The Continuity Girl [Paperback]

In her first novel, The Continuity Girl, Leah McLaren builds a set with multiple locations, assembles an eccentric cast, and calls a hilarious narrative into action. Meredith Moore is a continuity girl who hates her more formal title of “script supervisor”. On film sets, she ensures the seamless transition of objects and characters from one scene to the next: “A cigarette in the left hand when it should be in the right, a prematurely melted ice cube in a half-empty glass of scotch, a stray lock of an actor’s hair-these were the details by which Meredith measured her working life.” She faces down sloppy photographers, careless directors and forgetful prop masters. Her “six identical pairs” of shoes have turned her into her work; she’s “eerily tidy and well composed.” Privately, Meredith is troubled by the futility of controlling the physical world around her, although there is a certain comfort in her discomfort; she frets about the slow deterioration of her fashionable condo: “. . . deterioration made her anxious. Anxious was normal. Normal was home.”
Early one morning, Meredith walks off a film set. Her exit is the first rupture in the fabric of her tidy life. Soon afterwards, she awakens to a commanding certainty: she is thirty-five, and she wants a baby-not a husband, not a boyfriend, just a baby. What should she do? Before she can formulate a plan, fate intervenes in the form of a one-way ticket to England and the promise of a job “doing whatever it is you do,” arranged by her mother. After a stinging encounter with a plainspoken gynecologist-a stand-in for her own-who confirms that “she’d better get pregnant soon,” Meredith bolts for London to recruit an unwitting father for her baby. A series of encounters yields no real leads, although the false starts are mightily promising. Meredith campaigns with desperate zeal, attempting to seduce one startled German in a style worthy of the big screen: “‘I want to be with you,’ she breathed into his hair as she had seen actresses do in movies.” Later, Barnaby Shakespeare, a gentle, alcoholic falconer stumbles into her sights-although his stock drops considerably when his prize bird mistakes a fur hat for something tasty.
McLaren’s portraits are deliciously funny; the domestic life of prosperous Toronto mums (the Yummies of the Backyard) is beautifully drawn, as is the insipid country life of the watered-down English nobility at a weekend party. Some characters are distantly familiar, like memorable movie personalities: Meredith’s mother, Irma Moore, a poetess of legendary promiscuity and almost baseless literary fame, is quite loopy. Inspired by a brief flirtation with Leonard Cohen, she entrusted Meredith to a Toronto boarding school: “We had such a nice time, I thought it would be lovely for you to grow up Canadian. Icicles, snowball fights, that sort of thing.” Irma lives in impressive squalor; her London neighbourhood was perfect when she moved in but to her disgust has been gentrified by the “offspring of ailing rock legends.” Osmond Crouch, the reclusive director who draws Meredith into his circle, is rather predictably mysterious, summoning Meredith from England to Italy for a dinner party, and ambushing her there with an offer she cannot refuse. Meredith’s friend Mish is an unsinkable wardrobe stylist whose audacity throws Meredith’s fussy ways into sharp relief. And Katherine Swain, the overripe, baby-crazed actress whose ambitions bring all the characters together, is often saved from pathos by her dazzling self-absorption.
Meredith and Dr. Joe Veil, the gynecologist whose own career path crosses Meredith’s again in London, are the novel’s most substantial characters. Their own narratives are often a nice departure from the hectic, over-the-top chatter of the supporting cast. Each is preoccupied with real-life continuity-Joe as a fertility expert, and Meredith through her desire for a baby. Moreover, Meredith doesn’t know who her own father is, and this gap in her personal story line becomes troublesome as she tries to wrangle the details of her life into a tidy set of continuity notes. Despite Osmond’s advice that “you don’t need to back-match the past,” she wants to, and more than once her efforts leave her feeling forlorn.
In The Continuity Girl, McLaren brings to life the tension between the safety of the script and that risky territory beyond the page. On set and off, appearances are sometimes soothing fabrications, not real life. From the outset, Meredith resists the unwelcome truth Joe offers: “Children are not convenient. They require . . . a leap of faith.” Ultimately, though, this leap of faith is what breaks Meredith’s white-knuckle grip on the script, and makes all things possible. “Much as it frightened her, perhaps letting the narrative play out on its own . . . was the wisest course of action.” Neurotic, resolute, and sweetly vulnerable, Meredith is an engaging, thoroughly modern heroine, whose adventures are nicely summed up in the novel’s first line: “A long night staggered into day.” What fun, from conception to the wrap party.
Nancy Fischer (Books in Canada)

Canadian journalist McLaren's debut novel is the witty, down-to-earth story of Meredith Moore, a tinseltown toiler whose personal life is anything but perfect. In charge of making sure the placement and number of everything from cigarettes to ice cubes is continuous from scene to scene, Meredith's professional eye for perfection doesn't extend to her personal life. At 35, she is a self-proclaimed disaster area. After a visit to gynecologist Dr. Joe Veil, Meredith decides her biological clock has ticked long enough. After walking off the set of her latest film, Meredith yields to her eccentric poetess mother's pleas and returns to her native London. Joined by her best friend, Mish, Meredith starts work on a new film and sets out to satisfy her maternal pangs by finding a man to father her child. Meredith encounters an alcoholic falconer, a sadistic artist and a mysterious millionaire director as she tries to balance her desire for a child with her yearning for real romance. Despite a potentially clichéd plot, McLaren's writing is crisp and her characters are surprisingly fresh, resulting in a novel that celebrates breaking away from the expected.
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