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REMAKE
What do you do when Illusion, Tragedy and Comedy all come at once—and stay overnight!
West London, Summer 1995. The British film industry is at its usual last gasp. Jackie Juste’s successful career on stage and screen has hit the skids due to a strange disorder, an ‘anorexia of the eye, following a fracture of the heart’. Jackie, who requires stage make-up even to see a face in the mirror, has taken Vows of ‘I simply would not whore myself any longer around the stage, movies, anything. After nearly twenty years, I felt sullied by the scripts of a century.’
But chance encounters are about to turn life itself bizarrely performative. As the protagonists of Derek Beaven’s edge-of-the-seat novel criss-cross London to escape the mysterious Dr F (an antagonist hellbent it seems on keeping lovers apart) they enact scenes of extravagant desire and terror, of uncanny mimetic compulsion, in a wealth of fascinating sets and locations—not least, after all the narrative ebbs and flows, in the extraordinary estuary-based denouement to this strikingly original work of gothic romance.
About the Author
Derek Beaven lives in Berkshire. He is the author of five previous novels. His first, NEWTON’S NIECE (1994) was shortlisted for the Writers' Guild Best Novel Prize and won a Commonwealth Prize. His second, ACTS OF MUTINY (1998) was shortlisted for the Guardian Fiction Prize. His third, IF THE INVADER COMES (2001) was long-listed for the Booker Prize.
West London, Summer 1995. The British film industry is at its usual last gasp. Jackie Juste’s successful career on stage and screen has hit the skids due to a strange disorder, an ‘anorexia of the eye, following a fracture of the heart’. Jackie, who requires stage make-up even to see a face in the mirror, has taken Vows of ‘I simply would not whore myself any longer around the stage, movies, anything. After nearly twenty years, I felt sullied by the scripts of a century.’
But chance encounters are about to turn life itself bizarrely performative. As the protagonists of Derek Beaven’s edge-of-the-seat novel criss-cross London to escape the mysterious Dr F (an antagonist hellbent it seems on keeping lovers apart) they enact scenes of extravagant desire and terror, of uncanny mimetic compulsion, in a wealth of fascinating sets and locations—not least, after all the narrative ebbs and flows, in the extraordinary estuary-based denouement to this strikingly original work of gothic romance.
About the Author
Derek Beaven lives in Berkshire. He is the author of five previous novels. His first, NEWTON’S NIECE (1994) was shortlisted for the Writers' Guild Best Novel Prize and won a Commonwealth Prize. His second, ACTS OF MUTINY (1998) was shortlisted for the Guardian Fiction Prize. His third, IF THE INVADER COMES (2001) was long-listed for the Booker Prize.
409 pages, Kindle Edition
Published September 5, 2024
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November 14, 2024
JACKIE JUSTE, a stage and film actor, is horrified to find no reflection in his makeup mirror. A self-diagnosis of ‘anorexia of the eye, following a fracture of the heart’ after a messy breakup with an American movie star, causes him to make a Vow of Abstinence. He refuses to ‘deliver other people’s speeches’, in other words, to accept any speaking parts. Therefore, his agent’s ability to keep her client gainfully employed is rendered well–nigh impossible. She lands him a gig as a ‘corpse’, which requires him to do no more than lie on the mortician’s slab, and a knitwear commercial, where he models sweaters alongside a female dancer, Raffaella. After the shoot wraps, they begin a relationship, the progress of which forms the structure of REMAKE.
In this harlequinade of a novel, Beaven draws on the stock characters of the commedia dell’ arte. Here the Dottore is the sinister Doctor F, a vampiric figure determined to suck the life from his patients – much of the book’s action centres on the lovers’ attempt to avoid his baleful influence. The Capitano is Guy, a film director whose baggage is stolen at Heathrow and dosses down in Jackie’s flat. There’s even a brief appearance from Scaramuccia in the form of Shelburn Calvert, tax advisor to the entertainment profession and comedy grotesque. Pierrot features as Jackie and the reference to the white-faced clown is direct. Jackie’s self-imposed speaking embargo allows him to continue performing his one-man show, modelled on the nineteenth-century mime, Jean-Gaspard Deburau. He offers his audience the classic mimetic illusions of a man trapped inside an invisible glass box and the helium balloon that exerts an invisible upward force. Jackie’s technique is flawless, to the extent that the audience accepts they are seeing three-dimensional objects.
Soon it becomes evident that Raffaella is also suffering a mental health crisis. In her case, the disorder is so severe that she is admitted to a clinic. Here she undergoes a programme of therapy under the guidance of a psychiatric doctor in the mould of Sigmund Freud. Jackie, having played Freud himself in the British movie that marked the high point of his career, takes a dim view of this doctor, referring to his branch of psychiatry as ‘misogynistic’. He refers to Freud’s accounts of his patient case studies and re-evaluates the science in light of more humane methods of treating mental health patients. It becomes a comprehensive critique of Freud’s methodology.
This novel’s great achievement is in describing psychosis ‘from the inside’. It’s a subjective account of how it feels to be gripped by a terrifying delusion. The Pandora’s box, conjured up by Jackie in mime, contains many horrors that become all too real. Is it a coffin or a prison containing a small boy? An afterword at the end of the book reinforces the theme when Jackie is cast in a remake of the celebrated German expressionist G.W. Pabst’s film PANDORA’S BOX.
REMAKE continues Derek Beaven’s interest in the theme of the disordered self-image, which he began in his novel THE ICON PAINTER, published in 2015. In that case, the trigger of the crisis was childhood trauma and Beaven took a similar opportunity to denounce cultural and scientific orthodoxy.
A considerable depth of research has gone into this book. Beaven knows his stuff as regards psychiatry, in particular the practice of Sigmund Freud. He is equally knowledgeable about the history of mime and the Commedia dell’Arte and has made a study of contemporary trends in filmmaking, particularly the Danish Dogme 95 movement pioneered by Thomas Vinterberg and Lars von Trier. His film director character Guy follows Dogme’s ‘Vow of Chastity’, the set of rules by which they made their films.
REMAKE is a ‘must-read’ for anyone interested in altered states of consciousness. It offers conventional narrative tropes – a love story, a thriller, a ‘hostage story’ – but through the unusual prism of a narrator struggling to hang on to the last shreds of his sanity.
FIVE STARS and highly recommended.
In this harlequinade of a novel, Beaven draws on the stock characters of the commedia dell’ arte. Here the Dottore is the sinister Doctor F, a vampiric figure determined to suck the life from his patients – much of the book’s action centres on the lovers’ attempt to avoid his baleful influence. The Capitano is Guy, a film director whose baggage is stolen at Heathrow and dosses down in Jackie’s flat. There’s even a brief appearance from Scaramuccia in the form of Shelburn Calvert, tax advisor to the entertainment profession and comedy grotesque. Pierrot features as Jackie and the reference to the white-faced clown is direct. Jackie’s self-imposed speaking embargo allows him to continue performing his one-man show, modelled on the nineteenth-century mime, Jean-Gaspard Deburau. He offers his audience the classic mimetic illusions of a man trapped inside an invisible glass box and the helium balloon that exerts an invisible upward force. Jackie’s technique is flawless, to the extent that the audience accepts they are seeing three-dimensional objects.
Soon it becomes evident that Raffaella is also suffering a mental health crisis. In her case, the disorder is so severe that she is admitted to a clinic. Here she undergoes a programme of therapy under the guidance of a psychiatric doctor in the mould of Sigmund Freud. Jackie, having played Freud himself in the British movie that marked the high point of his career, takes a dim view of this doctor, referring to his branch of psychiatry as ‘misogynistic’. He refers to Freud’s accounts of his patient case studies and re-evaluates the science in light of more humane methods of treating mental health patients. It becomes a comprehensive critique of Freud’s methodology.
This novel’s great achievement is in describing psychosis ‘from the inside’. It’s a subjective account of how it feels to be gripped by a terrifying delusion. The Pandora’s box, conjured up by Jackie in mime, contains many horrors that become all too real. Is it a coffin or a prison containing a small boy? An afterword at the end of the book reinforces the theme when Jackie is cast in a remake of the celebrated German expressionist G.W. Pabst’s film PANDORA’S BOX.
REMAKE continues Derek Beaven’s interest in the theme of the disordered self-image, which he began in his novel THE ICON PAINTER, published in 2015. In that case, the trigger of the crisis was childhood trauma and Beaven took a similar opportunity to denounce cultural and scientific orthodoxy.
A considerable depth of research has gone into this book. Beaven knows his stuff as regards psychiatry, in particular the practice of Sigmund Freud. He is equally knowledgeable about the history of mime and the Commedia dell’Arte and has made a study of contemporary trends in filmmaking, particularly the Danish Dogme 95 movement pioneered by Thomas Vinterberg and Lars von Trier. His film director character Guy follows Dogme’s ‘Vow of Chastity’, the set of rules by which they made their films.
REMAKE is a ‘must-read’ for anyone interested in altered states of consciousness. It offers conventional narrative tropes – a love story, a thriller, a ‘hostage story’ – but through the unusual prism of a narrator struggling to hang on to the last shreds of his sanity.
FIVE STARS and highly recommended.
Displaying 1 of 1 review