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The Director's Cut
Nicholas Royle
Abacus trade paperback, 310 pages, £9.99
Review by Gerald Houghton (2000)

On this evidence (and that provided by his last, the lop-sided The Matter of The Heart), Nicholas Royle is a writer with problems. Fecundity is not one. The Director's Cut is more a novel of ideas than of cohesive narrative, in love with process more than progress. The lesson learned from Heart - that a purported crowd-pleaser (even with literary pretensions) demands a proper ending - infects the end result, but this novel is, if anything, even less satisfying.

1983. Iain Burns, an East Anglian cinema projectionist with tertiary syphilis, abandons his wife for London, conspiring with four young cinéastes to film his suicide. In the present, a body wrapped in celluloid is unearthed in the great Tottenham Court Road demolition, and a murder enquiry opens. But who's hiding what? Frank, the filmmaker who gave it all up for criticism? Richard, who surrendered art for commercialism? Harry, the struggling art-house auteur? Or Angelo, a lowly dispatch clerk who hears voices in video static and obsessively searches out the city's Museum of Lost Cinema Spaces? And what of reclusive avant-garde Scots filmmaker Fraser Munro?

Royle's writing is always more than functional but, never transcendent. Everything, from the mundane to Munro's artful short films, is realised with a sturdiness that denies its ambition. Equally, while The Director's Cut keeps the pages turning, it wears its research on its sleeve. It's hard to fault Royle's obsessive documentation of cinematic London at the tail-end of the last century but it goes for naught when it becomes his raison d'etre. Nor is he good enough to mask his top heavy superstructure. Debts to Iain Sinclair and Chris Petit, Crash and, most obviously, Nic Roeg, stick through the already slack canvass.

It's not all bad. The evocation of the grey pall of eighties London is convincing, and the not so subtle subtext (that the powers that be have steadily eroded our film heritage) is always worth repeating. But Royle really hasn't the nous to pull this off. His narrative, populated with ciphers, is fragmented beyond the call of duty, and the climax is clumsily handled. The Director's Cut is as much a testament to the perilous state of contemporary book editing as it is to our beleaguered cinematic past. •

Read an excerpt from The Director's Cut

Interview with Nicholas Royle

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