A Review of Tom Lee’s “The Alarming Palsy of James Orr”
Body Horror
Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg is known as one of the original purveyors of the “body horror” genre of filmmaking — a visceral, gross view of the breakdown of the body’s tissues. Think of The Fly remake. I’m willing to bet that Cronenberg would love to get his lenses on a film adaptation of British writer Tom Lee’s debut The Alarming Palsy of James Orr, a book that was originally published in Great Britain in 2017 but is only now becoming available in North America. This is a twisted, disturbing book — think Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” as being infinitely more readable. The thing is, the book is being billed as a “dark comedy.” The thing about the thing is that the comedy doesn’t become readily apparent until the end of the book and the utterly shocking ending.
Basically, what you have is a story of a very ordinary Briton who wakes up one morning with a case of Bell’s palsy, making one side of his face paralyzed. Normally, this is a condition that goes away on its own fairly quickly, though there are apparently instances where the palsy lingers. Well, the case of this Briton, named James Orr, definitely takes the chronic route and does not resolve itself in any manner whatsoever. This means that James cannot go to work (he has some kind of law job that involves public interaction), his relationship with his wife and children generally becomes frazzled, and the side gig that James has as the chair of a residents committee of the gated community where he lives becomes jeopardized because of his illness and the actions that result from that illness.
There are two things that benefit the novel: it’s relatively short, clocking in at just more than 200 pages, which means that the case of James Orr’s alarming palsy doesn’t drag on for a mind-numbing length, and that author Lee plays it straight. You wouldn’t know you were reading something of a social satire until the very end of the book. As a character, James is likable enough — even though he is prone to fits of being tired or lazy, and generally sticks his nose into places where it probably doesn’t very well belong. This includes when two teenagers make out in the back of a car that James wakes up to hearing pull into his residential area laneway. Instead of chasing the teens off, James — for reasons that aren’t exactly clear, other than satisfying his own curiosity or his sense of lethargy — watches them make out within a breath of being noticed by them.
As a result, there are loose ends that are left untied — to say more would be to give away spoilers. However, these untied ends are a part of the strength of the novel, too, as it bolsters the feeling of the ending quite cleverly. What’s not as easily resolved, however, is the novel’s morbid fascination of children and sex. For instance, at one point in the novel, James’ six-year-old or so daughter Laura discovers a used condom near her house that she brings to show her father. The novel goes on and on about this find, as it if were something horrific, with little in the way of a pay off or meaning. It is as though Lee needed to bulk up the page count with something fascinatingly horrible, and there’s not much more to things that that.
However, to go back to this being a “body horror” book, the novel seems to work at its best when it supposes that the real menace to society exists not merely as symbols such as spent condoms, but from illnesses that proceed from within. As James Orr’s life proceeds at its regular pace, the palsy doesn’t get better. Rather, he finds that he starts crying for no reason on a moment’s notice — the result of his eye being infected by the palsy — and this leads to embarrassing consequences at the meeting he chairs. In fat, much of the novel is centered around life in this gated community and the perceived threats from the outside, when the real threat may be the monster striking within. Thoughts of Brexit perhaps?
By and large, The Alarming Palsy of James Orr is a compulsively readable novel. While its views of British life are remarkably ordinary and slow-paced, possibly too slow-paced for some readers, I found it to be enchanting and charming. This is one of those books you slowly fall in love with, due to the depiction of a crumbling Britain in its unnamed surroundings and the slowly creepy feeling that James may be on a fast downward spiral to nowhere. It could be said that perhaps the very ending comes a tad bit too fast. Perhaps a touch more resolution — after all, what was going on with the neighbours? — would have been beneficial.
Ultimately, The Alarming Palsy of James Orr could be added to the growing body of “not in my backyard”-style thrillers (though it should be added that this book isn’t really a thriller, per se — not in the conventional sense). There are levels to this book that will get you thinking, which is particularly remarkable given its length. Whether or not you view this as a book about the ugly undercurrent of Brexit-like Britishness or about how the body as a whole is prone to failure, causing the demise of the rest of the organism so to speak, is up to you. One thing is for sure for me: I really want to see what Cronenberg could do with a book like this one. I bet that the end result would be absolutely startling and provide a whole lot of uncomfortable food for thought. The novel does this aptly enough, but could Cronenberg’s touch do better?
Tom Lee’s The Alarming Palsy of James Orr will be published by Soho Press on January 22, 2019.
Of course, if you like what you see, please recommend this piece (click on the clapping hands icon below) and share it with your followers.
Get in touch: zacharyhoule@rogers.com
