Kubrick’s Game by Derek Taylor Kent
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Kubrick’s Game is the first adult-aimed novel from children’s author Derek Taylor Kent, who writes the Scary School series under the pen name Derek the Ghost. The author reached out to me about reading and reviewing the book, which was a great honor. I’m not sure if he approached me because of the book reviews on my site or the film reviews, but either way would make sense since Kubrick’s Game truly is a book for cinephiles.
Molded in the fashion of books like Ready Player One and The Da Vinci Code, the story involves an elaborate and mysterious treasure hunt based on clues hidden in the films of Stanley Kubrick.
When I recently described the book I was currently reading to my family, they said “that’s perfect for you”. And that’s mostly true. Except…
I am not the world’s biggest Kubrick fan. I have nothing but respect for the undeniable talent of the man and extremely little patience for his method of filmmaking. He was a master of shot composition and a visionary. I acknowledge without hesitation the indelible impact of his films; they are gorgeous, wholly unique and are completely stuffed with content ripe for analysis. But I never really went in for film analysis. I find much of his work slow, dull and pretentious. The absurdly methodical “film fifty takes and see what happens” approach with ambling, overlong shots badly in need of editing defined a generation of filmmakers and is directly responsible for the “director as auteur” nonsense that we are still stuck with.
I do not know if part of the author’s intent with Kubrick’s Game was to cultivate love of the filmmaker, but the book absolutely sent me back to the oeuvre to see if I hadn’t misjudged them. (Jury’s still out on that – I’ll let you know.)
The story is jam-packed with facts about filmmaking in general and Kubrick in particular, a sure sign that the author has put in time in La-La Land. I found the story most engaging during these moments, with film restoration specialists and aspiring directors discussing the craft.
The protagonist of Kubrick’s Game is Shawn Hagan, a promising film student who becomes central to a complicated game that the legendary filmmaker has engineered to take place some years after his death. Hagan is an introverted and talented young man, somewhere on the Autism spectrum, and it’s his journey that I found a little wanting. Possibly because the author is trying to convey Shawn’s difficulty with reading people, some of the plot points are delivered forcefully, without any subtlety. Other characters in the story act with transparent motives, but the story takes a long time to bring the main character up to speed. Again, I believe this is done for effect, an intentional representation of Shawn’s struggles to digest social clues, but this style of leaving obvious hints and spelling things out very slowly is also a hallmark of writing to a younger audience, and I can’t help but wonder if that is a carryover from Kent’s main writing experience.
The only way in which the book suffers from this deliberate writing style is in the length; as engaging as the story was, I thought it could use a sizable haircut. But again, perhaps this is an homage to Kubrick…
Lest my criticism of the feel of the story give you the wrong impression, let me be clear – I really enjoyed Kubrick’s Game. It is a well-thought out and unique story, brimming with details sure to spur the imagination and interest of fans of the director and possibly create some new devotees. While I did find the writing style somewhat exposition heavy, that sort of comes with the territory, and doesn’t detract from the imaginative hunt that drives the tale.
Possibly more interesting to fans of Kubrick, conspiracy theorists and codebreakers, the quality of the story is engaging for all and make Kubrick’s Game easy to recommend…
Oh, and there’s a game based on the book – a real life treasure hunt! DerekTaylorKent.com/the-game Very cool…
