Similarly, the modern short-story writer perhaps needs to conquer his or her inner Morrissey. But Wilson has created – in its ambition, as well as in its evocation of a studio system and a cinema long gone – a novel which rivals William Boyd’s magisterial The New Confessions and which may even, dare I say it, be a lot more fun to read.. This is the first novel in which he has tackled the present-day, and it is the contemporary sections which are the least satisfying here. There are small niggles – how many emails do you get that repeatedly feature italic script? – but it’s the character of Miranda, and her relationship with another orphaned daughter in the novel, that doesn’t always convince, something that undermines the book’s ending. “The marvellous, the hasard objectif, can erupt anywhere,” a fellow art-lover tells him; a theory which bears poisonous fruit later when Whitaker discovers a living, breathing example in the shape of a strange woman staring out of the frame of one of his own documentaries.Wilson is known for his historical fiction.

Whitaker’s struggle to bring the sufferings of the dockers during the Depression to the cinema screen is intensely moving.Eventually though, his film-making career unravels in the face of a growing preoccupation with signs and symbols A trip to a Surrealist art exhibition in 1936 doesn’t help. But her version of events is tested by an academic set on rescuing Whitaker, a neglected hero of British documentary-making, both from critical indifference and from Miranda’s slanderous assertions.Occasionally, Wilson’s narrative snags a little on celluloid history – the Cinematograph Films Act, the coming of sound, the quota quickie, are all discussed by his characters in over-explicatory fashion – but his fictional films are so vividly imagined that you feel you must have seen them. She holds her father responsible for the suicide of her mother, a German refugee from the Second World War. The story is Whitaker’s own and its quirks and twists typify his treatment at the hands of fate throughout the novel.
Set against Henry’s progress through the film world of the 1920s and Thirties is the present-day narrative of his daughter, Miranda – a less than loyal offspring. The launch of his film-making career in the 1920s owes a lot to a macabre story, that of a young man searching a German town for the fianc?left behind by a dead soldier This soldier was killed by the young man’s father. Henry Whitaker, a young Cambridge graduate, lost his father in the First World War.

Small wonder, then, that one of Wilson’s main players, looking back at his life to date, doesn’t find the word “coincidence” even begins to cover it: “something else seems to be at work here, something we don’t have a term for…” And that belief is his undoing. Characters run into each other in the most unexpected places; find themselves on streets with the same names, hundreds of miles – and years – apart; discover the secrets of lost loves through chance conversations. Plenty of plotlines rely on coincidences But James Wilson’s latest novel positively teems with them. A fact which this personal, involving, colourful and deftly written book in the end celebrates.. They call him Burenyi, which he doesn’t realise means “white man” because he doesn’t understand Fante as well as he thought he did.At the end of three months in Ghana and a line of argument which connects WEB DuBois, Richard Wright and Martin Luther King with the X-Men comics and Chris Offili, Bob Marley, Sun Ra and Tupac, Eshun has to conclude that identity isn’t bound by race but is fluid, moulded by circumstance, and available for de- or reconstruction. To the locals he’s as much of a tourist as those African-Americans who arrive expecting to find their fabled motherland and are disappointed to learn it’s as enamoured with US hip hop and black fashions as the rest of the globe. Eshun lived in Ghana for three years as a young boy, then spent the rest of his childhood in northwest London, the only black boy in his school in the era of race riots.

Returning to Ghana for the first time now he’s in his thirties, he’s as far from home as ever. It seems to satisfy everyone but himself, and his first book – part autobiography, part travelogue, part cultural studies essay – describes his lifelong feelings of dislocation and his recent efforts to understand and answer that question more fully.His father worked for the Ghana High Commission, and was forced abroad after the 1966 military coup that deposed modern Ghana’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah. The Black Gold of the Sun by Ekow Eshun (PENGUIN £8.99) If you ask the cultural commentator and popular TV talking head Ekow Eshun where he’s from, his standard reply is “My parents are from Ghana, but I was born in Britain”. And, in the background, the thread of a story about the farming town’s recent suburbanisation and concomitant dwindling of community, and lots of unsubtle imagery to remind us that we are human animals, but stuffed with memories, emotion and desire.