Copy supplied for review
Helen Grant’s previous book Too Near The Dead was a thoroughly absorbing ghost story, and well worth a read. Her new novel Jump Cut is, I’m pleased to say, even better.
Writer Theda Garrick is fortunate enough to have succeeded where others appear to have failed, and gained access to elderly film star Mary Arden. Theda aims to write a book on ‘the world’s most famous lost film’, a 1930 movie called The Simulacrum, of which Arden was the young star. The film was never released and there is uncertainty among film-buffs as to what exactly it was about. Theda therefore, in being invited to stay in Arden’s breathtaking Art Deco house in the Perthshire wilds, has the opportunity to produce a piece of film scholarship that’s genuinely groundbreaking.
It isn’t easy. Theda becomes stranded when her car is damaged by driving into water, and taken away for lengthy repairs. The Arden household is run by Mrs Harris, who marries the efficiency and warmth(!) of Rebecca‘s Mrs Danvers with the bland politeness of HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Someone – or something – is prowling the corridors by night, and trying Theda’s door. Arden herself is waspish and impatient: too old and rich to care what others think; she’s a wonderful creation, an ancient puppet-master full of bile. She gets under Theda’s skin immediately, finding with unerring ease which buttons to press: the buttons marked ‘Max’. Theda is recently widowed, and this trip was supposed to put the death of her husband Max behind her.
Furthermore, there’s a reference – seemingly throwaway, but that’s just part of Grant’s skill – to the legend of Bluebeard, and unspoken horrors are implied by the discovery of something as banal as a used pot of face cream. Like Too Near The Dead the pacing is slow and deliberate, and Grant’s prose slips down like a fine single malt. Slowly, slowly, Grant turns up the temperature on Theda until, like the proverbial frog, she realises she’s being (metaphorically) boiled. Not only does she not realise it for a long time, neither do we, and when the rug is pulled from under her it’s a shocking moment and Theda realises far too late that rather than launching a new phase of her life, she has become instead “an insect trapped inside a jewelled box”.
There’s another similarity with Too Near The Dead (as well as a neat little reference to it). Again, a female narrator uses the first-person present tense. Some writers (Philip Pullman most vocally) have been sniffy about this technique, but surely it’s a case of ‘horses for courses’? In a work of suspense it means that we are as unprepared as the narrator for any surprises, and the implicit unreliability of a first-person narrator (exacerbated by a present tense in which nothing is fixed and everything is contingent on the moment) always adds an element of intrigue; and so it is with Theda, who has a secret of her own.
The Simulacrum, as well as being a film, is a useful motif for much of what Grant is doing in this superbly-constructed novel. A simulacrum, after all, is a stand-in: something that looks like original of something but isn’t, and while that is literally the case in the deeply strange film itself, it also relates to Theda’s own life decisions; there are numerous examples of simulacra throughout the book. Jump Cut is a book about getting what we want, and the cost of it; and the perils inherent in falling for surface attraction.
I thoroughly enjoyed Jump Cut: it’s the best ghost story I’ve read this year, and deserves every success.
Into the Gyre 