Reviewed by Rabeea Saleem

BOOKS featuring mentally-disabled protagonists have gained acclaim as they gave us a chance to view the world from the unique perspective of a differently-abled individual. The most widely-read book published in the genre, in the recent past, has been The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon which has now become a staple text in most psychology courses. Alice and the Fly is the latest entry in this genre which is a brilliant debut novel by Liverpool writer James Rice.

The novel depicts the world through the eyes of a socially awkward teenager, Greg, who suffers from chronic arachnophobia along with schizophrenia. The story is told as a series of journal entries by Greg, in first-person narrative interspersed with transcripts of police interviews with Greg’s family and classmates. The latter serves to give us an inkling of the impending catastrophe which is eventually revealed at the end of the novel.

On the surface, the novel seems to deal with the struggles that a mentally dysfunctional person faces in society. Greg is relentlessly bullied by the “Pitt kids”, boys from the rough part of the neighborhood, who taunt him about his lisp, his condition and his lack of friends. He battles daily with his acute fear of spiders, which he refers to as “Them”, both real and hallucinatory. He takes all precautionary measures he can — routinely checking the ceilings and floor, using tape to seal all the wall cracks in his room to make his room “pretty much impenetrable”. Greg is given a wide berth by his classmates who label him “psycho” and he is not shown to be close to anyone except Ian and Alice, a girl with no eyelashes whose father is a butcher at the shop where Greg works.

Greg’s family is nouveau-riche and keen to enter the upper middle-class social circles. His mother is borderline obsessive-compulsive when it comes to maintaining family image. She compulsively remodels her house and then invites her rich friends to show off the swanky renovations. His father is a successful plastic surgeon who has no time or any interest in his family but who is socially projected as a workaholic by his wife. Greg’s younger sister, Sarah, is a dance enthusiast who is constantly practicing her dance routines and who considers Greg a “weirdo”.

Greg used to be very fond of Sarah as a child but his phobic tendencies posed a threat to her which led his parents to split them up by sending him to his grandmother’s place at Finners Island. However, that only resulted in compounding Greg’s condition as his Nan, who refers to Greg as “Fly” herself was a senile, paranoid individual. The details of the event in the latter half of the novel provide context to the climax.

Greg’s accounts of his family members provide deep insight into how shallow the lives of the urban, upper crust of the society actually are amidst all the ostentation, image-keeping and secrets. His mother’s solution to all her problems is repression and she is more concerned with keeping Greg’s condition under wraps, than she is about helping him get better.

Finally, Alice in some ways epitomises Greg’s “Them”. Greg’s condition makes him an unreliable narrator since he is guided by his subjective experiences which are often far from reality. This is the only clue that could be given to prepare readers for the harrowing climax. Greg wants to “save” Alice but it gradually becomes clear that he eventually is hoping to save himself too, under that pretext.

This book’s trajectory reminded me a lot of Made You Up, another splendid Young Adult novel written by Francesca Zappia which depicts a schizophrenic girl and her high school struggles. Both books employ first-person narrative that plunge the reader into a subjective perception of the world of the protagonists, with subtle clues peppered throughout the book hinting that reality might be different from what has been interpreted by the protagonist. This technique allows the writers to play on the discrepancies between the characters’ perception of reality and the grim actualities.

The narrative techniques used in the novel take into account Greg’s mental condition. For instance, whenever he is recounting emotionally distressing situations, he rambles on for pages. The only drawback of the story is that the writer seems to have used schizophrenia mostly as a tool to aid the progression of the story. Throughout the story, barring the end, there is no indication of any of the symptoms of schizophrenia and it is only alluded to in the latter part of the novel. Schizophrenia is a gravely debilitating illness so I was confused as to why the writer had not given much indication of the disorder, or given any sign of the impairment caused by the disorder to the protagonist’s life. Despite its minor flaws, Alice and the Fly is a captivating, heart-wrenching read which gives poignant insight into the life of a teenager grappling with his mental condition. The book’s strength lies in the incisive portrayal of a dysfunctional family and of a society surviving on half-truths and distorted reality.

The reviewer is a Karachi-based freelance writer.

Alice and the Fly

(YOUNG ADULT)

By James Rice

Hodder & Stoughton, UK

ISBN 978-1444790108

336pp.