Mr Wilder is Billy Wilder, American film maker, whose career spanned five decades and included such classics as The Apartment and Some Like It Hot. Me, in the context of this novel, is Calista Frangopoulou, a woman of mixed Greek and English heritage.
Their paths cross in 1976 when Calista, on a student backpacking holiday to the US, finds herself in Hollywood having dinner with the already famous director, his scriptwriting partner Iz Diamond, and their wives. Serendipity strikes. They are looking for a location in Greece for their next project, she is bilingual, has local knowledge, and a young fresh outlook that the old guys appreciate. But it still comes a surprise when ten months later, back in Greece, Calista is invited onto the movie making crew to interpret while filming there.
One thing leads to another over that summer and as the film moves on to Paris and Munich, so does Calista.
While that period forms the bulk of the novel, it is narrated in retrospect by Calista, twenty years later, as her twin daughters reach the age she was then, and as they too are embarking (separately) on potentially life defining journeys.
It is a curious mix of biography, film directory, inter-generational by-play, and romcom (Calista meets a boy). But beneath it all is a sense of ending. By 1976 Wilder’s career is winding down, the Greek film a last hurrah. His skills, what he does best, are no longer fashionable, no longer in demand. Twenty years later, Calista’s job as a mother, a role she defines herself by, is similarly coming to an end or at least a sea change.
It is tender,
slight, maybe subtle, maybe a little self-indulgent in its love for the golden
age of cinema. The writing is good enough, expect no less from Jonathan Coe,
but give me his more grounded Middle England and Bournville any day.
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