Camilla Grudova’s debut, the short fiction collection The Doll’s Alphabet, was acclaimed as feminist horror reminiscent of Angela Carter and Margaret Atwood. In 13 often jarringly grotesque stories, Grudova built miniature scenarios to explore the disappointments of young women’s lives: dystopian worlds studded with double meanings and symbolic objects such as inscrutable dolls, mannequin parts and sewing machines. With slyly rococo titles such as Edward, Do Not Pamper the Dead and The Moth Emporium, it was as if the surrealist artist Leonora Carrington had undertaken a collaboration with David Lynch.
Grudova’s themes of identity and isolation continue on a larger scale in her first novel, set in an old cinema called the Paradise. It is “a Frankenstein’s monster of a place”, with a trapdoor casually opening on to a river of raw sewage below, and a mysterious red screening room which manifests in hallucinatory fashion from time to time, and from which no one who enters emerges again. With its replica title, the novel is also a dark reflection of Marcel Carné’s classic 1945 film Les Enfants du Paradis, and similarly features a cast of misfits, although Grudova makes clear from her characters’ bizarre and frequently sadomasochistic interactions that Carné’s vision of doomed epic romance is very much not on the cards.
The novel’s narrator, a young woman in search of solace and reinvention, is – like everyone else at the Paradise – playing a part. She walks into the cinema on impulse after noticing a “We’re Hiring” sign on the front doors. “I had just arrived in the city, and in the country, by train, and badly needed a job.” She goes on: “I’ll call myself Holly, like the girl from Badlands.”
Holly is hired for badly paid shift work by Sally, a middle-aged former beauty queen who is the Paradise’s manager. She gets to know the foibles of the place, its peculiar rituals and shifting complicities. She learns how to handle Iris, an elderly regular who turns out to be the crumbling picture house’s actual owner. Holly stamps tickets, cleans the filthy toilets, tries to control the lunatic antics of the ancient popcorn machine and is, at first, studiously ignored by her similarly black-clad co-workers, who all socialise and live together in various squalid bedsits. Once she is allowed into their circle, an intense, competitive bond forms of freakish loneliness and obsession with the otherworldliness of cinema, laced with the mutual hostility familiar to powerless employees. Holly has found her tribe, and she refers to their tight-knit circle as “orphans” more than once.
The cinema workers have limited means of protest against poor pay and monotonous hours, but they make a glorious pretence at an anarchic, carnivalesque existence. Overworked shadows with meagre aspirations, they watch glamour and drama unfold before them on the big screen. They snort the remnants of drugs left behind in the Paradise’s bathrooms, down dubious cocktails mixed from the bar’s out-of-date dusty bottles, and sneak into the building after hours for all-night screenings, drunk or high or a mixture of both. Holly falls into a manic and dysfunctional sexual liaison with fellow usher Paolo. En masse, the staff act with sullen resentment towards the Paradise’s customers, an anomalous assortment of figures who “were a necessary evil … so that we, the true devotees, could have access to the screen, our giant, godlike monument”.
Faithful to this ardent worship of make-believe, each of the book’s short chapters is named after a film, beginning with John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy. Some of the film titles relate to the material within chapters, others are more elliptical. At the point where the novel threatens to sink under a weight of eccentric sketches, Grudova introduces a desperate (and necessary) shift to the plot. The cinema is sold to a faceless giant corporation and a Gradgrindian system of micro-management is imposed. For Holly and the others, who peel off one by one through a series of sometimes fatal incidents, work becomes fraught and unpleasantly unstable. And for the reader, reality and fantasy, which have been constantly overlapping throughout, begin to merge completely, like a fairground ride gone horribly awry.
Grudova, who is Canadian, has, according to her author biography, worked as an usher at an Edinburgh cinema – hopefully not one with as many casualties among staff and customers. The novel is not set anywhere specific, which underlines its unearthly atmosphere. Yet despite its surface of fantasia, Grudova has created a magnificently spiky commentary on the detrimental nature of work hierarchies and zero-hours contracts. There’s a strange, tortured beauty to Children of Paradise, a cruelly deliberate irony in creating characters who have no hope of attaining the rapture promised by the book’s title, shuffling instead through a state of purgatory.
• Children of Paradise by Camilla Grudova is published by Atlantic (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
