“Living in the past in the same place I have to be in the present, my mind often feels like a double exposed photograph, and the cinema like an ancient artefact I tread lightly around, to not displace any memory, though sometimes I am unsure where I am, whether a moment from the past will mistakenly come next, and time is just a mixed up jewellery box I grab helplessly from, wearing mismatched, tangled earrings and necklaces, some gaudy and fake, others real and precious, old and brand new.”

Camilla Grudova’s short story collection The Doll’s Alphabet (2017) established her as an exciting new voice across thirteen stories that combined her literary writing with a fascination for the fairy tale and the grotesque. Children of Paradise (2022), her debut novel, builds on this potential to deliver a modern gothic classic. Grudova’s sterling character work and gorgeous prose shine through in a compelling story about the outsiders who work in a decaying independent cinema under threat of corporate buyout, whilst reflecting on the difficulties of figuring out who you are as a young person in the workplace, and the strange relationships that form amongst groups of people when you’re living in each other’s pockets. A current of the Weird runs through the entire novel, pushing at the edges of Grudova’s troubled characters until they find themselves profoundly uncertain of the world they inhabit. By turns beautiful, grotesque, funny and sad, Children of Paradise is a wonderful and assured debut.

Holly has just moved to a city, and noticing a ‘We’re Hiring’ sign on a dilapidated old cinema called the Paradise, decides to apply for a job. She soon finds out that the Paradise is its own little detached world, peopled by the eccentrics and outcasts who work there. Although initially ignored by her colleagues, Holly soon becomes a member of the gang, attending their illicit private screenings after closing time, sharing the leftover drugs and alcohol they find cleaning up the stalls, complaining about their careless customers. There’s Sally, the manager who dresses like a faded beauty queen; Otto, the assistant manager; Peter the projectionist and his son Flynn; Patricia, who wears a beret, reads Godard on Godard and never lifts a finger to work; tall and dark Paolo; short and golden-haired cinema purist Cosmo; and Iris, the owner of the Paradise, as decayed and eccentric as the cinema itself. Holly becomes versed in the eccentric and bizarre lore of the Paradise, inhabiting a world of old films, rumours and legends that threaten to bleed out into the real world. All of this is shattered when Iris dies, putting the Paradise’s future in jeopardy. As Holly and her friends struggle to maintain their rebelliousness and their identity in the face of aggressive corporate takeover, they find themselves becoming the victims of mysterious outbursts of violence, almost as if the cinema itself is rising up in protest.

Grudova manages an expert balancing act of combining the mundane setting of the old cinema and powerful evocations of the drudgery of shift work with the underlying menace of a dark fairy tale. The Paradise is such a vivid creation one can almost smell it, a particularly British combination of faded grandeur and rotting decay. Grudova wonderfully evokes the gungy atmosphere of an old dilapidated indie cinema, with all the discomforts and eccentricities but also all the magic that it adds to the experience of cinema going. Holly and her colleagues are people who are consumed by cinema as a medium, a world of obsession and sublimated desire where having an opinion on a particular obscure French film is so much more important than the latest Hollywood blockbuster. Fittingly, each chapter is named after a particular film, with its director and year of release quoted, which reflects or comments upon the events, atmosphere or feeling of the chapter. The novel is steeped in the magic of cinema, and how the cinematic dreams of the past haunt the present.

Children of Paradise is chock full of memorable characters. Grudova expertly conjures each of them into being, bringing them to life through wry descriptions and little well-observed character snippets. From Cosmo’s snippiness about refusing to watch films shown on digital projectors to Patricia refusing to change her dusty glasses even after being sick on them, the novel is full of telling little details that tell you so much about every character. One quickly starts to feel like they are real people one has known for years. Grudova perfectly captures the combination of innocence and pretentiousness that defines a lot of us who love art as youths, that desperation to proof ourselves that so often tips over into obnoxiousness. She also brilliantly portrays the strange aimlessness of one’s early adult years, as one enters the work force and tries to figure out one’s identity by playing it off one’s colleagues. The novel’s characters are frequently narcissistic and self-destructive, but in quite an endearingly innocent and believable way. As the Paradise is bought up by a large chain and it changes from a tight-nit group of outsiders living in each other’s world to a professional business, Holly and her friends experience the alienation and the soullessness of the modern corporate work environment. They find themselves torn between the seductive dream of the Paradise’s past and the corporate machinery of its present, a tension which threatens to tear them apart.

Children of Paradise is an engaging and absorbing read. I just wanted to sink into Grudova’s prose, her world and her characters. She manages to keep an admirable balance between lightness and darkness, even as the novel descends into some pretty frightening and disturbing territory, and the otherworldly magic of the Paradise always remains in flux – how much is real and how much is a reflection of the disrupted mental states of the characters who inhabit it is left to the reader. Grudova is capable of sharp, wry humour and warmth and humanity even as the violence and terror escalate. Children of Paradise is a wonderful novel, and I very much look forward to whatever Grudova writes next.