GatesyRead

  Tom Keneally is a most prolific writer, with 34 published novels, 15 works of significant non-fiction, and two children’s collections. Almost Dickensian in output. His 1982 Booker-prize winning Schindler's Ark is his most famous book internationally and the basis of the film Schindler's List (1993) directed by Stephen Spielberg. Keneally, now aged 86, has had a long career and knows a thing or two about writing. The Dickens Boy is a richly imagined novel about the real-life journey to Australia by Edward Bulwer Lytton Dickens, known to everyone as Plorn, Dicken’s tenth child. Plorn is a likeable young Englishman, only sixteen when the story begins. His first stay in Australia is at a station named Eli Elwah, and he only lasts 12 hours. Young Dickens is angered by the station manager’s rude inquiries and innuendo about his father’s personal life, and goes so far as to threaten a ‘trial of honour’ to which the station manager replies, ‘Can you believe this bloke? (p.17). Stir

The premise of this novel appeals to fans of metafiction and Salman Rushdie. A spy thriller writer, Sam DuChamp, turns his attention to a more literary story—a picaresque novel about Ismail Smile — a traveling salesman of pharmaceutical products. Smile falls in love with a TV-host star, and travels across America on quest to win her love. Meanwhile, Smile conjures up a son, Sancho, who begins to have a life of his own, slowly moving from the imaginary world to the world of flesh and blood.  Like a 19th century novel, each chapter begins with a helpful summary as subtitle (e.g. Chapter One: Quichotte, an old man, falls in love, embarks on a quest & becomes a father). Chapter Two introduces the author of the character Quichotte – Sam DuChamp, and so the layering of the fictional world begins. So far, so good. When introducing DuChamp, however, the narrator highlights DuChamp’s fictional status (“we will call him Brother” p.21). Then there is the unsettling instability of the text'

Jonathon Coe and this reader share many passions, though Coe drips success, and I mostly just drip. Here’s Coe: MA, PhD in literature; musician before a writer; fan of progressive rock; the Duke of Prunes in Javier Marías’s kingdom of Redonda . Mr Wilder and Me is his latest work, and the first Coe novel I have read. Good gifts are like that: just outside your reading preferences but connected to your interests in one way or another. Here we have a young adventurer (Calista) and a real-life film legend, Billy Wilder. There is a Greek island and sharp conversations and gleaned insights into the mind of an aging artist and his urgent need to create, even when the times have changed and success of films like Sunset Boulevard and Double Indemnity is in the past. Coe bookends the novel in the near-present with Calista in London, ‘almost sixty’, about to drive one of her daughters to Heathrow (she’s headed to Australia, a crisis point in many an English household and story). Calista has