Literature is full of imaginary cultural artefacts. From Jacob Wrestling, the groundbreaking novel written by the heroine's father in I Capture the Castle, to It's A Wise Child, the quiz show entered by JD Salinger's Glass family, books have offered us films and television programmes we can never see and books we can never read.
The latest addition to this ghostly canon is Petite Mort, a 1914 silent film that is at the heart of Beatrice Hitchman's astonishingly assured debut novel. The film tells of a young woman who creates a doppelganger from her own reflection whom she sends to marry a rich man chosen by her father, allowing the real heroine to marry the man she loves. For years the film has been lost, supposedly destroyed in a fire that raged through the Pathé studios in Paris. Then, in 1967, it resurfaces – but the scene in which the doppelganger steps out of the mirror to destroy her creator is missing, crudely cut from the reel.
After a journalist called Juliette Blanc reports the story, she receives a surprising phone call from the film’s star, Adèle Roux. Adèle has decided that she wants Juliette to write her memoirs, and when the two meet, the old woman tells the younger one the story of her extraordinary life.
As a child, growing up with her younger sister, Camille, in the impoverished French provinces, the future looks grim for Adèle, but after seeing a film show in the village she is determined to become a film star. She runs away to Paris, but the dreams of stardom fail to materialise. Instead she manages to get a job in the wardrobe department at Pathé.
There she meets André Durand, a dashing young producer. Adèle is both attracted to André and coldly aware that he may be the path to a more glamorous career. When André’s wife, a glamorous star known as Terpsichore, is fired from a film for temperamental behaviour, Adèle is convinced she will be offered the leading role. But André has another offer: he wants Adèle to move into his house as his wife’s personal assistant.
Petite Mort's blurb declares that the book "has a twist we beg you not to disclose". This is both a clever and a risky request. Yes, knowing a big twist is coming will keep the reader hooked, but there's always the danger that the twist won't live up to expectations.
In Petite Mort, every time something vaguely dramatic happened I kept wondering, Is this the big twist? Surely not. Is this it? When it came, however, it was unmistakable – and pretty satisfying, too, not least because it arrived towards the end of an expertly crafted story. We know from the start of the novel and Adèle's first meeting with Juliette that she somehow did star in a Pathé film. We are kept wondering how she did this, though, as the narrative moves between Adèle's vivid memories, André's unusual childhood and Juliette's 1967 quest to discover the truth about the film and the people who made it.
Adèle is a pleasingly ambiguous heroine, always teetering on the edge of becoming a straightforward anti-heroine. We know from the book’s opening scene, in which she risks her own safety and maybe even her life to protect Camille, that she’s not callous, but there’s a coldness about her ambition that keeps the reader wondering about her. At one stage she imagines herself as a star, ordering around an assistant. “‘You have not sewn the hem correctly. Take it back, please.’ Would I say please?” It is strongly implied she wouldn’t. But as Adèle moves in with André and Terpsichore – real name Luce – her loyalties are stretched in different directions; she and Luce grow closer and her priorities, and visions of the future, change.
In another writer's hands the relationship between Luce and Adele might seem overly sensational, but here it feels almost inevitable, as if Adèle's life has been leading to this ever since she saw that first film show at her village church. Petite mort is, of course, a euphemism for orgasm, and this is partly a book about sex and sexuality and how it influences people's lives.
All the characters are skilfully drawn, from Durand’s unsettlingly calculating adopted mother and the tormented, bewitching Luce to Durand himself, who becomes less charming as the book goes on. But it’s the quality of the writing that makes the book stand out.
Debut novels can be overly lavish, as if the author is trying too hard, but there's nothing showy about Hitchman's prose. It has the dark, shimmering elegance of Pabst's silent classic Pandora's Box and is full of striking imagery; as Durand's coldness is revealed, he smiles, and "there is nothing behind the smile except perhaps another smile, repeating ad infinitum into the distance". Like everyone in this darkly seductive story, he's always acting.
Anna Carey's latest novel is Rebecca Rocks.
