Pandemonium

by Leslie Epstein

Pandaemonium was John Milton's invention, the capital of Hell where one of literature's great antiheroes, Satan, ruled his mob of fallen angels. Pandaemonium is Leslie Epstein's invention, a fevered mix of highbrow literary references wrapped in lowbrow comedy, a place where Hollywood directors mingle with German dictators, resulting in--well, you know. The novel's narrators are pulled straight from Hollywood history; the first, actor Peter Lorre, relates the events surrounding a performance of Antigone scheduled to be staged in Salzburg shortly before the Anschluss. Lorre, cast as Antigone's groom opposite the alluring Magda Mezaray, hopes this performance will release him from the string of B movies in which he starred as Japanese detective Mr. Moto. His hopes are dashed when the play is interrupted by an assassination attempt on one of the spectators, Adolph Hitler himself. The play's director, Rudolph Von Beckmann, is held responsible and taken to Vienna to explain things to Joseph Goebbels. Pandaemonium then returns to Hollywood where, upon his return from an internment camp in Europe, Von Beckmann's plans to make a great Western become inextricably tangled with labyrinthine studio politics and Lorre's attempts to shed his association with Mr. Moto. The second narrator, gossip columnist Louella Parsons, takes up the tale, chronicling Lorre and Von Beckmann's return to Europe in search of Magda. By the time Epstein reaches the filming of Von Beckmann's Western, his fictional landscape resembles Milton's Hell very closely indeed. Pandaemonium is funny, ambitious, and makes for wickedly good reading.

Genres: Fiction

Hardcover

Published May 1, 1997

About the author

Leslie Donald Epstein was an American educator, essayist, and novelist.

Reviews

[Hallie Cantor · Rating 1 out of 5]

The novel seems to be a fictionalized account of the German (or German-speaking) Jews in Hollywood, among them the author's father and uncle. It begins in Salzburg, Austria, with a director Von Beckman trying to stage the play Antigone right during the Anschluss and a visit from Nazi dignitaries, among them Hitler himself. Narrated by actor Peter Lorre, who is trying to get out of his Mr. Moto films, the action takes the reader through escapades of various second-rate actors and producers of a B-movie in the Nevada desert. The movie, titled Pandemonium, highlights the backbiting and sexual shenanigans (a bit too explicitly) of those involved.

Frankly, I found the book a convoluted, pointless mess, which I barely managed to slough through. It starts out well, as the movie crew suspensefully attempts to flee the newly invaded Austria, but then it slides into rambling prose that strains credulity. The author may have taken too much liberty with Lorre and famed publicist Louella Parsons. Perhaps the message was the utter frivolity of Hollywood, and the blindness of its large Jewish constituency to the horrors in Eastern Europe, until America's entry into World War Two sobered everyone up and jolted the studios into seriousness. (It ends with Lorre on the set in Casablanca, one of my favorite classic films, conversing with Jack Warner, who has been made an honorary colonel.)

I don't know how much of Peter Lorre's life was factual here, other than the externals. Was he, himself an Austro-Hungarian Jew, truly aware before everyone else of the atrocities in Poland? This book seems intentionally absurd, with art imitating life, to the oblivion of brutal reality outside the studios. This novel contains some of the irony of Epstein's earlier King of the Jews, which paralleled Shakespeare's MacBeth with a megalomaniac Judenrat leader (possibly modeled after Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, who ran Lodz Ghetto). I enjoyed that book. Alas, not this one. Perhaps the director's obsessive production of Antigone was meant to represent the inherent Greek tragedy of the characters who comprised Hollywood's elite and hopefuls. Sadly, none of them were likeable or interesting.

[Brady Westwater · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is one of the very few books I found to be totally unreadable. The prose style is so leaden, despite numerous efforts, I have never been able to read more than a few pages of the first chapter.

And every time I attempted to find readable pages elsewhere in the book, I failed to find a single paragraph which made me want to read the next sentence.

And what puzzles me is that the subject matter is a perfect fit for me, we each share a love of Proust and I admire the writings of his father and his uncle.

But every paragraph of this novel, is more unreadable than any book I can ever recall reading. And that makes absolutely no sense to me at all.

[Isidore · Rating 3 out of 5]

The novel opens well, and the section set in Salzburg could stand alone as an excellent novella. The rest of the book is needlessly protracted and lacks the coherence and the tension of that first part. Despite the immense amount of time lavished upon it, the Pandaemonium/Third Reich parallel is never developed beyond a superficial level; instead, it's a convenient device upon which the author hangs a lot of colourful action. On the whole, the book is generally quite enjoyable, without being any sort of literary masterpiece.