Their Finest Hour and a Half -- Lissa Evans

This is Lissa Evans' third novel and the first of hers that I've read.  In fact, I hadn't even heard of her though I did sporadically (hardly actually) watch the series she directed, The Kumars at No. 42.  She's briefly been a doctor, a stand-up comedian, has done radio programs, has been a director and then recently turned her hand to writing novels.

Their Finest Hour and a Half spans seventeen months during the Second World War, between April 1940 and August 1941.  France has been invaded by the Nazis and Great Britain is in great danger of being swallowed up too.  The citizens have been trained on what to do when bomb raids threaten the British skies.

The core narrative is about making a film that will boost the image of the British Army and by the end of it act as a tool to draw the vast might of the American army, as of now uninvolved, to support them.  It mercilessly depicts all the trials and travails that accompany this process.  Ah, the human foibles!

One of the protagonists is disgruntled aging actor Ambrose Hilliard.  He has been seeking roles in movies, preferably leading, but is constantly frustrated with what he believes is his agent's incompetence.  There is also Catrin 'Cat' Cole, who in the beginning lives in London with her 'husband', artist Ellis Cole, a man several years older than herself and working on four painting under contract with the War Artists Committee for the Ministry of Supply.  He is doesn't work for the commercial sector, but "is a part of the Paddington Group ... undertake commissions for organizations with sympathetic beliefs."  She herself is a copywriter at the firm Finch and Caradoc, writing - and rewriting - dialogues for flash advertisements.  She is roped in by Buckley and his team who work for the Ministry of Information, where she is needed to rework dialogue for women characters to give them a feminine touch.  She parts ways with Ellis eventually when their desires and goals are no longer mutual.

Things come to a head when, some months later, Catrin is selected by Buckley to help work on featuring the 'true story' of twin girls, Rose and Lily Starling, who cross the English Channel in their fishing boat to rescue stranded and wounded soldiers from the bloodied beach of Dunkirk.  Coincidentally, Ambrose Hilliard, out of work because of the death of his agent Sammy in a bombing raid, and now under the thumb of Sammy's sister who has taken the agent mantle from her brother, finally relents and grudgingly plays the 'character' role of the drunken uncle of the Starling sisters.  A few other minor characters, like Edith, who are introduced in bits and pieces throughout the story, also come together for this particular filming, in various roles.

A lot of politicising naturally occurs with this movie, with the script going back and forth between departments who have their own grouse against the written material.  It is, after all, the image of Britain that is at stake.  Each version of the script is crossed and scratched through to accommodate changes before the faceless authorities can approve it.  When it finally returns to the writers, Buckley and Catrin and Parfitt, the script undergoes further evolution to accommodate the actors and the teams working on the sets who have their own shortcomings.

Just as things were beginning to settle, and production just starting, it is made clear by the higher authorities that to help with the British cause, it would do the movie some good if an American actor is roped in for a minor role, thus helping to capture the Yankee interest in the war.  An amateur actor, Lundback, is cast for the role of an American reporter (because, after all, America had not yet joined the war to depict a soldier, and the movie must be realistic); but it soon enough becomes evident that Lundback has no acting skills whatsoever.  This adds to the frustrations of the self-important Hilliard, whose career is at stake, and to the general hilarity of the novel. 

The author's knowledge of the behind-the-scene workings of production and direction shines throughout the book, without being obvious.  It was very interesting overall and I felt I learnt quite a bit.  There certainly were places in the book where my attention flagged and would've been enough to get me to return the book to the library shelf, but the comic parts were strong enough to make up for these lapses.

The main characters were defined well enough.  Catrin's youthfulness is depicted very well in the way she interacts with other people, her uncertainty of herself as if she were out of depth with her work and surroundings, and her openness to receive experiences; we only learn somewhere in the middle during one of her conversations that she is just nineteen years old.  Buckley is this prickly unattractive older man full of quips and witticisms, constantly brainstorming about whenever Catrin encounters him.  Not surprisingly, he has a reputation of being a womanizer.  At first, she finds nothing in him to take notice of, but soon enough, as her own personal life crumbles, she sees beneath his veneer and is attracted to the energy he emanates. Ambrose Hilliard's pomposity can provoke a lot of mirth, such as the dressing down his ex-wife gives him during her charity dinner and which just goes in one of his ears and comes out the other without making any impression on him whatsoever.  He just can't see himself the way others see him; he thinks and behaves as if he is above most mortals in this limited world of his and his point of view has been shown brilliantly throughout the book.  Sometimes it is hard to decide whether to react to his various humiliations with pity or with laughter.  Especially when Cerberus, the deceased agent's dog, transfers his doggy affections to him and looks at him with eyes of melting devotion but manages to cause him many an indignity because of it.

The secondary characters, like Edith and Arthur, and a few others, seemed rather shapeless and uninteresting.  There were places when I would've just put down the book, but I felt rewarded when I ploughed through it all to reach the brilliant stretches of comic incidents.  By the end of it I was fond of Catrin and felt happy about the way things finally turned out, despite the numerous hiccups along the way.

This book had been longlisted for the Orange Prize in 2009.  It is a good piece of work and very lighthearted.  I found the first few pages a little hard to understand when I started on the book, because I was completely ingnorant of what the novel was about, but soon enough the narrative smoothened out as I delved into it deeper.  There are moments of comedy, tragedy and tenderness all bound together to form an amalgam.  The chapters are named cleverly (starting with Trailer and ending with Forthcoming Attractions) giving a neatness to the narrative and pushing it forward.  The whole thing reminded me of my childhood visit to the Universal Studios with my family where we saw firsthand the things that happen behind the scenes during the making of a movie; all the romance of the final product was shed but a lot was learnt.  I especially loved the title of the book; so very apt.  Read the novel if you can lay your hands on it.  It'll provide some hours of pure enjoyment, much better than experiencing the passive entertainment of a sit-com.