Gorgeous George

IN his odd but intermittently compelling novel about four generations of British variety performers, Wesley Stace nonchalantly mixes genres, voices and prose styles from several centuries. It’s a bit peculiar to have a memoir supposedly written in the 1940s begin with a riff on the Victorian opening sentences of “David Copperfield” -- even more peculiar to learn that the memoirist is a ventriloquist’s dummy, or “boy,” as the old-timers called them. But “by George” is not an Anglo-Saxon attempt at magic realism: The recollections of Gorgeous Garrulous George are penned in straightforward language with few hints of the supernatural; indeed, they probably were written by Joe “King” Fisher, his ventriloquist. The saga of George and Joe alternates with a third-person narrative chronicling the adolescence of Joe’s grandson, also named George. The book concludes with wartime letters from Joe to a beloved colleague and with a first-person account by George (the real boy, not the “boy”) of his struggle to deal with the disturbing truths contained in the memoir.

Sound confusing? It’s not, actually. Stace capably keeps the main lines of action clear as he moves between the first and second halves of the 20th century. The aesthetic mishmash works; eclecticism seems to suit this author, who, under the name John Wesley Harding, writes and performs songs he has described as “gangsta folk.” He’s also written one previous novel, “Misfortune.” More to the point, eclecticism is intrinsic to English popular theater, lovingly described in some of the book’s best passages. Joe’s daughter, Frankie, top-billed in the sort of Christmas pantomime adored by Brits for centuries, plays Aladdin in a production that climaxes with a rousing chorus of “Take Me Home, Country Roads.” With her career in something of a slide, she later appears in a bawdy sex comedy advertised with a caricature of scantily clad Frankie chasing a vicar and pursued by a man in a bear suit; the poster proclaims, “May the farce be with you!”

The Fisher women comfortably inhabit this world of no-frills entertainment in which Stace mixes folk tales with pop songs and age-old stereotypes with a catchphrase from the latest mega-movie. The memoirs of the dummy relate Joe’s distaste for such easy pleasures, his desperate quest to take the art of ventriloquism into new territory despite the contempt of his mother. Echo Endor, an old-style diva who insists that performing is all about personality, brutally informs her son that “with you, there is nothing there, no personality. . . . You are not interesting.” She pushes resentful but passive Joe into marrying Queenie, a sweet-natured woman content to make a living as a not-very-skillful ventriloquist at children’s birthday parties. Joe escapes into a secret life, crafting an unconventional act with George in seedy clubs outside his mother’s purview.

“We were making it up, going where the laughter took us,” George (or Joe) writes of their performances, a far cry from Echo’s always-the-same star turns with their grand entrances, familiar songs and perfectly polished punch lines. Joe sees less and less of Queenie and baby Frankie as he becomes more absorbed in the career he’s forged on his own and in the friendship of another innovator: flamboyant, cross-dressing Bobbie Sheridan, who performs in an evening gown with a female doll named Belle. Joe’s alienation from his family, we soon see, is prompted by sexual as well as artistic dissatisfactions. A startling passage apparently describing George and Belle attempting to make love serves as coded acknowledgment of Joe’s feelings for Bobbie.

The consequences of the rifts among the Fishers become apparent in the chapters concerning Joe’s grandson. This George is 11 in 1973, when he’s sent to boarding school after the death of his stepfather. Frankie, constantly touring, can’t look after her son, and Queenie has her hands full with 93-year-old Echo, who dies during George’s first term at school. Joe was killed during World War II, we’re told, and the youth doesn’t know who his biological father is. Raised backstage and in theatrical lodgings, George doesn’t fit in at the Upside School for Boys. His only friend is the troubled groundskeeper, Donald, and his only amusement is reading his grandfather’s notebooks, bequeathed to him by Echo. Increasingly preoccupied with ventriloquism, George skates through school copying papers from library books, gets caught and is sent home in disgrace. These chapters are so gray, compared with the vibrancy of every scene involving the various theatrical pursuits of George’s family, that readers might well wonder why the author bothered to send the boy to Upside at all -- were it not for some heavy hints that eventually lead us to the identity of his father.

That revelation underscores the ruthlessness of Echo, who meddled unforgivably in the lives of her son, daughter-in-law and granddaughter to maintain the façade of one big happy show-biz family. Ironically, it’s her desire to pass along this legacy to her great-grandson that provokes a crisis. Joe’s notebooks lead George to the memoir, hidden in the legs of the wooden George in Queenie’s attic. Stunned by what he learns about Joe, George stops talking. “Hiding behind my namesake in silence,” he tells us, “I was protecting those I loved.” It’s not surprising that he would want to protect Queenie and Frankie (who worships her father’s memory). Their warmhearted acceptance of young George just as he is contrasts pointedly with Echo’s treatment of her son, whose tormented letters to Bobbie reveal the enduring wounds she inflicted. So it’s distressing that when George recovers his voice, his climactic words are in judgment of Joe: “a missing father, a cowardly husband, a spineless, absent son.”

Judging by the book’s structure, Stace seems to intend its principal subject to be George’s coming of age. The unfair, wrongheaded conclusions he comes to about his grandfather, however, suggest that George’s notion of adult behavior includes perpetuating Echo’s tendency to banish from the stage any inconvenient character not following the approved script. Fortunately, the author’s vivid set pieces of life on the stage are a lot more convincing and enjoyable than his psychological insights. *