A Sort of Review of Nicholas Royle’s ‘The Director’s Cut.’
(The aim of this review is not to divulge major plot points or to even give a comprehensive overview of the novel, but is an attempt to try to communicate some of the feelings and thoughts I had on reading the novel).
(1) Cinema, perspective, plot.
Nicholas Royle’s ‘The Director’s Cut’ is seemingly rooted in the familiar traditions of the thriller novel with cinema as its most prominent and eye-catching backdrop. The story unfolds within a framework of interconnecting viewpoints, a series of subtle, multiple narratives.
Four film students make an experimental film of a man committing suicide. This terrible event transforms the apparent conventions of the novel into one in which psychologically much is left to the reader to decide, regardless of how much emotional and interior story we are supposedly given. Years later the police find the body of the suicide, and the much older protagonists are now forced to confront more than just their guilt.
Part of the delight of this novel is how Royle refuses to centralize his narrative with one character. It’s a risky technique, yet Royle does what very few other writers can, relating the story within the relative physical narrowness of just three hundred pages.
(2) Location
London and train stations (derelict or operative), not to mention the ordinary streets of flats and shops and pubs that make up the teeming metropolis, become a topography of reference points to cinema, imagined or real. But this is London as lived in, one in which its movements are felt like tides of gradually accelerating fatality, the plot entwined about the bland objects and relics of London now, and London ‘then.’
Old abandoned cinemas, train stations, depots, derelict buildings, attain a sense of architectural importance to the story that changes their day to day significance into something far more mysterious. There are layers to these buildings as there are to the story, which doesn’t just stop with the physical aspects of mortar or brickwork or even their demolition.
Royle has taken London at its most recognizable and injected it with a skewed perspective. It’s London, but perhaps not the one we wish to admit to.
(3) Characters
Paradoxically Royle creates four protagonists who are understandable in their motivations, actions, and lack of actions, and despite their flaws, or perhaps because of them, generates contradictory feelings towards them.
Most importantly it’s being able to recognize these so called opposing forces of emotional disparate qualities which gives the characters the impetus to do what they do, and to allow us to believe that ‘real people in the real world’ would also develop and evolve towards such questionable, yet almost inevitable conclusions.
(4) The Novel
The Director’s Cut is a thriller, but not one in which traditionalism of genre is allowed to play out the way commercial Hollywood might envision. It succeeds in bending and deviating expected routes of plot for a heavier sense of character, undoing them and somehow resolving them along the way. The old adage that nothing is what it seems, is doubly enforced here, but not at the expense of the importance of the story.
The Director’s Cut was first published in 2000. I read it this year. I expect people will still be reading it many more years to come.
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Upcoming ‘sort of reviews’:
Next week I will be reviewing Antwerp, an unofficial sequel of sorts to The Director’s Cut. There will also be a short mini-interview with Nicholas Royle about the novels.
I’ll also be talking about Joel Lane’s marvelous chapbook ‘Black Country.’
The week after I will be doing an overview of two of the best crime writers out there, Paul D Brazill and Julia Madeleine.
Thanks for reading.
