Geordie Williamson

And it really does set the stage, I think, marvelously for what happens afterwards.

But in terms of structure, I mean, when I was doing a bit of Google stalking on Pabst, I didn't realise that he was basically the inventor of the invisible cart.

So he'd sort of cut on action while

bodies were in movement.

So none of that kind of stagey theatre style cutting of early cinema.

He was the person who started making it feel and look like documentary realism.

And I think that Kaleman's trying to achieve that with his kind of swapping between chapters, between moments in time and particular individuals and perspectives.

I mean, I think the important thing to take away from that is that he says what the ocean liner cast that he imagines must now do, having learned that the war was fake, is to carry on as if civilization hasn't been rent apart.

And it's that hypocrisy or it's that pretense that everything is okay, which is sort of explored throughout the remainder of the book.

Because at that same party, he's accosted by a very nervous engineer for General Electrics, who's another German émigré who plays golf with the guy holding the party, who takes Pabst aside and said, look...

You know, you might be a communist, but you're not a Jew.

We will have you back and you can make movies and we'll give you money to make them.

So that's the splinter that is inserted at the very beginning of the narrative.

And as we learn and as we know, the historical Pabst got trapped in France at the outbreak of war and ended up going and working for the Germans.

They gave him a lot of money and allowed him to do what he wanted, at least at the beginning.

She does, but I think what's most interesting about Lenny's appearance is that perhaps she's horrified at the idea that she might be using large-scale kind of actors who she's removed from concentration camps to kind of, you know, swell the ranks of her vast crowds and so on and so forth.

But this is a novel about Pabst's own moral degradation.

And he is an artist.

He stakes everything on art because his gamble – and I think he actually makes the point quite late in the novel –

Art is always out of place, always unnecessary when it's made.