Karoo

"All I can tell you about Karoo is that it is just way, way, way the best fictional story about modern filmmaking that you’re ever going to read. And it’s one of the best novels you’re ever going to read. It’s set at the time of Ceausescu’s fall, and it’s about a film writer called Saul Karoo who’s fighting against the cynicism that he can feel seeping into him. He knows what he should do and what he shouldn’t do, and ends up doing what he shouldn’t do. That makes it sound incredibly depressing, but it’s not: it’s a very, very funny book. I should say that Tesich was a really great screenwriter. He wrote Breaking Away and the screenplay for The World According to Garp and was really successful. And he’s written this book about someone who’s not a successful screenwriter, who’s a script doctor, who comes across this masterpiece of a film, and he knows there’s nothing wrong with it, but he deliberately destroys it to do some greater good. It’s incredibly complicated emotionally and morally, but I’m making it sound like it’s really heavy going: actually it’s a very sprightly book and it’s about family relationships and you recognise a lot of the characters. “ Karoo is that it is just way, way, way the best fictional story about modern filmmaking that you’re ever going to read.” Although Hollywood seems exotic, in the book the people in it are really easy to relate to. But things that would be completely normal at home are all wrong out in Hollywood. There’s this scene where he takes his son’s sweetheart out to dinner – a completely normal, nice thing to do – but seen through the prism of Hollywood it’s really creepy. The thing is, you’ve read loads of books with those types of characters in, but even when they’re written by people who’ve worked in the cinema they seem oddly unconvincing and over the top. But everything in this book is really convincing. Tesich has got a great eye for detail. Karoo calls all the apparatchiks of Hollywood ‘Brad’: ‘He’s got a new Brad’, or, ‘I like the new Brad better than the old Brad’. There’s a bit where Karoo’s waiting for a meeting and he realises that everyone in the building is incredibly young and good looking, but they don’t look at each other at all. But people are looking at him, because he’s a fat, baldy, paunchy, middle-aged man, and that means power. And then the book pulls off something that you could never have in a film by ending with this amazing coup. Because Karoo’s own dream project is a version of The Odyssey set in space, and the book fulfils the dream that he can’t fulfil for himself. It ends with this amazing prayer, this hymn of praise, and it’s just a fantastically uplifting, or maybe rather moving, ending. Except that people who work in cinema are constantly going into those things. If you look at The Lion King , it’s full of Hamlet . People who work in cinema are not averse to stealing things from the classics – on the contrary they tend to be into going to the classics to loot and pillage. But in the book, all the way through, you’re expecting Karoo’s version of The Odyssey to be a bit crap. And then you see it and it’s absolutely amazing. And it does make you think: gosh, cinema sometimes is breathtaking. That’s what I found uplifting. It’s sort of the opposite of how this conversation started – that you mustn’t only think about movies. Actually this book goes somewhere else – and makes you think about movies."