A Greek film composer recalls Billy Wilder’s impact on her life in a novel that ranks among Jonathan Coe’s best The renaissance of Jonathan Coe has been one of the more cheering literary stories of recent years. He’s a writer whose career can be usefully arranged in decades. There was the apprenticeship of his 20s; then in his 30s a run of unforgettable, name-making novels – _What a Carve Up__!_, _The House of Sleep_, _The Rotters’ Club_. Then it felt as if Coe went off the boil a little, with the books of his 40s and 50s – _The Rain Before It Falls_, _The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim__ _and _Expo 58_ in particular – all lacking the verve and humour of his earlier work. Coe at his best was that rare thing: a writer of page-turners that are full of postmodern flourishes, _jeux d’esprit_ that also engage profoundly with important subjects. In the Costa prize-winning and bestselling _Middle England_, he seemed to recapture the warmth and sharpness of his mid-career masterpieces. Following up a success is never easy and yet the life and light that flooded _Middle England _is preserved and multiplied in _Mr Wilder & Me_. This is a book that looks back to Coe’s brilliant early period, engaging, like _What a Carve Up!_, with cinema in a formal as well as a thematic way, delivering the reader a satisfyingly sweeping novel that still manages to push the form in new directions. It hinges on 60 pages in the middle of the book when the narrative morphs suddenly into an approximation of a Billy Wilder script – but this is a film in which Wilder himself is the star. We meet “Billie” as a young man, in the war, when he betrayed a lover and made a film that in some way compensated for this betrayal. The script colours all the story around it and is one of the most strangely moving pieces of writing I’ve read in years. Coe’s best novels always sounded tricksier in summary than they were when you read them. The same can be said here. Continue reading...
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