A young woman finds herself on the set of Billy Wilder’s 1978 film Fedora, in Coe’s love letter to the spirit of cinema Jonathan Coe is not a cinematic novelist in the sense that the description is generally meant – dialogue-heavy scenes in camera-ready settings – but movies underpin much of his fiction. _What a Carve Up! _shares a title and narrative framework with a 1961 British film comedy. That book’s 2015 sequel, _Number 11_, more tangentially draws on horror flicks; _Expo __58_ has a subplot modelled on Hitchcock’s _The Lady Vanishes_; while Coe described _The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim_ as his attempt at a literary road movie. Coe’s latest novel, however, is his most passionate marriage of screen and page. In 1977, Calista Frangopolou, a young Athenian woman, is backpacking across California with Gill Foley, a Brummie teenager she befriended at a Greyhound station. Gill is invited to dinner in Los Angeles with an old business contact of her dad’s, who turns out to be Billy Wilder, septuagenarian Austrian émigré director of films including _Some Like __It Hot_ and _Sunset Boulevard_. Through contrived but amusing plotting, the ingenue from Greece is hired to provide local know-how during the shooting in Corfu of _Fedora_, the 1978 late-career movie by Wilder and co-writer IAL Diamond, another dinner guest. Continue reading...
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