are.
This was especially true of Schreber, who when ill believed that all other people were “false” beings: rag dolls, playthings of the “upper and lower gods”. “These people were nothing,” Pheby relates early in the novel, “their lives ended the moment they were out of his sight.” We join Schreber on the brink of his third and final period of madness. His first struck in 1884, and a decade later he fell ill again, spending the next nine years in asylums.
Alongside the delusions described in Schreber’s book, his illness manifested in other ways: transvestism, groping (himself and others) and bellowing. He passed in and out of lucidity, a state Pheby recreates by only giving us access to moments when he has some amount of control and awareness. This means it is difficult to know, from scene to scene, whether an hour has passed, or a week, or months. Pheby’s writing is elegant and straightforward, but the discontinuous structure of the book is not, and the clarity of the prose can be deceptive: certain characters and events presented as real turn out not to be; others we are left to wonder about.
The way the prose crisscrosses the unmarked border between reality and delusion recalls two very different novellas: Georg Büchner’s Lenz, another fusion of documented madness and fiction, and Evelyn Waugh’s The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, in which an alcoholic writer’s hallucinations are initially presented as indistinguishable from actual events: like Schreber, Pinfold is nonplussed by what is (or is not) happening.
What was the root of Schreber’s madness? Many insist his father, a doctor who devised faddish methods of childrearing, was a monster to his family, and Pheby returns to this abusive past at various points of Schreber’s increasingly lengthy confinement. The man controlling that confinement is Doctor Rössler, who has an infuriating ability to ignore his patient. Every attempt Schreber makes to have a profitable conversation, whether with his wife, his adopted daughter or his warder Müller, is frustrated. Those between Schreber and Rössler would be hilarious if they weren’t so painful.
Fittingly for a book about a psychoanalytical subject, Playthings is swollen with buried truths: beneath Schreber’s madness, Pheby argues, lies his father’s cruelty; Schreber’s adopted daughter might in fact be his wife’s illegitimate child; the Schreber home in an affluent Dresden suburb is built over a slum: (the ground was cleared, the impoverished residents moved on); Schreber’s room in the asylum is well appointed, but he is warned there is “a place below”, cells “from which people never return”. Every action, every situation, is influenced by what lies beneath it.
These instances are not always malignant. The book’s final chapter might describe thoughts that “fill the mind of a man who has lost everything, and who has withdrawn inside himself and found nothing of his own to cling to”, but Pheby nevertheless performs a kindness on Schreber’s behalf. He loses himself in memories of a happy summer, just before his father died, when that tyrannical figure became mellow and kind. By obscuring the desolate present behind a happier past, some of the sting is drawn from words the real Schreber wrote in a 1901 postscript to his memoir: “I harbour the wish that when my last hour finally strikes I will no longer find myself in an asylum, but in orderly domestic life surrounded by near relatives, as I may need more loving care than I could get in an asylum.” It is appealing to think Schreber’s madness eventually freed him from the horror his life had become. - Chris Power
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/nov/20/plaything-alex-pheby-review-novel-daniel-paul-schreber-mental-illness

When a writer casts a historical figure as the subject of a novel, the intrepid reader may ask why an element of nonfiction is needed to create a work of fiction, and how that work of fiction may expand or complicate a biography. This is the challenge Alex Pheby has set for himself in composing his second novel, “Playthings.”

Daniel Paul Schreber, a prominent German judge of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, suffered three yearslong bouts of paranoid schizophrenia. Schreber documented the first and second breakdowns in his book, “Memoirs of My Nervous Illness,” but he never recovered from the final one — the premise of Pheby’s skillfully rich novel.

A close third-person voice situates “Playthings” in an eerie place between a lived account of insanity and a careful observation of a mind’s unraveling. “Coal dropped through the chute, sending a hint of black rising up the stairs into the hall,” the book opens. “Nothing to be concerned about. Quite the opposite, really. Some coal dust mingling with the scent of fresh flowers.”

“Just a normal day, like every other,” the judge repeats to himself in the dawn of his madness, insisting on what is not true. His wife, Sabine, has had a seizure and is incapacitated on the floor. “That is not my wife,” he says before rushing out in search of her, shoving a maid “too roughly, much too roughly, clumsy brute, knocking vases over, was he a child? Was he incapable of looking where he was going, like all men? And they call themselves civilized, traipsing mud through the house.”

He soon lands in an asylum, where a doctor tells him, “It is felt that your treatment might be best carried out under close observation.” Schreber objects: “Who feels it? I do not feel it.” He begs for his wife, demands to be sent home, or to be cured. Agile and wily, Pheby’s sentences flit in the weather of Schreber’s sanity, yet they are always buoyed by the judge’s half-hampered intellect and rationality. It’s the most torturous variety of mental illness — one that almost understands itself.

Schreber is physically abused by an orderly whose brother was executed under one of the judge’s rulings. The orderly justifies his brutality as obligation, saying: “You understand that, right? Just following the law? Right, Judge? Nothing personal. Blind justice.”

Hierarchies and judgments — past and present — tortuously strip bodies of their autonomy; in “Playthings” only children seem to notice these cruelties. When Fridoline, Schreber’s daughter, objects to her father’s inhumane treatment, even he defends it. “My sweet girl, you mustn’t upset yourself! Silly thing! It’s all perfectly fine and normal. … A little holiday, nothing more!” Yet in a childhood flashback to what seems to be the revolution of 1848, Schreber accepts the lie of his white superiority and tells his Jewish neighbors, “If you were set fire to in your beds then that would be no one’s fault but your own.” The Jewish boy he bullied as a child is one of the visions that now haunt him.

In the fiction of Schreber’s madness, every person is, as he puts it, a “plaything of the Lower God.” In the reality that Schreber lived, the mentally ill were playthings of the “well,” children were playthings of adults, and minorities were playthings of the state. It is this economy of cruelty — not repressed homosexuality, as Freud suggested in an essay on Schreber’s memoir — that is the seed of Schreber’s suffering. Pheby illustrates this point with compassion and subtlety in “Playthings”; the book’s hybrid position between the historical and the fictional makes it all the more potent. - Catherine Lacey

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/10/books/review/playthings-alex-pheby.html

The German judge Daniel Paul Schreber is a fascinating subject for a book. A respected legal authority and a well-known figure in Dresden society, he was hit in middle age with the sudden onset of psychosis. What would nowadays be diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenia was, on the cusp of the 20th century, believed to be dementia praecox, or premature mental decline.

Among other delusions, Schreber became obsessed with female sexuality, wanting to “succumb” to sexual intercourse as a woman and believing, in later stages of the psychosis, that God was changing him into female form.

These thoughts are recorded in a book he wrote about his bouts of psychosis, Memoirs of My Mental Illness, which was elemental to the development of psychoanalysis after Sigmund Freud used it in his studies. Freud believed Schreber’s mental health was affected by a repressed homosexuality, stemming from intense and sometimes violent relationships with his revered father and brother.

Repressions of childhood are central to Alex Pheby’s complex second novel, Playthings. From Essex, the author has a doctorate in critical and creative writing from the University of East Anglia. He presents a challenging narrative that hops from Schreber as a severely disturbed adult back to the traumas of childhood. 

Pheby’s novel is published by Galley Beggar Press, the independent English publisher behind Eimear McBride’s debut, A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing. There are similarities: dark pasts, sordid sexual encounters, dissociated voices, modernist styles. But where Girl is passionate, intense, violent, its second-person voice dragging the reader into the distress, Playthings works at a remove. Its fragmented scenes and Schreber’s unreliable narrator create distance.

Pheby eschews a linear plot for an episodic structure that mirrors the disjointed workings of the judge’s mind. It is a fitting form that leaves the reader reeling as they are jolted from scenes of public perversion, to the realities of life inside an asylum in the early 1900s, to the impact that Schreber’s condition has on his family, most poignantly his adopted daughter Frida.

Having received treatment on a number of other occasions, Schreber’s psychosis returns when his wife Sabine has a stroke in the family home. Unable to process the trauma, Schreber escapes into town, gets knocked down by a tram, publicly molests a young woman and ends up incarcerated in an asylum under the care of Dr Rössler and his menacing orderly, Müller.

Once inside, Schreber’s thoughts enter a full-blown imaginary world where he is visited by Alexander, “a mysterious Jewish gentleman” from his past. Prompted by these visits, Schreber recounts the formative events of his childhood.

Amid the innocent play-acting with his brothers and sisters, more complex issues of gender identity and sexuality emerge. “Paul, you be mother if Anna won’t do it,” says eldest son Gustav. Moments later, young Paul has baby Klara suckling at his prepubescent chest: “Her little hands gripped the air, looking for something and her wet lips were over your chest, on the flat, bony ground of it.”

His father’s violent reaction to this act will have life-long consequences for Schreber, who learns from an early age that being effeminate “was the worst thing a boy could be”. Other interesting themes are also explored – sexuality and power, transgression, lineage, and a wider backdrop of a burgeoning anti-Semitism that would soon explode in Europe.

Headings lead into each of Schreber’s episodes, giving a Victorian feel to the text that is appropriate to era. Written in the present tense and sometimes with a humorous tone, they give an omniscient quality. Schreber is relating his own story but this voice in the background reminds us how little we can trust him. The shifts in voice and tense can be confusing though, creating a barrier between reader and character.

Sensual quality

Pheby’s powers of description – there is a wonderful sensual quality to his writing – and his knack for dialogue go some way to knocking it down again. The blurring between delusion and reality in the judge’s mind is also vividly depicted. To Schreber, only the past seems real, with whole scenes from childhood remembered with extraordinary clarity. He is incapable of living in the present, viewing the people around him as “playthings” or “flimsy ripples”.

The world is “nothing to him, because they were all nothing.” Creating something out of this nothing is not an easy task but with this most unusual novel, the author has succeeded in doing just that. - Sarah Gilmartin

https://www.irishtimes.com/profile/sarah-gilmartin-7.3357385

As I was checking Galley Beggar’s catalogue, there was one novel that particularly caught my attention: Playthings (2015) by Alex Pheby (@alexpheby), a lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Greenwich. The book has been described by the British magazine Literary Review as “the best neuro-novel ever written” and it was shortlisted for the £30,000 Wellcome Book Prize in 2016—this is an award that celebrates the topics of health and medicine in literature (fiction and non-fiction).

Playthings fictionalises the story of Daniel Paul Schreber (1842–1911), a German judge suffering from schizophrenia, who authored the book Memoirs of My Nervous Illness that was interpreted by Sigmund Freud and became quite influential in the history of psychiatry and psychoanalysis.
Not every page of Playthings was engrossing but overall, I can say, it was really my kind of novel. Bold, deep, terrific. Reading it was an intense, even scary experience. It was definitely gruelling—the last time I felt so drained was while going through The Melancholy of Resistance by Hungarian novelist László Krasznahorkai. Nevertheless, I found the novel thrilling and didn’t feel like keeping it away.

The official description mentions that the book “delves deep into a disturbed mind” and it also has a political side—according to the publisher, it “explores the roots of the great ills in the twentieth century, the psychological structure of fascism, the cancer of anti-Semitism, and the abuse of institutional power”. The anti-Semitic bit I won’t cover here, let me just concentrate on the psychological structure of fascism as it is unravelled in Playthings.
As the story begins, we find Schreber—retired Senatpräsident of the High Court of Saxony—as a man with a weak grip on reality. He is not sure what illness he suffers from, he is not even sure that he suffers from an illness. He experiences a “poverty of will”, an “impotence” as he goes about doing daily tasks. It is written: “he ran down the stairs, heels clacking loud, with his hand on the banister and each foot kicking out to the side. They threatened to slip on the varnish, to send him falling back, to crack his skull. Clumsy brute. Silly man.” He finds it difficult to recognise and connect with his wife Sabine and their adopted daughter Fridoline.
In Schreber’s eyes, the world with all its components loses its soul and substance. For him, there are no houses, trees, railings, streetlamps—in their place are only “the representations” of these things. Even human beings are nothing, they are clicking and whirring puppets, fleetingly improvised soulless automata, “playthings of the Lower God” who makes and unmakes them for the purpose of deceiving Schreber—the man keeps mumbling this to whoever he meets.
Who is this “Lower God”? At one point, Schreber reveals: “Like Sabine, like Fridoline, like the little ones – you are playthings of Ariman, the Lower God.” Ariman, I believe, means “Ahriman” (aka Angra Mainyu), the omnimalevolent destructive spirit of dualistic Persian/Zoroastrian mythology, the evil twin of the omnibenevolent creative spirit Ahura Mazda. The Lower God of Schreber may be read as a metaphor for a worldly dictator.
Schreber is committed to an asylum. He recalls his past traumas as his mind continues to disintegrate. The memories of a strict father come to him along with mechanistic imagery—visions of clocks, dreams of cloned men. Extreme discipline and order and obedience and repetition. A revelatory moment for me occurred when Schreber says:

“Fridoline! Listen to me! My papa – he knew how terrible the world was. The things inside: inside his head, inside the belly, everywhere. You must remain strong, Fridoline. Take your mother’s example! You must take the world and write on it – make it obey your will. Do not obey its. Do you understand me?…The world cannot be allowed to dominate you. Other people cannot be allowed to dominate you. You must dominate them! Do you understand me, Frida? This is what my father knew…there is no choice. The world is chaos, there is no justice, you must enforce yourself on it. There is no other way.”

This is what, I suppose, is the heart of fascism—acute insecurity turned into an absolute imposition of power.
I will not give away too much of the plot and reveal what happens to the protagonist but just end with a comment on why I think books like Playthings must be more popular. A lot of big publishers maintain that readers prefer something “relatable”, that they only want to engage with characters in whom they can see themselves immediately.
Well, fine—but that’s only one purpose of literature—to offer assurance that we are not alone in whatever we are going through. Literature must also be allowed to give us an insight into experiences and emotions that are particularly foreign to us. Or how else will we develop empathy? How would we reach out to those with needs different from our own? In the character of Schreber, I found somebody who was alien to me in many ways. And I am certain that if I ever encounter an individual like him in real life, I would look upon and treat them with a greater degree of compassion.
I would recommend this novel to those who are looking for a challenging read, and of course, to lovers of psychology and political science.
onartandaesthetics.com/2017/11/21/playthings-by-alex-pheby-an-intense-exploration-of-paranoia-and-the-abuse-of-power/


Playthings, Alex Pheby’s second novel, is based on the case of Daniel Paul Schreber, a 19th century German judge afflicted by schizophrenia. Unusually for a patient of that era, he wrote an extensive account of his psychotic experiences and long periods of hospitalization, later published as Memoirs of my Nervous Illness. The case has been made famous by Sigmund Freud who wrote his own interpretation of Schreber’s illness, although the two never met in person.
Crucial to the case is a knowledge of Schreber’s family background. His father, Moritz Schreber, was a medical doctor and child-rearing expert whose many books on the subject achieved a popularity which seems astonishing when judged by today’s standards of child care. He it was who devised the harsh and punitive regime of upbringing imposed on his own children from the age of just a few months, a regime described by  Morton Schatzman, author of Soul Murder – an analysis of the Schreber case – as ‘household totalitarianism’.
Freud’s and Schatzman’s are probably the most prominent of the analytical works published on Schreber and they are at odds with each other, Freud linking his psychotic condition to repressed homosexual desire for his father and his brother, Schatzman imputing it rather to his father’s repressive disciplinarianism. In Playthings Pheby seems to subscribe to the latter theory.
The question of whether or not any author can adequately represent the reality of another person by attempting to think himself into that person’s consciousness and portraying the findings in a work of ‘faction’ is a controversial one. Yet any rendering of the past is mediated through the specific consciousness of the narrator, with all that that implies in terms of formative forces acting on the narrative produced. Indeed we might question to what extent Schreber himself was a reliable narrator.
Memoirs was written towards the end of Schreber’s second hospitalisation, when he was trying to secure his release. There is undoubtedly something of the splendid in Memoirs, with its magnificent architecture of exuberant hallucinatory imagery and its elaborately surreal cosmology. Yet it is recorded with almost an air of detachment, as if written by a third person rather than directly by the experiencer himself. There isn’t the sense of confusion, disorientation, menace even, that might be expected to flavour a first-hand account. As Rosemary Dinnage comments in her Introduction to the New York Review Books Classics edition: ‘What remains missing up to the end is feeling itself: no tears are recorded.’ Was this a deliberate strategy on Schreber’s part, adopted to help him secure his release? At the very least, we should bear in mind that, although based on notes made while his illness was at its height, it was rendered into its final form when he was in the recovery stage, when some of the vigour of the original experiences would be lost, even in his own memory.
Pheby could have chosen the time frame of the novel to correspond with Schreber’s first or second hospitalisation, the periods covered by Memoirs; he could then have produced a dramatisation of Schreber’s own testimony which would, of course, have resulted in an entirely different kind of novel, and one possibly less challenging for both writer and reader.
He opted instead to set it in Schreber’s third, and last, hospitalisation, for which we have no reports from Schreber and little other information.  This, of course, gives Pheby greater creative freedom and, given his stated aim of ‘exploring the psychological structure of fascism, the cancer of anti-Semitism, and the abuse of institutional power’, it is understandable why he would have felt the need for this freedom.
The style Pheby has adopted for Playthings seems to be inspired by that of Memoirs. As with Memoirs, I found it curiously devoid of emotion. There is a similar sense of dry detachment in the narration. Schreber’s mind never seems quite out of control. His conversations with hallucinated individuals struck me as too measured and coherent to be consistent with the kind of dialogue experienced in psychotic conditions. Even Schreber himself, for all his control, goes further; for example,  in Memoirs he refers to the voices as “nonsensical twaddle”; or again, “……..the talk of the voices had already become mostly an empty babel of ever-recurring monotonous phrases in tiresome repetition; on top of this they were rendered grammatically incomplete by the omission of words and even syllables.” There is none of this raggedness of speech in Playthings, little of the flamboyant surreality that is found in Memoirs.
There is also surprisingly little of the religious preoccupations that feature so prominently in Schreber’s own writing. Instead much of the action is devoted to filling in Schreber’s backstory as he remembers or relives events from his strict childhood. Some of those events are based on known fact, such as his father’s accident, and others invented; for example, when the young Schreber put his baby sister to his own nipple. But whether real or fictional, they are designed to provide an explanatory framework for Schreber’s later condition.
The writing style is almost minimalist, but also studded with idiosyncratic descriptive detail. Pheby is master of the eloquent phrase: a hand ‘that was thin to the point of brittleness – like a twig one finds on the forest floor late into the autumn‘; anger which ‘filled the room like steam from an untended kettle‘.  The menace is allowed to grow quietly, particularly via the person of Muller, the aggrieved and sinister orderly, who comes into his full sadistic own when Schreber is confined, helpless, in an isolation cell for recalcitrant patients.
In reading Playthings I found that I had to stop fairly early on to find out more about Schreber, his illness and his work before reading any further. In fact, throughout the book I had to keep checking the record in this way and I feel that without that background information I would have had less appreciation of the book. As yet Pheby has no information about Playthings on his website. I hope this will be rectified. It would be fascinating to get more insight into the author ’s thinking about both Schreber himself and the creation of the novel.  It would also be illuminating to have the book reviewed by someone who has experience of a psychotic condition similar to Schreber’s. Only such a person can truly judge to what extent Pheby succeeds in conveying ’what it’s like’ (in Nagel’s sense) to have this kind of mental disturbance.
But perhaps the novel form is unsuited to accommodating a full-blown representation of schizophrenia. We expect a novel to make some sort of sense; we expect to be able to arrive at some understanding of the characters; we expect, however loosely, a beginning, a middle and an end. Playthings provides all this, and given the difficulty of finding these criteria realised in actual cases of psychosis we can hardly expect fiction to achieve it without a degree of compromise.
Although I can’t say I enjoyed reading Playthings in any recreational sense – it’s not a novel I would recommend for a long-haul flight –  I found it stimulating to read in the context of the wider Schreber literature and as a spur to further reflection on the validity of the biographical novel as a literary genre. - Hilda Reilly
https://emotionsblog.history.qmul.ac.uk/2015/10/review-playthings-by-alex-pheby/


“Nothing to be concerned about” Daniel Paul Schreber reassures himself in the opening paragraph of Alex Pheby’s second novel. Just an ordinary day in a middle-class Dresden household as they prepare for an evening party, so why is he so disturbed about the sounds and smells of activity? Why is he so nervous about interrupting his wife? But with his past experience of psychosis, the retired High Court judge is not only anxious, but anxious about his anxiety, and with good reason, as these feelings are the precursors of bizarre thoughts and behaviours which will result in his being incarcerated in a lunatic asylum for several years.
“The Schreber case” is of paramount importance in psychoanalytic circles since both Freud and Lacan published interpretations of his illness based on readings of his memoir published in 1903. Although not the first novelisation of his account, Playthings is certainly a moving and thought-provoking one, exploring the experience of severe mental illness, its potential causes and treatment, in a manner not only of historical interest but pertinent to the societal response to mental disturbance in the present day.
How to represent that disturbance on the page; how to reflect an experience that is largely beyond words without confounding the reader? By writing in the close third person, Alex Pheby invites the reader into Schreber’s mind with just enough distance for us to question what we find there. In the early chapters, we witness his confusion as, beginning with the shock of finding his wife lying in an unnatural position following a stroke, he “discovers” that the familiar people and landmarks have been replaced by imposters (p10-11):
She would not let herself become like this. She was a rock. A mighty fortress … A Plaything of the Lower God? … this thing cradled in his arms, this grinning mannequin. Its skin was stretched pale and taut over the bones of the skull, taking on the appearance of wax, like dressmaker’s dummy. It was like a sculpture modelled on his wife’s form, but without her soul.
While the doctor arranges to take her to the surgery, Schreber rushes out into the street to look for her. As his daughter tries to persuade him home, he seems about to find sanctuary, until he looks to where his house should be and finds it isn’t there. The reader can’t help but empathise with his quest for safety, even as we despair at how he jeopardises his chances of finding it.
When we meet him later in the asylum, he seems more lucid. His doctor, Rössler, and the attendant, Müller, seem neglectful in their dismissal of his requests to return home. However, Schreber’s illness is now manifest less in his preoccupations, than in the gaps between the periods of clarity. More time has elapsed between these scenes than either Schreber or the reader first imagines, so that he’s still wondering about whether he will be allowed home for Christmas in the middle of June. The asylum staff and his occasional visitors, if we can trust them, suggest far more alarming behaviours than Schreber himself can acknowledge, emphasising the loneliness of a reality no-one else shares.
Interspersed with the here and now of Schreber’s tragic existence within the asylum, memories of his childhood, prompted by Alexander “the Jew”, provide a possible psychological explanation for his inability to live with himself. His father was a harsh disciplinarian, punishing the boy for any signs of supposedly effeminate sensitivity, who believed that his sadistic methods would enable his children to thrive (p119):
If he was stern then it was through love, hadn’t he said so a hundred times? Like a general is stern with his men, in their best interest, to make strength in them that might one day save their lives. He was no less loving of his children, so that whatever he did, however they imagined they suffered, this was a loving kindness.
How terrifying it must have been for those children when, after an iron ladder falls on his head, their strong and powerful father is weakened by migrainous episodes in which he struggles even to climb the stairs. While Müller might taunt him about the harshness of his judicial decisions in his former career, for Schreber it is the oedipal sins against his father that disturb him most (p178):
he knew that he was stained, as a man is always stained, and no office or garment could stand between him and his own judgement. It was not those small things of which he was accused, the deaths he had personally ordered, or the weeping, or the misery, but a much greater crime: a crime of the soul, to have lived when his father had died, when his brother had died, to have exceeded his proper authority.
The characters of Müller and Alexander the Jew point to the social context of Schreber’s illness, in the anti-Semitism and class inequalities of the time, to the extent of a slum being cleared for him to build his house. In the asylum too there’s murk hidden underneath in the dark (and presumably madness-exacerbating) cells where the hopeless cases languish.
Along with the references to buried secrets, there are several possible interpretations of the “playthings” of the title. The inmates are the playthings of the staff who arrogantly experiment with various improbable remedies without effecting a cure. The Schreber children are similarly toyed with by their father whose regime robs them of the freedom to play as children should. The strangely-altered figures of Schreber’s incipient psychosis are like puppets, as are his stillborn children, while his emasculated father is as a mobile as a statue. Yet in his deluded grandiosity, Schreber has perceived his entire community as his playground, to do with as he wished.
My only reservation is the (very) occasional diversion from Schreber’s point of view into Müller’s; otherwise Playthings is a highly engaging novel about individual and societal psychosis. - Anne Goodwin
shinynewbooks.co.uk/shiny-new-books-archive/issue-8-archive/fiction08/playthings-by-alex-pheby/




We celebrate the achievements of physicians and researchers at the cutting edge of medicine, but the patients whose lives are central to such advances mostly pass unknown.
One striking exception is the 19th-century German judge, Daniel Paul Schreber, one of modern psychiatry’s most fascinating case studies. His remarkable life has inspired film and nonfiction treatments, and is now explored in Playthings, a haunting new novel by Alex Pheby.                  

Schreber had what we today call paranoid schizophrenia, labelled in the late 19th century as “dementia praecox”. He was institutionalised three times, and his case is inextricably linked to the early history of both psychoanalysis and modern psychiatric medicine. His sister Anna married Carl Jung, and Sigmund Freud made extensive use of Schreber’s published accounts of his delusions as he developed his analytic theories.
Yet Sonnenstein asylum, where Schreber spent his final years, was by that time moving backwards from its progressive treatment of mental illness. By the time of Schreber’s death there in 1911, this once-groundbreaking “therapeutic asylum” had regressed to a dumping ground for the incurable. Schreber’s life ended in almost medieval conditions of confinement and semi-starvation. It was his strange fate to occupy the juncture between progressive and retrograde understandings of mental illness.
Soulless automata
And what an astonishing form Schreber’s illness took. The retired judge believed himself to be a “plaything of the Lower God”, and that the world around him had no substantial reality. To him, people were: “Puppets, soulless automata, clicking and whirring and chirruping to each other on a flat street of false houses and dust blown by the perishing wind.”
What drew Freud to Schreber’s story were his sexual obsessions, for the judge believed himself desired by God. “In my belly is an octopus,” he tells his doctors, “and in it are God’s children. Living children. There are things I must not think of.”
“Things that must not be thought of” are, of course, the very things we should give ourselves permission to think about. Pheby has been thinking about them for some time. He has written about mental illness before, in his 2009 debut Grace, whose protagonist escapes from a secure psychiatric hospital.
But in Playthings, he doesn’t merely narrate Schreber’s illness. He invites us to inhabit it – using writing that is both precise and beautiful. His disjointed prose conveys disordered thinking. Readers are fully immersed in paranoid psychosis, yet unlike Schreber, remain in full possession of their faculties.
It’s an experience that remains with you long after the last page has been turned and the door to Schreber’s asylum cell has swung open. Conjuring his delusions so acutely reminds us how far, despite neuroscience’s best efforts, we are from understanding the interior state. - Vic James
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn28702-playthings-immerse-yourself-in-a-story-of-mental-illness/



Alex Pheby, Afterimages of Schreber, Colico Press, 2014.


A hybrid of fiction, biography, and literary theory dealing with the schizophrenic German judge Daniel Paul Schreber's overlooked final period of incarceration in an asylum near Leipzig.

Paul Schreber's immortal book, the title of which should be Great Thoughts of a Nervous Patient rather than Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (1903), continues to inspire interpretations of his life and ideas. Schreber has disappeared from the radar of psychiatrists and psychoanalysts but continues to fascinate interpreters creating films, plays, operas—and novels (e.g., Huizing 2008), the latest being Afterimages of Schreber, by the English novelist Alex Pheby. This work alternates between fiction and academic nonfiction, freely mixing fact and fantasy. The book's main text, 134 pages long, is preceded by six pages of references titled “Repeatedly Read.” It is followed by an appendix of 161 pages; there is no index. The experiment is both pleasing and problematic.

The book opens with an imaginary monologue by Schreber, followed by a fictional undated letter from Schreber's physician, Dr. Dannenberg (see Lothane 1992, p. 88) to Schreber's adoptive daughter Fridoline about her father's recent admission to Leipzig-Dösen psychiatric hospital. The letter states that a fictional Fraulein Gerhardt and her mother, Frau Gerhardt, have “no intention of pressing charges [against Schreber], and the police will not be levying any fines for the disturbing of the peace” (p. 9). Also mentioned in the letter is the real Dr. Rössler (the correct spelling is Rösler). Whereas there is only one signed chart note by Rösler about the moribund Schreber on April 13, 1911, one day before his death, Pheby invents an ongoing analysis of Schreber by this doctor from 1907 to 1911. In a section dated “3rd May '07” Pheby declares:

cursory readings of Santner [1996], Lothane, Freud [1911], and Israels [1989]…. Clinically, I feel myself steering away from straight Freudian reading of paranoia…. My initial thoughts are that I can use Schreber's hospital notes [1907-1911] stating that he was convinced that his head was alive while his body rotted away as the basis for a continuation of the messianic theme of the Memoirs. … Will finish Lothane and Israels and make a start on Niederland [1974]. Hopefully there will be some clarification of the antagonism shown in Lothane for Niederland's approach. While it is impossible to question his scholarship, Lothane's overstated distaste for Niederland, and Israels's outright hostility, make me instinctively suspicious of their arguments [pp. 10-11]. - Henry Zvi Lothane

http://www.pep-web.org/document.php?id=apa.063c.0621a

Alex Pheby, Grace, Two Ravens Press, 2009.


'Grace' tells the story of Peterman, an inmate at Greenwood Walls secure hospital, whose dramatic escape leaves him seriously injured, lost in the snow. Half-delirious, he encounters an old woman and a young girl who live deep in the nearby forest.

I was in the mood for colour and action.   So it was that the first sentence on the back cover of Alex Pheby’s debut novel  promising an inmate on the run from a secure mental hospital pushed Grace to the top of the TBR.  The vividness of the first paragraphs pulled me right into the alternate world.

 Mr Peterman ran away.

It was snowing hard, but he left that place and ran until his lungs sang and his skin burned with cold.

And then he stopped.

He was in a forest, straining to catch his breath.  The air tasted of antiseptic.  Pine fresh.  It was like his room, only richer and cleaner.  It filled his mounth and his throat and soon his chest was on fire with it.  It was invigorating. Or sickening.  Or both.

He shot a look over his shoulder. Nothing – no-one – just the snow, the trees, and the feel of his chest rising and falling against the slick polyester hospital smock.  The fine black hairs on his bare arms bristled in the wind, and the back of his hands were red.  Snow shone white all around.  Was this freedom?

I’m with Mr Peterman.  Feeling his exuberant though shortlived exhilaration.  He is soon despondent of the snow which is inconveniently creating tracks for his hunters to follow.  Despondency turns to despair when he gets caught in a bear trap and ends up dependant on an unnamed hag and her granddaughter for his survival.

Like the bear trap, or even a Grimms fairytale, the plot of Pheby’s novel snaps in sudden nightmarish ways.  Mr Peterman trades imprisonment in the hospital for captivity in the woods during which the relationship between him and his rescuers/captors is both vividly realistic and increasingly surreal.  What is a sane reader to make of it all?  In a blinding flash I remember that Peterman is mad and, therefore, a reliably unreliable narrator.  Of course, this is all an illusion.
I am vindicated in the second half of the novel when Peterman is recaptured and taken back to the hospital.  His psychoanalyst interprets his fantasies in the same way as I do.  Normality is once more in sight.  Or is it?  There’s something OCD about the doctor – a specific history and a personal determination to prove her professional worth which is clouding her judgment.  And just when I have a grip on this, the fairytale/nightmare  in  the woods reemerges and subverts my expectations once more.
Where does that leave me?  Hunting for my own gingerbread house … needing to reread to establish the lines of reality because of the expert blurring of its fringes.

Dedicated to Xanthe, the author’s stillborn daughter, Grace is also a poignant study of loss and the ensuing madness of grief.  It’s no coincidence that Peterman’s equilibrium slips catastrophically at the moment he loses contact with the young girl he comes to love as the daughter he never had.  A girl he finally calls Grace – a name with as many interpretations as the text of Pheby’s novel.  Take your pick, they probably all apply with a bittersweet poignancy to the relationship of Peterman and Grace and, by extension, to the author and his own child. In the final words of the novel, “such is the way of things between fathers and daughters that, even if they never met again, it was enough.”
- https://lizzysiddal.wordpress.com/2009/02/04/grace-alex-pheby/


I had two over-arching concerns during my late teens and early twenties. The first was socialism. The second was sex. It is a popular misconception that women of the early twentieth century were politically and sexually disinterested. In my experience nothing could have been further from the truth. The most committed radicals in both fields were inevitably female and, even taken as a species, the women put to shame the stodgy mass of masculinity – at least as it was represented by those who had avoided the call to arms.
Grace is a dark fairytale reminiscent of the work of Angela Carter. The novel begins with Peterman, an escapee from a mental hospital, running hell for leather through a forest. The snow comes down and he plunges on until he finds himself in the jaws of a bear trap, whereupon he meets an old woman, Granny, and a girl. Granny and the girl change everything for Peterman, and through them he is able to find a little happiness for the first time since he was institutionalized.
Granny and the girl nurse Peterman back to health, and Peterman comes to love the girl as a daughter. Peterman’s mind is perhaps not the most reliable indicator of events, so when the group becomes fractured the reader questions if the girl and the old woman ever existed. It’s interesting that the only time Peterman is particularly convincing as a trustworthy witness is when he is in the company of these two women.
Grace struck me as a feminist text and ninety-nine-year-old Granny was undoubtedly my favourite character. There are stories within stories and Granny’s transgressive tale of debauchery fascinated and engrossed me. Its tone was very different from the tone of the stories offered by Peterman and the girl and for me it was the most brilliant element of this novel. The novel’s consideration of fatherhood and father-daughter love was possibly the most emotional element and it is woven throughout the book, right until the final line.
Alex Pheby, a guest contributor to Vulpes Libris, once wrote us a hugely popular soapbox piece urging us to ‘Buy Difficult Books‘ and yes Grace is a somewhat difficult book. It took me a while to immerse myself in Grace‘s pages, and in order to do so I had to read the novel in total silence with no distractions, as otherwise I’d find my eye slipping down the page and I’d have to reread sections. However, when I gave it a hundred percent of my attention, I was captivated and delighted by the storytelling. This is vivid but risk-taking writing. The reader has work to do and not everybody will fancy the challenge that Grace offers. I was not able to dip in and out of this book, so I read it in two sittings, which was an intense but rewarding experience.
Events unfold in a weird and wonderful manner and even though the reader is never entirely sure what is in Peterman’s mind and what is occurring independently of it, I found myself siding with Peterman’s version of events, and I was far less convinced by the psychologist’s theories. I imagine Grace would do very well on a university syllabus, because of the quality of writing, but also because Grace has so many layers that can be peeled back to reveal its hidden depths. There is a compelling surface story but there are counter stories running beneath, which makes Grace a novel that plays with the mind even after finishing it.
The descriptive passages are beautiful, characterisation is gloriously strange and whilst the plot is relatively small in its scale, it is not simple. When viewed as a whole the novel has a mesmorizing, unsettling quality that might be considered quite rare in this age of supposed ‘lowest common denominator’ publishing. The weirdness of Grace will be off-putting to some readers, but I found it refreshing to read something so unique. Something with a loud, echoing voice that asks its own questions about the nature of literature, families and sanity.
To end with a quotation that made me smile, and also brings to mind Eve’s discussion of Twilight yesterday:
‘…a century of experience has told me that one solidly educated and free-thinking girl is worth ten jaded, spoiled and arrogant middle-aged men in almost any sphere of life…’
- https://vulpeslibris.wordpress.com/2009/03/08/grace-by-alex-pheby-giveaway/


For Lizzy Siddal’s interview with Alex Pheby, click here.