From the Other Side

Press, 24 April 1987, Page 19

From the Other Side

Voices of Love. By Doria Stokes with Linda Doanley. Future, 1906. 207 pp. $10.99 (paperback). (Reviewed by Ralf Unger) Everybody knows her as Doris, and "Love,” as in “how are you feeling now, love?” to a recently deceased person, seems to be her chosen word in almost every sentence addressed to her adoring public — dead and alive. Doris is a clairaudient who is constantly listening in to spirit voices of the dead and repeating their humdrum chatter as cheer to their

distressed, surviving friends and relatives.

Name-dropping is a speciality and it is therefore not surprising that one of her “voices” not only speaks, but whistles the theme song of “Auf Wiedersehen, Pet” and turns out to be Gary Holton, who was Wayne in the television series. Through Doris he talks to a former girlfriend and it transpires he had planned to see Doris before his death, had been delayed, but after death had not forgotten the planned meeting. He organised his girlfriend to set up the opportunity to rap with Doris. He reveals to her from the “other side” that it was not drugs that killed, him at all, as he had given them up, and that it was not fair that he should be thus labelled.

Doris’s dear old dad who started off her career in clairaudeniency, as described in her autobiography previously, pops up from time to time to give her advice about her physical

ailments. He persuades her that her, pain on sitting down is not cancer, but can be helped by an inflatable rubber ring to relieve pressure. Similarly, to selected members of audience, dead relatives indicate where lost articles can be found. Deceased children whose parents in life did not understand their moodiness as due to a brain tumor offer simple forgiveness, and dead Elvis Presley, struggling to achieve humility, explains all the mistakes he made, to Doris.

Doris’s “other side” is covered thickly with ordinary folk whose

general activities, apart from speaking to her fluently and sometimes cheekily, are not clear, but whose ages are at whatever was their apex and whose physical disabilities have disappeared — with the crippled now walking and the spastic now peaceful. If a baby is lost through miscarriage then it has to wait till it is full term to be born into the spirit world again and goes to its relatives, she assures us. What an endearing prospect from this show person celebrity, brought up around the corner from Maggie Thatcher’s father’s corner-shop where she used to buy a half-penny’s worth of broken biscuits as a child, who says she has cheerfully surmounted the death of her only child, the brain

damage of her adopted son, her husband’s illness, and her own mastectomy. A planned, heartwarming, slickly produced public-relations exercise.