“I hate critics,” Baille is pronouncing. “I loathe the way they sit there in the previews writing by the light of their little torches… write about it afterwards, I say. Let the films come at you. Why sit there trying to get your review worked out while you’re watching the film? Watch the film! If you want to write a review, you should be able to remember.”
“But there must be a critic inside you, too”.
“Yes and once in a while I am obliged to stab him.”
Baille is the reclusive, retired French film maker, Jean Jaques Baille, grieving the unsolved abduction of his Australian wife, Anna and the titular character of John A. Scott’s latest intriguing novel, THE BOY WHO LOVED DOLLS.
Baille has acquiesced to meeting and being interviewed by Susan Vaughan, documentary maker and film critic, at Winterbourne, his Mount Macedon refuge. Like Manderley, in Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, it cannot be seen from the road.
Indeed, there is a vague hint of Maxim de Winter in Baille, as there is perhaps a whiff of Mrs. Danvers in Adele, his cook.
THE BOY WHO LOVED DOLLS begins in 1984 with a prologue based on a scene from Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist. Fast forward three years and we are in the present of the narrative although the nature of the story requires flashback to Baille’s early life and career.
Baille contends that he lived in Lyon during the Nazi occupation under the regime of Klaus Barbie. This assertion brings a neat topicality to the text as the so called Butcher of Lyon was, in 1987, on trial in France for war crimes. It also creates a subliminal frisson in the fiction.
Susan Vaughan wrestles with Baille’s apparent reinvention of himself, and wonders whether in his withdrawal he might have been hiding from himself, like Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment. And what of his penchant for dolls, an affinity bordering on the fetish and macabre.
THE BOY WHO LOVED DOLLS is a cleverly conceived fiction creating a complicated mosaic of suspicion, madness and murder. Film buffs will have a field day but anyone who responds to strong, stylish storytelling will relish its potency. The overlapping of myth and truth, film and literature, fantasy and reality is brilliantly rendered. Eerie and provocative, THE BOY WHO LOVED DOLLS is a genuine pleasure.
THE BOY WHO LOVED DOLLS by John A. Scott is published by Puncher & Wattmann.
