A dummy's tale and a schoolboy's travails in "by George"

George, a ventriloquist's dummy crafted by renowned theatrical props artist Romando, has a mind of his own. He prefers being called a "boy," and in his memoirs — yes, he's writing his memoirs — he's eager to tell how, back in the 1930s, he came into the hands of the Fishers, a family of entertainers.

The idea was for young Joe Fisher to make his stage debut as a ventriloquist. But Joe has always dreamed of performing solo, just throwing his voice around a room to confuse his audience. Result: George spends years stuffed in a box, gathering dust.

Ah, but then one day the lid comes off the box.

In singer-songwriter John Wesley Harding's second novel, penned under his real name, Wesley Stace, the author both investigates and celebrates the art of ventriloquism while simultaneously lampooning every storyteller's dilemma: finding just the right voice in which to tell a story.

In "by George," Stace alternates between two voices, both belonging to boys named George. One is the verbose boy-dummy and the other is Joe Fisher's grandson, a shy, endearing schoolboy of the 1980s whose family has packed him off to boarding school while they tour the theatrical circuit.

The two narratives — separated by two decades — become interwoven as they unravel the muck and murk of the Fisher family's past. George-the-dummy's voice sounds as if it had been plucked intact from a box marked "Chatty Extrovert." George-the-schoolboy, however, has great difficulty finding a voice that will faithfully represent him to the boarding-school world he inhabits, with its bully peers, boring lessons and taciturn schoolmasters. And on the rare occasions when he visits his beloved family of wildly eccentric prima donnas and dons, the introverted schoolboy must learn to articulate his special talents within a tribe of upstaging relatives.

Like real human beings whose voices occasionally betray them, George-the-dummy occasionally falters, his confident voice cracking to reveal heartbreak, as it does when he recalls his days entertaining British troops during World War II. And even innocent schoolboy-George's well-intentioned words of gratitude roll off his tongue with tremulous misery after a sympathetic schoolmaster takes him in during a school holiday when his family doesn't have time for him.

Voice, many great writers insist, is everything. But voice is a fierce taskmaster, and a writer not in control of a character's voice will inevitably lose his way.

Stace found his own writer's voice in his debut novel, "Misfortune." Like "Misfortune," "by George" enthralls from its first page, with fanciful characters in oddball situations so convincing that when a ventriloquist's dummy speaks for himself, the only question a reader wants to ask the dummy is, "Why don't you stop complaining and just get on with your life?"

In "by George," Stace reprises his mesmerizing, whimsical, neo-Dickensian storytelling, revealing himself to be one of the freshest fictional voices at work today. Indeed, "by George" delivers two fresh fictional voices for the price of one.