Excellent. Léger, marrant, touchant ( )

Mr Wilder & Me is an extended essay about the film director Billy Wilder, masquerading as a novel about the experiences of a young Anglo-Greek musician, Calista Frangopoulou, who accidentally gets drawn into Wilder's entourage and finds herself working for him as an interpreter whilst he is filming Fedora on location in Greece in 1977. Her connection with Wilder comes about through Gill Foley, a British girl she has met whilst backpacking around the USA, and whose father worked with Wilder in London during the war. Wilder is charmed and amused by the two young girls who turn up for dinner in totally the wrong clothes and obviously not having a clue about movies or who he is...

It's all a bit contrived, especially when we realise that Calista's Greek background is only there to allow Wilder to make a Sherlock Holmes joke, but it's an affectionate and intelligent homage to a great director and to the end of an era in cinema, so why not? ( )

This delight of a novel imaginatively recreates and captures the making of Billy Wilder’s penultimate film in 1977. The experience is recalled by Calista Frangopoulu, who at the time was around 20 years old, with no idea of a future career. On holiday in America, through a friend, she meets Billy Wilder who is planning his latest film “Fedora”. The fortuitous encounter, leads to her being offered the role of translator when filming starts in her native Greece. Coe’s lightness of touch, mirrors the best work of Wilder’s films and his portrayal of Wilder’s return and ambivalent feelings about Europe and especially Germans after his pre-war exile from the Nazis, strikes a note of truth. Into this, are woven, Calista’s growing maturity and the gradual realisation of how she may develop her life. Together, these add up to a wholly absorbing and entertaining story.

Not one of his characteristic state-of-the-nation novels this time but Mr Wilder & Me still has plenty of typical Jonathan Coe themes and trademarks. There’s the fusing of fact and fiction, the strong storytelling plus formal innovations, the humour tinged with melancholy. Coe writes about the compensations of everyday life - friendship, romance, conversation, wine and lots of brie - set against the unforgiving backdrop of history. At one point this novel about Billy Wilder turns into a film starring Billy Wilder as he flees the Nazis. Wilder escaped to Paris and then the USA but his mother, grandmother and stepfather were all murdered during the Holocaust.

Music and film have long been inspirations for Coe and so they are again. Film composer Calista Frangopolou, born in Athens but now living in London, is at a crisis point in her life. Approaching sixty her music isn’t in the demand it once was, one of her two daughters is leaving home and her relationship with the other is problematic. This is the framing device Coe uses for the story of how the young and naive Calista found herself, almost accidentally, as an assistant on the set of Billy Wilder’s penultimate film Fedora, the story of an old and faded film star, forty years earlier.

When Wilder made that film he was no longer the king of Hollywood he had been. He and his style of filmmaking were being superseded by a new type of film and a new generation of filmmakers - Coppola, Scorsese, Spielberg. Rejected by Hollywood Fedora was filmed in Corfu, Munich and Paris and financed by German money. Of the many memorable Wilder quotes peppered throughout this novel perhaps the most memorable is one he made at a Munich press conference for the film. Explaining that he was in a win-win situation he said: ‘If this picture is a big hit it’s my revenge on Hollywood. If it’s a total financial disaster, it’s my revenge for Auschwitz’.

Mr Wilder & Me is at once a coming of age and coming of old age novel. It’s about being young and finding your way in the world and being old and finding the world no longer wants what you have to offer.

Although ostensibly about Billy Wilder this book feels very personal - the ‘Me’ of the title could as easily be Coe as Calista. Coe’s portrait of Wilder serves as a celebration, or affirmation, of the kind of art he both admires and creates. At the heart of it, this novel in particular and Coe’s aesthetic in general, is a profound humanism, a deep moral seriousness combined with a desire to entertain. When Wilder talks about the value of entertainment, of wanting his films to be serious but also give the audience ‘some little spark’ or ‘a bit of joy, maybe’, it could be Coe talking about his own work. There is no shortage of darkness in this book but it leaves you enlightened; enlarged rather than diminished.

Towards the end Calista tells Wilder she thinks Fedora will be a ‘very… compassionate film’. Mr Wilder & Me is certainly a compassionate novel. Like all of Coe’s best work it carries it’s seriousness lightly and is funny, touching and deeply humane. ( )

This is a charming novel which centres on a young Greek woman, Calista, who happens to be invited to a dinner with Billy Wilder and his screenwriter as a friend of a family friend. She is young, on holiday on the West Coast of California, and has no real idea of who he is. Wilder is in the autumn years of his career and they connect again when he is shooting a movie on a Greek island and Calista is asked to work on the set as an interpreter and translator. She is kept on as a PA/general dogsbody when the shooting transfers to Munich and this coming of age story is intertwined with a portrait of Wilder, his career on the wane, reminiscing about earlier times in his pomp. The lightest of touch is skilfully applied and it’s a book to whisk you away to different times in a welcome way. ( )