RaveFull StopPheby’s novel takes Schreber’s breakdown as its starting point, and uses his story to powerfully depict the radical disjunctions of a schizophrenic mind descending into insanity, offering a complex multi-layered account of madness which shatters linear conceptions of time and perspective. In so doing it harkens back to a modernist obsession with mental well-being which went hand in hand with radical literary experiments in form and perspective. Playthings is however not a cold, clinical work, nor is it an unceasingly harrowing read, despite some moments of psychological horror; it is imbued with a dark but humorous sense of the absurd ... This vertiginous shift in perception is one of the joys of this shape shifting novel, as it perpetually plays with the reader’s scope of insight, first widening, then narrowing, until we are never sure where we sit. This is both a pleasure and a challenge, as the reader is quite appropriately the writer’s plaything ... Pheby’s primary accomplishment is to depict a man wrestling with his demons without ever explicitly expressing that struggle, leaving it to the reader to connect the dots between trauma, insanity, guilt and perception. Thus he embodies Schreber’s own repression in the fractured form of his novel, showing that we can never know what is lurking beneath the surface of apparent normality.
