Mr Scobie’s Riddle conjures up a world where the bizarre seems to be the rule. The. night sister is quite right: nothing is abnormal in such a topsy-turvy world. Ordinary signposts for  judging normality have been removed, leaving confusion in their wake. This removal job has taken place in the very first pages when Elizabeth Jolley offers her·’Guide to the Perplexed’.

The guide is a twentieth century version of the table of contents one expects to find in novels like Tom Jones. Fielding would give the chapter number and a brief description such as ‘The reader’s neck brought into danger by a description; his escape; and the great condescension of Miss Bridget Allworthy’. Such enigmatic tidbits were presumably designed to transform a prospective customer into a reader curious to find out just what Fielding could do with his neck. Jolley’s ‘Guide’ is more dangerous: it threatens to discourage potential readers. Times have changed and tastes have changed, and few late-twentieth -century readers are attracted by a five-page series of incomprehensible fragments set alongside a broken sequence of page numbers. It’s to be hope that no one will be put off, because far from being a ponderous novel self-consciously concerned with linguistic structures and form, Mr Scobie’s Riddle is delightfully entertaining.

Jolley has an eye for the eccentric and an ear for the incongruous. She can make a reader laugh at matters our social conventions tell us are not funny. A badly run institution for the aged is one of these. It seems a more likely subject for investigative journalism than for a comic novel, and yet Jolley wrings laughter from ‘The Hospital of St Christopher and St Jude’, which is no more a hospital than it is the ‘old people’s home’ of common parlance. It is a place which has much stronger ties to the local bank manager than to the revered saints under whose protective covering it shelters. The hospital is presided over by a matron-owner­manager whose surname is naturally ‘Price’, and whose unnatural first name Heather, is fittingly kept down to a purely functional ‘H’. Matron Price should be investigated. She feeds her patients on beetroot, dried peas, and lentils, and her medical remedies are limited to menthol camphor and Epsom salts. Only Jolley’s prose keeps the reader from moral outrage. Like a gifted comic actor, Jolley’s timing is brilliant. She knows how to embed the serious within the farcical and to shift attention to the incongruous for light relief. Matron Price who is never anxious about diarrhoea and haemorrhage as physical states, worries about how to spell them.

Both words, though repeatedly occurring in her life, gave her trouble. It was a sort of mental blockage, she told herself, probably a daily reminder that she needed a holiday in a remote pace, on a peninsula or, better still, an island where neither could exist. Though it was likely that some other difficult word would turn up even there, and she’d be unable to spell it. A word like archipelago for instance. She was not sure how to pronounce it let alone spell it.

Here I am in the Greek Islands the archipelago ... How could she even send a post card from her holiday if unable to write the word,

food good, weather splendid the arkipalargo very lovely…

Without its comedy Mr Scobie’s Riddle would be sentimental. Jolley needs the amusing flamboyance of Heather Hailey, who cannot understand why the Town Clerk should take offence when he receives the ode in which she has ‘tried to look with renewed rapture and entirely new images at his water works’. Miss Hailey’s insouciance and theatricality are counterpointed by the pathos of the three elderly men in Room One who hate the place and long for their homes.

Crammed together, they lack all privacy in a space so tiny that even the most basic furniture makes it impossible to operate the door, which therefore remains permanently wide open. Mr Scobie tries to explain to his fat, cigar-smoking niece what this means:

‘Joan dear, I don’t think I want to stay here at St Christopher and St Jude. I don’t think I can manage even to stay one day, not another day. I want to go home.’

‘Why on earth Uncle?’

‘There’s no dignity,’ Mr Scobie said, ‘absolutely none whatever. You can’t even shut the lavatory door, dear, and when I go down there someone else always seems to need to go ...’

Jolley’s compassion for the people who ordinarily slide by without attention has always given her fiction a special kind of gentleness. In the stories of Five Acre Virgin and The Travelling Entertainer, in her novel The Newspaper of Claremont Street, the gentleness has an edge to it which keeps it from going soft. It is the edge created by comedy when the distorted in life evokes laughter rather than tears. The cumulative effect of the laughter in situations which are not intrinsically funny is to create a sense of unease in the reader. The distortions are funny, but they are also distortions and as such threaten to become sinister. Matron Price’s anxieties about spelling, whimsically amusing though they may be, are also disturbing reminders that the matron is not troubled by similar anxieties about the old people over whose lives she has far too much power.

Jolley’s work has been well served in the past by the stylish productions of Fremantle Press. Unfortunately, the problem of distribution faced by small presses has meant that these volumes, together with the novel Palomino published by Outback Press, have been difficult to find outside Western Australia. For those of us who live elsewhere, the publication of Mr Scobie’s Riddle by Penguin will make the novel easily available, and it is to be hoped that many new readers will be gained for this polished and talented writer.