John A. Scott’s latest novel, The Boy Who Loved Dolls, has the bare bones of an archetypal Gothic narrative: a young woman confined in a sprawling mansion; an enigmatic, possibly sinister older man; the disconcerting traces of a former lover, her disappearance still unsolved; the fear of sharing her fate. Early on, there is an allusion to Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, and the opening half of Scott’s novel hovers in the same zone of paranoia and hauntedness.

Review: The Boy Who Loved Dolls – John A. Scott (Puncher & Wattmann)

On top of this genre framework, The Boy Who Loved Dolls explores the 20th century’s cultural legacies. Scott, an English-Australian poet and novelist, is a double winner of the Victorian Premier’s Award and double shortlistee for the Miles Franklin Literary Award. The Boy Who Loved Dolls, his 18th book, is animated above all by a passion for the French avant-garde. It looks back to French surrealism and post-war European cinema, and the way they responded to the horrors of fascism and war.

The novel’s protagonist is Jean-Jacques Baille, a fictional French film director from the generation of Jean-Luc Godard, Agnès Varda and François Truffaut, living reclusively in Australia. You need to suspend your disbelief that such a legendary avant-garde artist would decamp to a country estate outside of Melbourne, all the while continuing to make films in France with an apparently Australian crew.

The reason for his antipodean move appears to be love. Late in his career, he falls for a young Australian woman, Anna, whom he casts in all his productions, despite her lack of acting experience or ability to speak French.

In 1984, three years before the main narrative begins, Anna is abducted from her chauffeured car by a gang of masked men. At the time, she was flicking through a script sent to her by the Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci, who was perhaps trying to poach her as a muse of his own. The motive for the abduction and the fate of........

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