Review: `What is real, what is not?'
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 05 7, 2014
British author Stuart Ayris is a self-made writer, or so it seems in attempting to find biographical data outside of that posted by the author. Finding his schooling noncontributory he worked odd jobs at menial labor, resigned work in an insurance company to play in a band and while unemployed began writing, this book being the second novel in what is a trilogy. By far the most significant biographical data (if we are to believe it) serves as the Prologue to this book and it bears repeating: 'In September 2008 I accompanied the police as they entered a house in Tollesbury. I was a psychiatric nurse at the time. The owner of the house was one of my patients. He had not been seen for two weeks - neither had his son nor his wife. What I saw that evening will stay with me forever. On the walls of the lounge, in tiny, neat black writing were thousands and thousands of words. The torch beams picked them out as if they were groups of well-ordered flies. The words continued up the stairway, onto the landing walls and into the main bedroom. I had been in the house before and had seen some of the writing upstairs. Still I was mesmerized. What you are about to read are the words that I saw on those walls. I have ordered them into chapters and taken the liberty of providing chapter headings. I have inserted two documents midway through which I trust will make sense when you come to them. I have since resigned my post as a community mental health nurse and no longer work in psychiatry. The patient of whom I speak is called Simon Anthony. I have met him just once - yet he is, and will always remain, my hero.'TOLLESBURY TIME FOREVER: FRUGALITY then relates the tale of Simon Anthony as gleaned by the author from the words on the walls. As the book begins Simon Anthony, a resident of Tollesbury is an avid Beatles fan with a history of mental health problems and an alcohol dependency.  After an evening of excessive dinking the local pub `The King's Head' he meanders off to the Tollesbury Salt Marshes with suicidal ideation. But rather than meeting his death in the marshes, Simon finds himself thrust into the past, to Tollesbury, in the year 1836, where despite the all too familiar surroundings, he finds himself a stranger in a setting that is both atmospheric and believable with a host of interesting and appealing characters.  Simon relates his journey through the haze of paranoid schizophrenia - which is to say he perceives the world differently that society at large. He view is suffused with poetry, music, delusions, time travel of a sort that for Simon open doors and windows that help him understand his world. Drugs administered to him fractionate his perception of reality, an imposed problem by those who consider normalcy (the way others `uninflected' view the world) through the forced used of antipsychotic medications. Simon understands that his illness has caused him to attempt suicide twice and that he must accept the drugs in order to be considered well, but it is his journey into his own mind that provides the path to his own version of wellness - returning to his beleaguered wife and mentally challenged child.Ayers' prose is colorful, adroitly phrased, allowing the reader entry into the mind of Simon and share his rather improved view of the society that has labeled him insane. Ayers significantly comments elsewhere `For there is no schizophrenia and there is no depression; no bi-polar disorder, personality disorder or post-traumatic stress disorder. There is just life and trying to get through it. That is all. Look past the drugs and past the diagnosis, look deeper than the despair and higher than the highs - and what you have is a soul that needs embracing, a mind that needs cradling and a heart that needs to beat its beat without condemnation. To have a direction, a purpose, is fundamental to human existence. Without it, we flounder in an ocean of self-doubt and ennui.' With so much else unsaid as far as this author is concerned, views such as these coupled with a rather advanced technique of writing suggests we have a new voice in our midst. If at times the novel seems like a over the top Peter Sellers amalgamation of classical music, bizarre décor, word soup, choreographed delirium then Stuart Ayers, in words, deserves our attention.  Watch and wait: what is real, what is not? Grady Harp, May 14