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| I love this cover and all the little Chaplin's |
It’s size is not surprising. It took eight years between the publication of his first novel, Carter Beats the Devil for Glen David Gold to release his second novel. Centring around actor Charlie Chaplin, budding actor and lighthouse keeper’s son Leeland Wheeler and an officious young train engineer Hugo Black and swirling with a host of secondary and minor characters interweaving through the various rich and detailed plots it’s sometimes hard to see what fits where in a novel that stretches across time and topic. Thematically spanning the Hollywood dream, the First World War, absentee parents (in more ways than one), romantic mistakes and dog training it can be quite easy to loose the central arc of the book.
Where the book really shines is the Chaplin storyline. By far the most engaging and coherent of the myriad stories, the book opens with a mass vision across America of Chaplin as his most famous character the tramp. Leeland spies him cavorting in a rowboat off the coast off the coast of California at the same time that the train Hugo is working on is stopped by an angry mob in Texas who were (for some reason they can’t remember afterwards) awaiting Chaplin’s arrival and throughout various hotels and clubs pages are being put out for the same man. Chaplin himself meanwhile is blissfully unaware of the commotion and daydreaming about his next film. What’s most frustrating about this exciting opening is that it is never properly explained. Gold attests that this incident actually happened in his detailed endnotes but unhelpfully, doesn’t mention from which source he discovered this. More to the point, it acts as an opening but after the initial furore dies down there’s no mention of the most memorable incident in the entire novel.
We follow Chaplin as his career is taking off, through the various relationships leading up to his first marriage and how he copes with the public scorn and his own feelings of guilt when the authorities secretly ban him from taking an active part in World War One outside of morale raising. The scenes that really shine here though are when we see Chaplin in his element. The rich, evocative descriptions of Hollywood parties, film techniques and creative struggle of genius are so very detailed that it is not hard to imagine that Sunnyside is completely biographical. Chaplin himself comes across as a very likeable character with a ready wit and obvious talent that is shrouded in his own eyes by a fear of failure.
Whilst the other characters are likeable enough in their own way, Chaplin is so obviously the protagonist that I kept looking for meaningful links between their stories and his and generally drawing a blank.
Wheeler briefly meets Chaplin but otherwise, his story of blundering boyhood dreams of Hollywood stardom and escaping his overbearing (but well meaning) lighthouse keeper mother, doesn’t pick up until he finds himself fighting in France. After unintentionally ending a marriage, he rescues some Alsatian puppies from certain death and devotes the rest of his stay in France to caring for and training them. It’s unclear at first why events have taken this turn but at least the reader gets the satisfaction of understanding the connection as Leeland’s strand of the story ends (I won’t spoil it as I thought the surprise was a nice twist).
The Hugo Black storyline is even more ponderous. After appearing in the first chapter, he disappears until well over half of the book is done. There’s some good comedy moments as he finds himself driving a steam train through the Russian steppes as part of an isolated American troop and he even gets to meet three deposed princesses but otherwise his presence in the novel seems almost indulgent. Likewise, the various bit part characters who pop up in between acts to move the narrative on in inventive ways before swiftly ducking out of frame once more (Rebecca Golood being the classic example) are charming enough and suggest a certain connectivity between all the characters but they are somewhat underdeveloped. With repeated appearances especially, I kept expecting the plots of these lesser characters to develop and begin heavily intertwining with the main players, but alas, that never came to pass.
As much as I enjoyed the comedy and the ‘big picture’ writing style of using many characters/actors (in much the same way as a plot of an old Hollywood film) I can’t help but think that Sunnyside needed a heavier hand during the editing process. The many voices can be distracting and confusing, especially when you’re trying to remember who’s related to who. There’s just so much information crammed in here from all the many hours of research that Gold no doubt put in to make this epic sized novel, that the story is quite often overwhelmed by its weight. All in all, it’s a novel with a brilliant premise but one full of internal disconnections which ultimately leads to disappointment.
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