The Director's Cut

Royle specializes in cleverly placed juxtapositions of the seemingly incongruous, and in his new novel he exploits this skill to maximum effect. The story begins oddly, but alluringly: within a few pages, you find yourself identifying with a jeweller stalking a lonely widow on the Suffolk coast. Cut to London, where a body wrapped in celluloid is discovered on a demolition site, and a group of worried film-makers reluctantly reunite after a long separation. Cut back to the same city 15 years earlier, with the widow's projectionist husband still alive, and the same film-makers on the cusp of a colossal error of judgement. Cut again to a psychotic medical student tracking down and murdering his namesake on a barren Scottish mountain, and emerging later in London to haunt the lives of the four film-makers. It's demanding but seductive stuff, and Royle's prose swings back and forth in time with all the immediacy of cinema, revealing tantalizing sections of a dark snapshot London's seedy underbelly. The ingenious plot is full of historical and geographic detail and suffused with a noir-ish melancholy that lends the whole novel the dream-like quality which has become Royle's hallmark as a writer. His theme, the clash of ethics and aesthetics, fantasy and reality, is made all the more compelling by its topicality in an increasingly celluloid age. Review by LIZ JENSEN. Editor's note: Liz Jensen is the author of The Paper Eater. (Kirkus UK)