by Austin Williams, Director of The Future Cities Project
It is fifty years since Spielberg’s movie, Jaws, first reached the big screen. It was described by film critic, Mark Kermode as a “genre-defining blockbuster that changed the face of modern cinema.” Indeed, a new theatre production, The Shark Is Broken, reflecting on the making of that movie is playing in UK theatres today. Lew Collins’ new book “Out of Competition” makes a few nods to the film – one of the characters is proposing yet another remake of the Jaws franchise – and to film-making per se, in a novel of intrigue, murder, and protest set in the murky world of international-finance in the film industry. Within the first chapter, a motor-boat driver is killed by a real shark falling from a promotional helicopter stunt. And so it begins.
The story is told in chronological order, day by day, over the course of a Film Festival in the south of France. A central protagonist Larry Linsteeg, a failing Hollywood film producer, kicks things off and within the first few pages we see him manhandled in a street in the south of France and bundled into a rowdy, radical, pro-democracy meeting. He’d been on his way to close a film-deal, and this opening chapter is fast-paced, and scripted in a manner of a Tarantino-esque film-edit. And equally confusing.
This book has been acclaimed as the 2023 Kenneth Patchen Award-winner (a prize celebrated by the Journal of Experimental Fiction). The author, Lew Collins relocated to France several years ago and his love of the country and especially its language comes across in the text that mixes French language freely into the dialogue. Maybe it’s a little too much for this GCSE-level reader. I found myself reaching for the Google Translate app across several paragraphs (but perhaps that says more about me than the average reader).
Adding to the need for concentration while reading this book, a number of characters appear with few flags or signature and we are confronted by a growing cast in rapid succession: a dodgy Russian oligarch, a film correspondent, a freelance photographer, a chief inspector, an ex-KGB agent with a heart condition, an outgoing festival director, critics, journalists, billionaires and showgirls. Along the way, there is a disappearance and a murder; there are Chinese kickboxers, Japanese artists and leftist demonstrators. It’s a lot for the reader to take in, and it is clearly a strain in the author’s character-naming inventiveness; culminating in Semolina Pynes, the out-of-her-depth, lead actress; or Zena Zatters, the festival gofer. Where characterisations are made, they are a little laboured, for example, sign-posting the “LA-based American audiovisual expert and putative film producer” or describing the oligarch’s boat as “a three hundred and twenty foot welded steel and aluminium moulded fibre-glass… ocean-going, part-solar-powered ship cruiser.”
That said, the story settles, and intrigue ensues. With so many characters, they rise and fall, appear and disappear all too easily and it is hard to relate to the characters in sufficient depth. But the pace is cinematic. Indeed, the filmic ambitions of the novel seem to have drawn characters from movie references: I pictured Rollergirl in Boogie Nights, or Alain Delon in La Piscine, and one can imagine a script for the big screen that emphasises the “homage“, as they say in France, towards updated Bogart detective noir. Maybe even a hint of Get Shorty… about a loan shark after all.
“Out of Competition” by Lew Collins, Jef Books, 2024. pp407.
Swimanög 