Sunnyside

By Glen David Gold

Sceptre, stg£17.99

Sunnyside takes its title from a 1919 Chaplin film. If Glen David Gold's first novel, Carter Beats the Devil, took its theme from 19th-century illusionists, this book looks to early Hollywood. It's set during World War I and moves between the Western Front, Russia and the burgeoning California film industry.

There are so many facts, story­ lines and characters that it becomes somewhat baffling, like watching three films at once. But Gold anticipates his reader's objections. About one priggish character at the theatre, he writes: "the lack of a single protagonist bothered him". The novel is structured as an evening's entertainment at the cinema but reading it certainly isn't the passive pleasure of watching a film.

The chapters featuring Chaplin are fascinating. Gold brings one of the most mysterious stars to life. He takes on the gigantic challenge of conjuring in words a character whose genius was wholly physical, and who famously could not adjust to the talkies. Gold also suggests that the shiny surface of the star and the psychology beneath are a kind of Moebius strip. Behind the little tramp in baggy trousers is another little tramp in baggy trousers.

The style of the parts varies, like the rhythms of Chaplin's best films, deftly ranging through slapstick, satire, melodrama and tragedy. But the subject isn't really Chaplin or the First World War. The book explores the impact of the new medium of film. Gold describes the rapidly disappearing rural Hollywood landscape and comments that the woodlands that would soon be bulldozed would become a memory, "but not the way memory had worked since the dawn of time". Now, film becomes a collective memory, as faulty as anyone's.

History has blurred with our cinematic retelling of the past. Sunnyside suggests that this process began during the Great War, and that Chaplin was instrumental in it.