I’ll Take You There

Wally Lamb

Arrow, £8.99

Review by Alastair Mabbott

HAVING just turned 60, film professor Felix Funicello (a cousin of Annette Funicello of Beach Blanket Bingo fame) seems like a nice guy, supportive of the rights of women and in touch with his feelings.

We first meet him on a plane, where he’s getting teary over the Pixar film Up and it turns out that the mohawked teenager in the next seat isn’t sneering at him but wants to let him know how he cried when he first saw that film, too. It’s a charming introduction.

Felix runs a Monday night movie club, showing films like Stagecoach and Sunset Boulevard at a place called the Garde Theatre, which is reputed to be haunted. One Monday, he walks into the Garde to be confronted with an apparition: the ghosts of 1920s director Lois Weber and one of her stars, Billie Dove. At one time the highest-paid director and screenwriter in Hollywood, Lois Weber is an obscure, forgotten figure compared to her male contemporaries, although her achievements include originating the split-screen technique and becoming the first mayor of Universal City.

Lois has brought him a present: a pile of film cans. It’s Felix’s life, captured on celluloid, with the additional feature that he can re-enter and re-live parts of it. She says Felix has been chosen for this honour because he’s “educable”, meaning, apparently, that he grew up with two sisters and has a daughter with a career.

At first, Felix marvels at the glorious recreation of the America he remembers when he was a six-year-old boy. But the real purpose is to explore his family’s dynamic, and how it was shaped by the roles available to women in that era. He gains a deeper understanding of what the women of his generation had to endure, largely through the testimony of Verna, a young woman connected with his family who died before he was born.

However, it doesn’t really add up, not least because the ghosts and time travel aspects aren’t strictly necessary to Felix’s journey of discovery. Furthermore, the novel is a spiritual descendant of A Christmas Carol, but Felix was never a Scrooge-like character in the first place. He was a decent brother, he married a staunch feminist and all the indications are that he’s been a loving and supportive father to his daughter Aliza, so why the spirits should choose him to “educate” isn’t quite clear.

It makes much more sense after finding out that I’ll Take You There was originally conceived as a multimedia presentation, which accounts for the awkward insertion into the narrative of a 15-page magazine article on the Rheingold Girls beauty contests as well as an entry from Aliza’s blog reassuring her mother that her generation is carrying on the feminist struggle in its own way. With its content reconfigured and condensed from other media, it’s hardly surprising the various elements never quite coalesce, though Lamb’s nostalgic recreation of 1960s America is delightful and his study of a dysfunctional family hints at the book it could have been.