The Air Loom Gang by Mike Jay, Transworld, 拢12.99, ISBN 0593049977 Reviewed by Roy Herbert
DRAMA and mystery from the start. In December 1796, a terrified man approached the House of Commons under the influence of a secret machine called the Air Loom, operated by an evil gang. It was powered by windmills and stretched out invisible rays of magnetic fluid to control the minds of its victims. The gang鈥檚 purpose was to keep the war between Britain and revolutionary France going. The Commons were due to debate possible peace negotiations and speakers such as William Pitt, the prime minister, and Lord Liverpool, the home secretary, were to take part. From a seat in the gallery, the man, James Tilly Matthews, could see that when Liverpool rose to make a statement he was also a victim of the Air Loom and would embark on a speech condemning any idea of peace. Fighting the magnetic power with desperate effort, Matthews managed to yell one word, 鈥淭reason!鈥�
This is the riveting opening to a strange story about madness and its treatment. Matthews was arrested and detained as a lunatic, despite his protests that he had been engaged in high policy, making clandestine journeys to France and negotiating with powerful French circles to achieve a peace, claims that showed he was mad.
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Yet it was the truth. Moreover, he had made one trip too many, and had been seized by the French revolutionaries who suspected he was a spy and imprisoned him for three anguished years. During this time he first encountered the practice of mesmerism, then causing a sensation in Paris and a likely origin of the delusion of the monstrous machine.
In The Air Loom Gang Mike Jay agrees Tilly was mad and would now probably be called a paranoid schizophrenic. But he spends the rest of this affecting tale almost demolishing his own conclusion.
Jay plainly admires his subject. He points out that the meaning of schizophrenia is imprecise; he sympathetically lists reasons for Matthews鈥檚 delusions; and is as outraged at his treatment in the infamous London asylum Bedlam as were some contemporaries.
Two doctors were convinced that Matthews was sane but were ignored. Two writs of habeas corpus to set him free came to nothing. These and other attempts on his behalf were frustrated because of the obduracy of John Haslam, Master of Bedlam. There were dark rumours that the amiable Matthews could be a political prisoner.
He was a model one at least and maybe an embarrassing one. Jay recounts his relentless campaigning for better conditions for inmates that was eventually successful and remained influential even after he died, shortly after his release from Bedlam. Jay sets Matthews鈥檚 extraordinary life vividly in its dangerous times and in a final flourish sheers away to other times that have their complement of mind-controlling machines 鈥� our own.