Mr Wilder and Me, by Jonathan Coe Alex Clark
ALEX CLARK
Mr Wilder and Me By Jonathan Coe Viking £16.99
Film and music have run through Jonathan Coe’s fiction.
His novels include the 1961 Shirley Eaton and Kenneth Connor comedy that lent its name to his novel What a Carve Up! There was the prog rock that weaves in and out of the series of books beginning with The Rotters’ Club in 2001, most recently including Middle England.
His characters become obsessed by these cultural artefacts, whose lives begin to echo them, or vice versa. Their loss or disappearance becomes a matter not only of nostalgia but of a vanishing sense of identity.
That theme is writ exceptionally large in Coe’s concise, exquisite Mr Wilder and Me, a novel that could only have proceeded from its author’s preoccupation with the film director Billy Wilder, yet which also prods at wider ideas of creative obsession.
Coe’s Wilder is largely encountered in his older years. The triumphs of Double Indemnity, Some Like It Hot and Sunset Boulevard have left him revered and yet unable to interest the money men in the new projects he still feels compelled to pursue with his long-term writing partner, Iz Diamond.
The pair’s latest production is Fedora, the story of a faded film legend, starring Marthe Keller and William Holden. When the Los Angeles studios decline to get on board, Wilder finds himself German financiers, leading to what he describes, with grim humour, as a win-win situation. If the film soars, it’s his revenge on Hollywood. If it tanks, it’s revenge for the concentration camps in which his mother and other family members died.
Into this mix, Coe throws another of his favourite kinds of character – an innocent keen to become more worldly, a youthful devotee whose inexperience is nonetheless inflected with an instinctive understanding of the complications of age, ambitions, disappointment and acceptance.
There’s a comically improbable meeting at a Hollywood dinner, at which a young, cheeseburger-eating Al Pacino makes the first of two appearances.
Then a 21-year-old Anglo-greek, Calista, is hired as an interpreter for Wilder and Diamond as they begin to shoot Fedora on, again improbably, the island of Corfu. And it’s Calista – now a middle-aged woman balancing the fading of her own musical career with the demands of her teenage daughters – who narrates the novel.
Coe is wonderful at capturing the court atmosphere of a film set. Exhausted actors are forced into repeated takes as Wilder insists they recite their lines with not even the tiniest deviation. He also captures the tension and fragility that underpin a film set’s essential unreality.
Wilder may be the king, and Diamond his loyal and capable consort, but there are young pretenders at the gate, the ‘kids with beards’ – Spielberg, Scorsese, Coppola – currently wowing audiences.
‘My God, this picture with the shark,’ says Wilder of Jaws. ‘When will people stop talking about this picture with the shark?’ But he is acutely aware of Spielberg’s talent, as well as his popularity. Indeed, the last film he wanted to make was the adaptation of Thomas Keneally’s Schindler’s Ark that won the younger director seven Oscars.
Following a biographical trajectory and its details poses obvious dangers – of a predetermined outcome, a writer chasing the ball and a deadening of invention. But Coe is sprightly and witty enough to avoid that.
Along with the massing of enough detail to satisfy movie esotericists, he has a penchant for narrative risk-taking. When, for example, Wilder tells the story of his escape from Berlin and his later, unexpected foray into working for the British government, the text suddenly becomes a film script, as though the details are so painful they must be mediated into another genre.
Similarly, the final scene between Wilder and Calista is so drenched in sentimentality and symbolism that it shouldn’t work at all. And yet Coe, attuned to the fact that often sentiment is used to avoid confrontation of our most powerful fears of loss and regret, pulls it off.
And, at the book’s heart, of course, is Fedora itself – the neglected, underrated late-period work that portrays failure and despair, Coe’s book adding to its intricate history.
Seek it out if you can; it will unsettle you as much as Jaws, in its own way.