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4.0 out of 5 stars
"A learner should only move on when he has totally mastered a given effect", Oct 19 2007
Loosly based on author Wesley Stace's grandfather, this novel is a meticuously researched and vibrant account of the immensely popular art of ventriliquism and the accompanying variety acts that proliferated throughout Britain during the 20th century. Alternating between the early 1930's and the mid 1970's, with much of the action taking place through World War 11, By George is a coming-of-age-story, an irreverent memoir, and also a witty melodrama drama where family secrets are buried for years under the weight of so much anguish and pain.
The novel centers on George Fisher, son to the glamorous Frankie Fisher who has made a lucrative career out of English Pantomime and who later became known as a popular television personality. George is also grandson to the secretive Joe "Death Wish" Fisher, who once fashioned a ventriloquist act and ended up entertaining the troops throughout the Middle East during the War, even as he faced the derision of his diva-like mother Echo "Evie" Endor, who was royalty in a bygone era of music hall and variety entertainment and one the last great stalwarts of the British stage, and who also wowed audiences with her show which included "boy" Narcissus.
But there's also another George that's a part of this story, that of Joe's trusted friend and confidante, the dummy Gorgeous Garrulous George, who partially narrates this tale, and who was made by the great Joseph Romando and then given to Joe from Echo as a present on his twenty-first birthday. Like many divas that have made their living on the stage in the pre-war years, Echo Endor brims with her own agenda as she plots to think how she can build her son's career and help him through the early heartbreak as he pays his dues.
Swept away by her own ego, and perhaps also inflated opinion of her self (after all, she is a "ventriloquiste" of old-time variety), Echo hopes to pass on the benefit of her years of experience, even if she's determined to hide many of the real secrets of her success from him. Joe wants to develop an act centered around "polyphony," the art of making voices appear from nowhere, Echo, however, automatically shoots him down, telling him it's a nice idea, but that he'll never find a producer or an audience.
Determined not to have her life's work belittled by an amateur, even if he is her son, Joe becomes a part of the show called the Fol-de-Rols where this clash between mother and son ends up becoming a battle of wills and popularity. Suddenly it's George against Narcissus and Joe against Echo as Echo pretends to offer Joe one hand while all the while pushing him down with the other.
Meanwhile, in 1973 the poor eleven-year-old George is resentfully sent away to the Upside School for Boys. Echo is now in her early nineties and she still retains a fierce control of the household even though she can no longer leave her bed. Cast aside by the too busy Frankie who is constantly working, George is unable to live with his officious grandmother Queenie, or of course, his great-grandmother, and is consequently thrust into a new world of school with its unimagined customs and codes.
So begins the solitary life of this reclusive and lonely boy, forced to sleep in a dormitory that feels like a hospital ward, "on rough sheets in a dark, thin dungeon of whining bedsprings, grumbling matresses and the foreign creeks, coughs and groans." There is no room for pleasure and even reading is discouraged, but when Evie gifts him an ornately designed Victorian book called The Lfe and Adventures of Valentine Fox the Ventriloqiest, about a boy, a ventriloquest, who can throw his voice and make fun of people by pretending to be another voice, George sets his heart on cultivating his own weired gift and avenging all those wrongs and injustices that have roused his indignation.
Gravitating between the lives of George and Joe, the author makes his pages come alive with the worlds of ventriloquism, pantomime and variety entertainment as he follows the Fishers through the War with it's blackout restrictions and the closure of the threatres and cinemas which end up putting the entire entertainment profession out of work over night, and onto the 1950's and the onset of television where where variety began to die a slow death, ending with the 1970's where the once sacred art of ventrilolquism has become a creepy nostaglic act with what was once the chirpy dummy, now party trick "on a par with juggling, surviving only on a pier and at the children's party."
Of course the Fisher Family soldier on. When Evie inevitably dies family secrets are revealed and George becomes ever more obsessed behind finding out the truth his grandfather's life and the true nature of his relatship with the flashy, drag artist Bobbie Sheridan, whose act includes performing with a female doll named Belle and whom the dummy George ends up being attracted to.
So many questions remain: Why have Frankie and Evie idolized Joe over the years, regularly refering to him as "our war hero" when he answered his country's call as an entertainer for the troops? What is the real relationship between Queenie and her chauffeur Reg? What connection does the enigmatic Upside handyman and groundsman Donald have to the Fishers, and more specifically to Frankie? Donald certainly doesn't say much and he gives the impression of being perfectly content working at Upside. And what of the resentful and embittered Aunt Silvia, who suddenly vanished from the family fold years ago and who now lives a reclusive life on the Coast?
George is often driven by blind faith in the world of his family and his love of theatre and of a hope and longing that has made him demand more of the world than at first it wanted to give him. It is only through these qualities that he can finally discover the ultimate truths that mysteriously surround his beloved grandfather Joe, even when his assumptions prove to be so mistaken. Weaving together the mysterious forces of memory, spirit, desire and regret and imbedding his narrative with a heavy sense of the nostalgic, Stace has written a book that will undoubtedly delight Anglophiles, lovers of the world of the English stage, and also admirers and devotees of the great art of ventriloquism. Mike Leonard October 07.
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