Flicker

This is one of the few novels I’ve read twice for pleasure (rather than work). It’s a noirish novel that delves into the esoteric along the lines of Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum (which Kubrick allegedly considered adapting at one point but which I was unable to read twice!).

The book follows a film scholar who uncovers an incredible conspiracy around a fictional B-movie director called Max Castle, and the imperceptible images he placed in the gap between each of the twenty-four frames played every second in a movie: the so-called flicker of the title. Its author, Roszak, is better known… show more.

A spellbinding mystery wrapped in an outlandish Hollywood history, Flicker was written by an author who obviously knows movie culture.

Allusions to films and filmmakers abound in the book, and readers will delight in teasing out the references, especially to the devastating portrait of the influential critic Pauline Kael. The book’s engaging play with movie history is similar to Wiseman’s frequent cinematic references, such as shots that invoke the western and John Ford in the opening of Meat and the sly references in Basic Training to such Sad Sack service comedies as Chaplin’s Shoulder Arms and Abbott and Costello’s Buck… show more.

I picked this up by accident in a beach hotel I was staying and I’m so glad I did. Written in the 1970s, it is a precursor to, and far better than, The Da Vinci Code and the library of conspiracy novels that followed. It tells the story of an obscure Cathar sect, taking in the history and role of film and the movies in the twentieth century. You’ll never be able to look at a horror movie in the same way again.