What I Thought: Antwerp by Nicholas Royle.
In Nicholas Royle’s gloriously dark, and stylishly unpredictable ‘Antwerp,’ the world of film-making is once again brought to life with Royle’s unnerving eye for authentic detail. This time we delve into the low-budget film-making of an American auteur working in Antwerp, Belgium. As with the Director’s Cut, Royle expertly juggles the story’s narrative from the viewpoint of several, remarkably believable characters, all of whom by-pass the role of supportive props.
This novel is a delicious labyrinth of plotting and mesmerizing intensity, in which real life characters mix with fictional ones. In ‘The Director’s Cut’ the abandoned cinemas and derelict buildings of London played a significant role in themselves, those crumbling edifices ‘perhaps’ reflecting the interior worlds of the characters who stumbled through them unaware. In Antwerp, where governmental law prohibits and protects the demolition of buildings much to the delight of online enthusiasts exploring their decaying architecture, the buildings can again be said to be architectural mirrors in which the questionable sanity of the protagonist(s) vacillate ominously in directions not yet clear to us.
Antwerp is an unofficial sequel of sorts to The Director’s Cut in which we have four characters from the first novel taking centre stage. But Antwerp, while dealing with the subject of cinema - scrutinizing its effects, its history, its meaning for those who are compelled to make it, and ultimately, those who are drawn into its world – while initially moving along lines perhaps similar to the first novel, eventually makes a sudden and jarring detour through a landscape of intensely claustrophobic dereliction, in which layers of meaning are peeled away to reveal more than was previously suspected.
The book snakes its way through a minefield of complex and daring ideas. Obsession, the effects of abuse, personalities within personalities, the enduring role of art, perspective, and national identity, all of which take place in Antwerp as a series of brutal and unexplained murders plague the city.
The elegance of Royle’s prose superbly articulates the pace of the story, conjuring up a world of half-light, of cinematic shadow, from which a contemporary noir modernity hangs threateningly above the characters.
As a small side note: Antwerp uses one of the characters from The Director’s Cut to re-examine past actions not given full scope in the first book. If this sounds a little mystifying, somewhat vague, it’s because I’m afraid the slightest clue might reveal important plot developments. But, personally, I was delighted that such odd actions as demonstrated at the start of The Director’s Cut, were now fully explored to such startling and disturbing effect in Antwerp.
Nicholas Royle’s Antwerp is every inch the achievement that The Director’s Cut is. I would even go so far as to say that its ending is possibly one of the most demonstrative examples in which readers’ expectation are well and truly confounded.
I would recommend this book for just about anybody. It’s one of the few novels I’ve read in recent years that defies genre expectation, occupying its own literary, and commercial genre. A wonderfully, thought provoking novel by one of most original and talented writers out there.
