12. The House in the Cerulean Sea

By TJ Klune 

I heard wonderful things about this book - where, I can't recall - maybe I scanned a few Goodreads reviews?  I was looking for a good contemporary fantasy and this sounded like it would satiate what I was missing, so I purposely didn’t read anything more. Earlier this summer, I saw a copy at Librairie Drawn & Quarterly and got a slight discount with some kids’ books I was getting as gifts (regular price was $25! then later saw this used for $14 when I was in Vancouver).   

Now that I’ve read it.. it's going in the pile to sell to SW Welch after this review is done.  Even though I enjoyed THintCS well enough, I need a big dollop of darkness with my fantasy, thank you very much.  The House in the Cerulean Sea was too feel- good n' cutesy for my taste, though there were touching parts that managed to pull some hardened heartstrings. 

Still, the style reminded me of the first and only Harry Potter book I read, except this is an American writer simulating how English people would talk.  Unassuming middle-aged case worker Linus Baker is a dedicated employee at the Department in Charge of Magical Youth. One day he gets a special month long assignment from Extremely Upper Management to investigate a peculiar orphanage that may be going a bit rogue. Linus and his cat travel by train to remote Marsyus island which is guarded by an ancient sprite named Ms Chapelwhite.  There, Linus gets to know the unusual magical children and their guardian, the mysterious Arthur Parnassus.  

Linus Baker’s ‘real’ world has been done before.  His workplace is a very Brazil-esque bureaucracy and everyone he encounters is cold and callous – his boss is a harridan, his coworkers are soulless automatons, and his neighbour Edith Clapper is an old shrew.  So far, cliched and two-dimensional. The queer romance that develops later between Linus and Arthur Parnassus was the only thing that might be considered ‘daring’, yet even their romance was unrealistic, like something out of Love, Actually.  Much of the narrative was conventional and safe, in the sense that everything goes down smoothly - like syrup, or treacle.  

If there’s fire and brimstone, it’s in the form a young boy nicknamed Lucy, who’s one of Arthur’s charges and who happens to be the Anti-Christ.  Extremely Upper Management are concerned that this boy will grow into his Satanic powers and take over the world and they want Linus to make sure that Arthur is doing his job to keep these children under control and out of sight from society.  For the rest of the unusual children, there’s a female gnome, a forest sprite, a shape-shifter who can only turn into a small dog, an unnamed tentacled species who longs to be a bellhop when he grows up.  Pretty cute stuff.  Klune makes sure to point out that two of the characters have dark skin, lest readers think that everyone in the book is white.

 

There's no big conflict in the novel, and no one is truly evil.  Linus has the typical character arc where he gradually comes out of his nerdy, bureaucratic shell and falls in love with the island, its inhabitants, esp. Arthur.  And of course, Linus realizes that his menial job and previous life is not what it's cracked up to be.  Despite his pudgy body, Linus becomes a fierce protector of the children, especially against some of the bigoted human villagers and helps save the day. 

All this is perfect fodder for a Hollywood movie – a Pleasantville for magical beings (I believe there's already a HBO production in the works).  Linus Baker has only known a life in monochrome until he stepped into the Technicolor world of Marsyas Island and its colourful inhabitants.  This is Klune's schtick - the end of the book included a preview for his next book, which read like a screenplay for a new Ricky Gervais movie.

 

Thus, I made a grave mistake in not learning enough about this book before buying it - if I had, I would’ve realized it was the literary equivalent of Love, Actually - a hit everyone loved and if you criticize it in any way, you’re looked upon as a cold-hearted miser.  More importantly, if I had really done my research, I would’ve learned how TJ Klune was inspired to write this book in the first place - he had read about the Sixties Scoop and my country's horrifying Residential School System that tortured and traumatized generations of indigenous children.  Keep in mind, this was before the unmarked graves were discovered in May 2021.  Even then, as a white male author, Klune knew he couldn’t write a fictional book without appropriating the horrors of colonized First Nations people, so his workaround was to write a glossy, charming fantasy novel about magical beings instead.

Let’s be clear, even if I hadn’t known about the Sixties Scoop connection, I felt THitCS was kept light and gently heart-string tuggy for mass appeal and, to its detriment, was safe and PC.  The Golden Compass was a far superior book dealing with similar themes but with the gravitas, subtlety and courage to deal with dark, difficult subjects that was sorely lacking in Klune’s writing, which glosses over anything that could be potentially disturbing or uncomfortable.

 

While I was in Vancouver, I also found a used copy of The Bone Clocks, and will give this a go next – still thirsting for some contemporary fantasy with substance.  So far, Mitchell's far superior writing skills is a nice change of scenery...

11. The Face on the Cutting-Room Floor

By Cameron McCabe

Picked this up at a new/used Toronto bookstore, Re:Reading, while visiting a friend in East Danforth back in early August.  It was our first family trip since the pandemic where we travelled beyond the borders of Quebec, primarily to visit my husband’s sister and nephews who were staying in TO throughout August.  

 I couldn’t believe Re:Reading had a used copy of The Face on the Cutting-Room Floor in decent condition.  Like The Darkmasters Trilogy, The Face was one of the “100 Novels about Cinema” featured in the August 2018 issue of Sight and Sound, where I first heard of this unusual hard-boiled murder mystery.

I only started reading The Face on the train ride back home, alone, gloriously alone, while hubs and kid remained in TO for a few more days.  Even though the book was fairly compact, it took me a while to finish because summer, ie. heat wave, general busy-ness.   And I couldn’t quite finish it before my trip to Vancouver in mid-Sept, and because I only had a couple of chapters left, I didn’t bring it with me.  So that was another two weeks of non-reading.  Then I disliked how the book ended and that took another while to finally get to the end (more on that later).

The Face on the Cutting-Room Floor was, in film terms, very meta.  There were a lot of insider references about working in film, and editing terminology, which I appreciated. 

      I was cutting the last sequences of The Waning Moon when Robertson came in and sat down.  He wanted to ask me something but he did not know how to start his question.  He looked at my scissors and said: ‘I often wonder why you people always cut on the end of a movement instead of cutting right on the movement.’

     I answered and he said something else about cutting and editing. We talked about the montage of the Russian films, about the French avant-garde, about the photography of the early Swedish silent and the sets of the German film classics.  We talked about everything but the thing we wanted to talk about. He did not know how to shift the theme and I did not want to start the shifting.

I would’ve loved this book as a film student, as I'd cut my teeth cutting film on a flatbed and studied the films that the two editors were conversing about.

 At first, I thought the story took place in the States since all the characters spoke in an American dialect.  Even though there were obvious references about prices being in pounds, etc.  It wasn’t until I read about Scotland Yard getting involved did I realize this was actually set in London, England!

The story unfolds via the first-person POV of Cameron McCabe, who’s also the ‘author’ of the book.  McCabe is a supervising film editor at a London movie studio, and his boss wants him to cut out the part of a young, aspiring actress without any real reason.  The problem is that the actress is one of the leads in a film about a love triangle, so this would be a near impossible task, even for a talented editor.  McCabe suspects the actress had jilted the studio boss and this is his way of getting revenge.  Later that day, the actress is found dead in another editor’s cutting room, and what do y’know, the room is equipped with an automatic camera that starts filming the room as soon as the door is opened.  Of course, the reel goes missing and soon, Detective Inspector Smith of Scotland Yard arrives on the scene to investigate the murder.  There is immediate tension between Smith and McCabe.  It doesn’t help that McCabe is a smart-ass with the inspector and our ‘hero’ immediately starts his own investigation on what happened and searches for the missing film reel. The reader eventually learns that McCabe isn’t what he seems, and surprise surprise, he’s far from a reliable narrator.  

The book was very clever, unusual, and even ahead of its time, making use of the ‘false document’ technique and the gimmick of narrator as ‘author’, which turns out to be a confession. 

Unfortunately, the writing wasn’t always great and it really got bogged down by its self-referentialism, especially in the afterword by a side character named Mueller with two dots.  Mueller was a key witness Smith used to prosecute McCabe, and he goes into agonizing detail analyzing the psyche and motivations of McCabe based on his bizarre confession.  It gets all convoluted with what happened to Smith because he had used very unorthodox schemes of getting McCabe arrested, and McCabe successfully defended himself in the drawn-out courtroom section, with Smith leaving his position and eventually taking justice into his own hands.   

The book made quite a splash in 1937 and was praised for its ingenuity, but then languished in obscurity for a couple of decades before it was rediscovered in the 1970’s.  

The most interesting section of the book was actually at the end which featured an interview with the real author, Ernest Borneman - he was the most fascinating thing in the book!  A precocious child and youth, Borneman wrote The Face on the Cutting-Room Floor when he was 19 years old, a few years after arriving in England as a Jewish Socialist refugee fleeing Nazi Germany.  Borneman had managed to deceive German authorities by posing as a Hitler Youth.   

Part of the reason he wrote The Face on the Cutting-Room Floor was to improve his English.  So his youth and ESL helped explain the uneven quality of writing, at least.  Borneman then became a jazz critic and musicologist, eventually collaborating with Norman McLaren, which led him to work with John Grierson when he was head of the NFB, and later with Orson Welles.  Then after a career in filmmaking, he became a sexologist, and a rather controversial one at that.  Apparently, Borneman was as sexual as he was intellectual! 

Here is one paragraph summarizing his career as a sexologist.  Reading about Borneman was definitely more interesting than reading his own fiction!

By now Borneman haunted the Frankfurt railway station at night to jot down slang, the cruder the better, and began to write down children’s sex rhymes, which led in 1968 to his Lexikon der Liebe (Dictionary of Love) in two volumes, launching his last and most controversial career as a sexologist. Borneman began to publish regularly, including two more dictionaries, which culminated in the encyclopedia Sex im Volksmund, with more than a thousand synonyms for penis. Nicknamed “Pornoman Borneman” he swiftly established himself as a sex-expert with columns, radio shows, and countless TV appearances. He was living happily in rural Austria in an old farmhouse with his 10,000 books, and had been married to Eva for fifty years, but was willing to admit he was also a threesome connoisseur who had slept with two or three hundred women. 

Still, I’m glad I read this unusual book, which was considered one of the best crime novels set in the movie industry.  The paperback edition I have isn’t great – as it’s from the 80’s.  I’d have preferred the more tasteful Picador or Green Penguin editions, or even the more lurid versions shown at the bottom.  Used book finders can’t always be choosers!