LITERARY FICTION
MR WILDER AND ME by Jonathan Coe (Viking £16.99, 256 pp)
FOR much of his career, Jonathan Coe has been our unofficial novelist laureate, entertainingly skewering the excesses and absurdities of the times from Thatcher to Brexit.
One wonders whether Brexit almost finished him off, as this, his first novel since 2018’s referendum-era Middle England, takes a sharp swerve east, specifically to a Greek island in the Seventies where Hollywood legend Billy Wilder is filming what will be one of his last pictures.
On set is a young Greek girl, Calista, an inexperienced general assistant, aspiring film composer and the novel’s narrator, whose callow naivety initially blinds her to Wilder’s struggle to accept his career is firmly in decline.
At the novel’s centre i s a rather extraordinary film script, presented as an autobiographical account of Wilder’s experiences of the Holocaust. This shapes our understanding of him, and the novel’s interest in how to respond artistically to atrocity, more than anything observed by Calista, who proves a thoroughly underwhelming narrator.
It’s all pleasantly ruminative, but I suspect this novel, like the Wilder film, will be seen as a footnote in Coe’s impressive career.
THE AUTUMN OF THE ACE by Louis de Bernières (Harvill Secker £17.99, 336 pp)
NEWCOMERS might not realise The Autumn Of The Ace is not a standalone novel but the last in a trilogy about airman Daniel Pitt, which would prove frustrating if so, since it makes scant allowances for anyone joining the story at this point.
World War I flying legend Pitt spent several years after the war in Ceylon with his emotionally hostile wife, Rosie, who had effectively given up on the marriage. Now we find him in the midst of a late middle-life reckoning, wondering both how to mend bridges with his estranged son Bertie and whether he is capable of forgiving his wife’s cruelty. He is haunted, too, by the deaths of his brother and daughter and the fact his two children with Rosie’s sister are unaware he is their father.
This philosophical novel, shot through with an awareness of mortality, is strong on exploring the psychological damage World Wars wreaked on the men who fought them, and the necessary challenge of confronting the regrets of a life at its end. We are far from the comic quirks of Captain Corelli here.
Even so, the writing is dreadfully uneven, while the plot, with its lumpy, abrupt shifts in direction, is a bit of a mess.
THE SWALLOWED MAN by Edward Carey (Gallic £14.99, 176 pp)
THE darkly magical Italian folktale Pinocchio gets an extra layer of strangeness in this reimagining from Little author Carey, who, with his flair for the macabre, conjures a most curious story about the years Pinocchio’s father Geppetto spent inside the belly of a sea monster.
Geppetto is far from the twinkly eyed incarnation of the Disney film; rather, trapped inside his watery prison with only the contents of a ship conveniently swallowed by the fish to sustain him (candles; biscuit; ink and paper from the captain’s cabin), he embarks upon a written account of his unhappy life. He confesses the immense guilt he feels over his treatment of his wooden son, whom he initially hoped to exploit for money.
Carey uses a quaint, folky, first-person idiom that takes some getting used to, but this is a marvellous feat of storytelling that dives deep into the madness accompanying solitude and creativity.