Night Film

I picked this up at a Heathrow bookstore hoping for a good holiday read and it didn't disappoint! I'm a bit weary of the ‘experimental fiction' format, but this book, with its iphone app, illustrations and browser screenshots, has actually turned out to be surprisingly smooth. All that extra material adds up to a truly immersive experience actually, and if you treat the iphone app as an approximation of google for the world of the book, it turns out all the more believable for it.

There's just so much good stuff here — crime, black magic, romance, loveable characters and loveable villains. It's a solid tome but I passed its halfway point on my short 2.5h flight, so as banal as it sounds, it is a real page-turner. The ending unspools with one twist after another, each trying to reclaim the narrative for a different genre (at some point it gets very meta, which was awesome). It's all tied up neatly at the end though.

It was a hugely satisfying read for which I have only one complaint, and that is: for a novel this cinematic — not only concerned with film making and story telling, but also obviously destined for the big screen — it paints its (obviously token) minority characters with the thickest possible brush. Those parts made me cringe so, so painfully. There's one episode in particular which is the Jar Jar Binks of Night Film, when the protagonists run into a clan of Chinese restaurateurs, then catch a ride with a Jamaican cab driver. None of those characters is given any depth and they all seem to be taken out of conservative comedy, in that instead of amusing you, they leave you annoyed — at the author. If this was supposed to be a statement on the stereotypical treatment of ethnic minorities in films (I really doubt it was), it backfired by taking some depth out of the whole story.