Overland

by Graham Rawle

OVERLAND is set in California, in 1942 -- or at least, a version of 1942. Because everything about Burbank in this novel is both utterly familiar and disquietingly strange.

George Godfrey has been hired by the US army to make a factory disappear. A Hollywood set-builder, his talents are required by the war effort to hide Burbank's vastaircraft plant from Japanese reconnaissance planes. George has to take a factory the size of a small city, and make it seem to be part of the suburban California landscape.

He builds streets and houses on the roof. With his right-hand man, Jimmy, he fills felt greenfields with fake sheep, employs extras to wander around the imaginary city as its fictional inhabitants. As the weeks turn to months, the Overland project becomes evermore elaborate, and George's superiors begin to doubt his sanity as he builds a fake"lake" where he can go fishing...Far below him, Queenie and her Japanese-American friend Kay work in the darkness of Underland, welding aircraft parts, with no sense of what's going on above their heads.

One day, they see a fishing hook descending from the looming darkness of the roof, and when they follow it, find themselves stepping out into a sunlit world they never imagined existed.

OVERLAND is a book like no other -- to be read in landscape format. Based on true events, it is a novel where characters' dreams and desires come down to earth with more than a bump -- confronting the hardships of life during wartime. As surreal and playful as it is affecting and unsettling, no-one other than Graham Rawle could have created it.

Genres: Historical Fiction

384 pages, Paperback

Published May 15, 2018

About the author

Graham Rawle was a British writer and collage artist whose visual work incorporates illustration, design, photography and installation. His weekly Lost Consonants series appeared in the Weekend Guardian for 15 years (1990–2005). He produced other regular series which included ‘Lying Doggo’ and ‘Graham Rawle’s Wonder Quiz’ for The Observer and ‘When Words Collide’ and ‘Pardon Mrs Arden’ for The Sunday Telegraph Magazine and 'Bright Ideas' for The Times.

Reviews

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 4 out of 5]

Graham Rawle passed away in August 2024 at the tragically young age of 69. His final work is this ingenious novel based on the real-life cinematic camouflage of an aviation factory in Brubeck California in WWII. Rawle explores through the character of Kay the shocking persecution of Japanese-Americans who, following the Pearl Harbor attack, were rounded up into cramped and insanitary concentration camps, in contrast to the utopian creation of Overland overseen by an unhinged creative director seduced by his own hermetically-sealed prop-nirvana. The novel is printed in landscape mode, with the utopian narratives verso and the real grime of 1940s California recto. Less interesting is the sassy actress manqué character, who sasses her way through various Hollywood tartlet clichés, and the squeamish naif Jimmy, a parachutist manqué who tends to Overland’s fake sheep. Unlike Rawle’s collage novel Woman’s World, Overland is free from illustrations or artistic flourishes, excepting the 90º textual tilt that makes the novel a physically unique (and trying) read. His skills as a black humorist and compelling talespinner are effortless, making his early passing a legit bummer.

[SueKich · Rating 5 out of 5]

Heavens above!

When Pearl Harbour forces the USA into the Second World War, American bomber plane manufacture roars into production. But how to prevent Japanese air reconnaissance from identifying the position of the giant Lockheed factory in California? The US military calls on the services of Hollywood set design to build a make-believe town above the underground factory. No-one will know that planes are being built beneath – not with George Godfrey’s fantastic eye for authentic detail.

The first major surprise of this book is that it is printed landscape on the page rather than portrait. Serif type on the top page delineates ‘Overland’ action while a sans serif type-face on the bottom page marks out what goes on below. Too clever by half, you may well think, but the fact of the matter is that once you can get used to holding the book on its side, it serves its purpose very well. Graham Rawle has written an extraordinarily good tale and has written it very well indeed.

As George gets more and more carried away with his perfect ‘Small Town, America’, so the Residents that volunteer to populate it in their spare time from factory duty grow to love it. And why not? It’s perfect, isn’t it! The contrast between what goes on in the idyllic world above and the manufacture of destruction below couldn’t be clearer whilst the callous banishment of American-born Japanese to internment camps profoundly illustrates the collateral damage of war.

I trust Overland is on Booker’s radar. It will certainly be on Hollywood’s.

[Alina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Overland is a wonderful story about a very interesting military project to hide a factory in California during Second World War from a possible Japanese attack from the air. Having hired an art director, George, who worked for such film studios as Warner Bros or MGM, the army expects him to build a set, which would cover the factory entirely and this project is to be called Overland. In this book we get a story from both the Overland - the set - and from the factory - the Underland or Underworld as Graham Rawle likes to call it. And here comes the interesting way in which the story is told: the book is to be read horizontally, so we get Overland on the upper page and Underworld on the one below. As time goes by and characters move from one place to the other, the pages mingle and we also move with those characters.

I truly loved the smart way in which Graham Rawle told this compelling story. The plot is as thrilling as the creative format of the book. The characters are likeable and not flat; the issues with which they struggle are of great importance even now; the journey quickly becomes a gripping rollercoaster of emotions till the very end, which, by the way, took me totally by surprise.

I highly recommend this book to anyone, who loves a superb storytelling and, just like me, when there are mentions of some of the greatest actors from the Golden Age of Hollywood.

[John Herbert · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Quirky Brilliant Little Package

The unusual split cover is one thing; reading the book landscape style is quite another.
But do you know what? - It damn well works sublimely.

A town built above an American airfield is absolutely outlandish, until you learn that such endeavours did take place during the war.
The whole idea was to disguise these airfields from prying Japanese aircraft.

The story is tip-top outrageously hilarious Graham Rawle at his best, weaving characters across the pages, with their unintentionally humorous outlooks on life, with interactions between the characters leaving me in floods of chuckles and giggles.

Yes, I loved this quirky, brilliant little package, and it's another big tick on the Graham Rawle list from me.
But my favourite book of his is still THE CARD, which made me laugh so much, it actually hurt.

[Maaike · Rating 5 out of 5]

Picked this up on a whim in a book shop in London because it put me in mind of ergodic books such as House of Leaves and The Raw Shark Texts, albeit much simpler than either of those with its dual-font, north-south landscape reading.

Overland's story feels much shorter than the page number would suggest, owing to its many blank sides when the perspective shifts between 'over' and 'under'. Despite that, it depicts the lives of four earnest if foolhardy main characters and slowly draws them together as the world around them - sometimes literally - unravels.

The book has laugh-out-loud moments as well as heart wrenching ones, not to forget about the twist which certainly leaves me wanting to read it all over again, just to see if I can pick up on the book's decisive, unsettling turning point.

[Andrew Jenkinson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I thoroughly enjoyed this book (as I have GW's previous novels). Overland ties the medium and story in a compelling and thought provoking way - with the typesetting being part of the delivery. I read this without having read the premise, and found the first sections entirely giddying - what was going on? What a wonderful realisation as it all came together and I understood where we were, and what I was seeing. The story is by turns heartbreaking, funny and - strangely - optimistic. A lovely novel.

[Karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nicely unusual, very clever.

[Elysia · Rating 2 out of 5]

Meh