Mr Wilder & Me - Jonathan Coe

I've read a bit of Jonathan Coe before and always enjoyed them - but Mr Wilder & Me is in another league.  It's simply a masterpiece of fiction.  The story is simple enough - in 1977 a young Greek woman called Calista Frangopolou is asked to provide translation services for the Greek shoot on Billy Wilder's penultimate film, Fedora.  She becomes innocently friendly with Wilder, his writing partner I A L Diamond ('Iz') and their respective wives.  She continues with the crew as they move on to Munich and Paris.  In Munich she hears about Wilder's wartime service and a postwar documentary.

In the obvious sense it's a study of a refugee who became a feted director but outlived his vogue - mirrored, of course, in Tom Tyron's rather trashy novel about Fedora which I rather enjoyed at the time.  But Calista is telling her recollections from circa 2013, when she has become a moderately successful composer of movie music and has twin daughters about to leave the domestic nest.  Lessons learnt from Wilder and Diamond back in the day come into play.

I don't know how Coe has done it, but in a book only 250 pages long he manages to create an enormous amount of room for his characters to move and develop in.  This is how he is able to avoid cheesy coincidence and deploy extremely poignant subtlety instead.  And in the middle of the book, when Billy's secret is revealed, he slips effortlessly into movie-script format - more brilliantly still, he does it in Wilder-Diamond style.  Like everything else in Mr Wilder & Me, it's note perfect.

The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim - Jonathan Coe

I like Jonathan Coe, I like his irreverence, his depth of knowledge, his wit, though all these can, of course, become pitfalls. I like him best when he combines natural satire with compassionate characterisation.

The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim falls midway in his range.  The story is slightly too convoluted, the titular protagonist just a shade too bland to evoke much empathy.  The writing, however, is a joy, and the ending just brilliant. But the fact remains, the journey of personal discovery just isn't that interesting.  I'm not surprised Max's wife left him, nor that his father doesn't like him that much.  Indeed one of the sub-stories - a really clever device, revealing Max as others see him - shows him to be rather a selfish, spiteful piece of work.

Some characters are not given as much time as I would have liked. Poppy's uncle Clive, for example. That said, the risky device of anchoring Max and his journey athwart that of the round-the-world sailing cheat Donald Crowhurst works like a charm. Like Coe, I remember following the Crowhurst story in the Sunday Times as a youngster; it has had more effect on me through Coe's novel than the reality ever did.

An excellent novel, a fine example of its kind - but Coe can do better.

[I'm loving the cover art, by the way. By gray318, apparently.]