Sunnyside [Hardcover]

Carter Beats the Devil, Glen David Gold's marvellous debut novel, was set largely in the showbiz environment of stage magic and had as its central character a fictionalised version of a real Golden Age magician and his (fictional) involvement in the death of (real) US president Warren Harding.

Sunnyside, Gold's long awaited follow up, at first glance has a similar starting point, focusing on another branch of showbiz - movies - and is also centred on a real prominent individual, the iconic figure of Charlie Chaplin. Again Gold weaves many other actual people and events into an engrossing fictional web. But here the scale and ambition are larger, and the tone and mood while occasionally comic, is less exhilarating than Carter, tending instead to the gloomy and unresolved.

Gold's Chaplin is a tortured genius, weighed down by so many problems and frustrations that he is trapped in a creative dead end. He is an intriguing, flawed, but also somewhat tiresome, character who needs something that his Tramp character was good at dishing out - a good kick in the pants. At least these parts of the book provide an opportunity for a fascinating scrutiny of Hollywood's early years, the struggle for dominance between the stars and the moguls, the changing face of Los Angeles as the film-makers discover its quiet canyons and hills, the burgeoning cult of celebrity, the magnetic pull that could attract royalty and revolutionaries. But this is also the period of the First World War and the novel also covers part of the American (and Allies) adventures in France and Russia.

The book starts on the day of 12 November 1916, when there were over 800 sightings of Chaplin across the USA, a form of mass hysteria that illustrate just how pervasive Chaplin or rather his Little Fellow persona had become. This serves to introduce, as well as Chaplin himself, the other two main characters. First there is Leland Duncan, a movie star handsome `hero' who via a series of misfortunes ends up looking after a pair of puppy dogs in a war ravaged area of France. Yes, really. (Duncan incidentally is also a based on a real person). The third protagonist is the pretentious and glum Hugo Black, a not very appealing character who by ill luck finds himself in the ranks of a motley multinational military force in a hell-frozen-over part of Russia supposedly there to fight the Bolsheviks (or Bolos).

Each section is modelled on part of the programme of an old time night at the movies (newsreel, serial, comedy short) and so the book flicks back and forth between the three protagonists, perhaps intending to reflect that monument of silent cinema Intolerance, where cross cutting was supposedly deployed for the first time. Teeming with characters and incidents both grand and small, the book is really a series of audacious set pieces that switch between comedy, tragedy, irony and melodrama.

Taken as a whole, Sunnyside is much less focused than Carter, and Gold seems to be straining to be more consciously literary. The sentences are frequently dense and packed with obsessive detail which often feels too much like unnecessary clutter. A small example; Hugo Black has disembarked with the rest of the 339th Infantry Regiment at the Russian Port of Archangel: "Soon the Americans stood in formation dockside...There was a tang of marine waste and metal slurry, a hint of old sawdust. It reminded Hugo of the ghostliness of the hoop-and-stave works, which he and his father, the engineer of engineers, visited on Sundays."

I don't know about you, but my experience of hoop-and-stave works isn't vast, so why the tang of marine waste, metal slurry and old sawdust should remind Hugo of one makes for a pretty arcane comparison. Are productive hoop-and-stave works always ghostly or are just the specific ones that Hugo is remembering ghostly? Were they ghostly because they were abandoned or because they didn't operate on Sundays? Have I forgotten an earlier reference to a hoop-and-stave works that would explain why one has been mentioned now? There are quite a few examples of this sort of unenlightening hyper detail which rather than aid or clarify understanding just get in the way.

There is no denying that many passages and sections taken individually are entertaining and engrossing but overall Sunnyside lacks the consistency and gripping narrative of Carter Beats the Devil. It is the, sometimes dazzling, parts that one comes away admiring rather than the whole.

Glenn David Gold's follow-up to "Carter Beats the Devil", his massively entertaining debut novel, may well disappoint fans hoping for a repeat of the nail biting plotting and historical reconstruction of that magnum opus, but there are enough high spots to excite any readers excited by ideas and style.

"Sunnyside" has taken 8 years to get to us and weighs in at a formidable 555 pages. In it he develops some of the ideas about celebrity and personality he began to develop in "Carter" but eschews the page turning plotting that kept that book so alive. But this is a much more considered attempt to analyse a key point in the development of modern America as Hollywood gets it legs and begins to establish itself in the public psyche. He centers on Charlie Chaplin, the king of the two reel silent comedies, who has established a power base for himself, but who is beginning to dry up artistically. Meanwhile the Hollywood entrepreneurs are trying to broaden the market for films to claim the artistic and intellectual market they are currently missing. All this is at the time when America enters the WW1, the first war in which film played a central part in portraying the supposed reality of war.

To hold all this together he invents a plot about two outsiders who join the war in Belgium and Russia respectively through a series of co-incidences that pull them both within Chaplin's orbit. Their naratives are designed to counterpoint the prevailing images that Americans are presented and to underpin his general analysis of the way that film narrative undermines popular perceptions. However, it is in this area that Gold has difficulties in sustaining the pace and liveliness of the Hollywood scenes.

In its depiction of Hollywood and the characters that populate it, Gold's style is reminiscent of EL Doctorow. His potrayal of Chaplin, Fairbanks and Pickford is very entertaining and these are interspersed with some brilliant set-pieces that, occasionally, rival those of his previous novel. But this is much more ambitious thematically and perhaps it is this which holds it back.

For the patient reader, however, this entertaining book offers rewards as it moves towards its deeply moving and hopeful conclusion as the characters' fates are sealed.

It seems obligatory to mention Gold's first novel, Carter Beats the Devil, when talking about Sunnyside. However, from the other reviews here, you'd suspect that debut was a far better book than it is. It's a great read, certainly, and manages to write about magic quite magically in places; it's a page-turner, too, and is undeniably enjoyable. However, in retrospect, it also seems to be easy to forget how long it took to get going, how poorly its female characters were written, and the fact that its playfulness isn't necessarily the same as the brilliance that's claimed for it now. Perhaps its reputation is as much a trick of the light as the show it described.

Sunnyside is a different book in many ways. For a start, it's more serious and reflective, and covers celebrity in a way that is as much about the melancholy as it is about the spectacle. Where Carter enjoyed performing, and the artifice behind the magic tricks, Sunnyside shows how hollow or empty the reality behind the publically consumed images can be: not as a series of tricks but in lives linked by history, dreams, and ideas.

In Leland, for all the overlong descriptions of dog training, we have a character who is a wonderful example of its central themes. He's a product of a broken home, and of a failed performer of bad illusions, and is driven by a desire for fame that he cannot truly understand to the point where he is always performing himself in his own illusory screenplay. The consequences of his performances in the real word are both tragic and comic, as much for their context as their narrative pull. The protracted passages on his dogs still build towards a set piece and reveal that is moving as well as knowing, and almost pays off the pages put into it.

Similarly, where others have criticised the portrayal of Chaplin for seeming unsympathetic, it's that aspect to him that makes the split between his appearance and his identity so dynamic, and that gives such a drive to the sections centred on him.

It's no surprise that Sunnyside isn't as much fun, then, because it is examining a different aspect of the themes of Carter, as well as others beside. It's just a shame if, in being more serious and less fun, this might lead readers to dwell on flaws they glossed over before. That seems unfair, not least because this is a so much better written book. There's so much more complexity and depth to its characters and ideas, and more ambition in their stories. Those characters are explored more fluidly, and Gold continually exhibits a wonderful knack for inhabiting both their outlook and the times they are in. He has more to say about - or at least to question of - all of them, which is among the key strengths of this book.

Obviously in a book of this length there are lulls, or less successful characters, but these are nothing to rival how long Carter's take-off was, or how painful its blind romance. Sunnyside's set pieces are just as wonderfully realised, if not better, and stand out too; I don't want to give any away here, but the party in particular is fantastic. It's not just seductions and gossip, but artifice, performance, Hollywood politics and more, and is compelling and breathtakingly achieved.

Sunnyside is too long, but on reflection, Carter is just as overlong and patchy in places. And I'd argue that Sunnyside only really fails where it shares its forerunner's flaws. What stands out for me is the genuine development in its writing style, a greater depth and complexity (even if this occasionally causes the focus to fail), and its consistently realised tone and context.

This book is all the better for not being a re-run, and deserves to be read for what it does, rather than misjudged on Carter's terms. If you can get past the light show of his first novel, you may find far more meaning here, as well as hints of how Gold's voice is growing. I, for one, hope there are more `disappointments' this good to follow.