the face on the cutting room floor [colin mccabe (ernest bornemann)]

The detective novel, written, or so it says on the cover, by Colin McCabe, begins with a film editor called Colin McCabe talking about how a studio head has cut an actress out of a film. She is the face on the cutting room floor. Soon afterwards, this same woman is discovered dead in an editing suite. Thus begins one of the more curious, post-modern of British novels, one that contains elements of the nouvel roman, that at times feels as though it might have been written, in the margin, by a gumshoe Robbe-Grillet. It’s a detective story that goes round in circles, circling itself, becoming so repetitive that it feels as though the mysterious author might suffer from a form of autism. The post-modernism reaches a new peak in the epilogue, written by a supposed second author, who refers to criticism by the likes of Cyril Connolly and Edmund Wilson of the novel, in the process dissecting the trajectory of the British detective novel, from Doyle to Sayers. Meanwhile he seeks to cast light on the dense complexity of the ‘original’ novel, a light that only serves to confuse the reader even more. All of which makes The Face on the Cutting Room Floor both a maddening and brilliant read at the same time. 

The edition I read includes an interview with the actual author, (not McCabe) whose identity has remained a mystery for many years. (Maclaren Ross in his memoirs recalls speculating with Greene as to who he might be, suggesting that it might even be Greene himself.) This interview is of itself slightly mind-blowing, recounting the story of Ernest Bornemann, a German childhood student of Brecht’s who fled to the UK pre-war, when he wrote the book, before being interned in Canada, then becoming part of the Wartime film propaganda team, returning to the UK where he had an eventful and successful career as a screenwriter, (at one point working with Orson Welles), before finally settling in Austria as a revered sexologist. His whole story, a bit like the narrative of The Face on the Cutting Room Floor, reads like a tall tale. In some ways the unlikeliness of Bornemann’s life story helps to explain how it was possible for a young immigrant, barely fluent in his new language, to write a novel that feels like a modernist dagger thrust into the heart of a staid British literary tradition. Albeit one that has, itself, more or less been cut out of the canon, left on the cutting room floor.