‘This Location of Unknown Possibilities’ by Brett Josef Grubisic

Reviewed by Kyla Neufeld from advance reading copy

Ask your average person if they know what goes into making movies, and they probably won’t be able to tell you; I wouldn’t be able to tell you. That’s why a novel like This Location of Unknown Possibilities is unique: it is an inside look into the business of making movies, showing everything from behind the scenes.  This Location is the story of a small-budget movie and the people who make it happen, and it’s Brett Josef Grubisic’s second novel. His first, The Age of Cities, was a finalist for the City of Vancouver Book Prize, and Grubisic himself teaches at the University of British Columbia, and reviews books for the National Post and The Winnipeg Review.

This Location follows Marta Spëk, an English professor, as she stumbles into a position as a consultant on The Prophet of Djoun, a biopic about Lady Hester Stanhope, which is being produced by an unnamed film company. Lady Hester was a British socialite and adventurer who lived from 1773 until 1839. She travelled the world with her doctor, Charles Meryon, and led many archaeological digs, including the expedition to the ruins of Ashkelonm, which is north of Gaza and became the first excavation in Palestine. Marta is asked to consult on the film because she is the only one “that knows a thing about…Lady Hester Stanhope,” having written a book about her.

Marta, experiencing the “the usual low morale doldrums coinciding with the school year’s sputtering out,” accepts and heads out to Penticton, BC, for a week-long location shoot. There she is thrown into the hustle and bustle of movie-making, having no experience and no idea what to expect. She is surprised even further when she is informed that the movie has changed completely: “Network A” has backed out of their commitment and another one has taken its place, this time with a completely different vision. The movie is no longer The Prophet of Djoun, but The Battle for Djoun—complete with aliens, action, and no regard for historical accuracy—and Lady Hester Stanhope becomes Lady Harriet Swinburne, “a sexy middle-aged alpha-female… Lara Croft meets a young Queen Elizabeth I with a touch of Amelia Earhart.” Marta is kept on board solely for the reason that a contract has been signed and the money is already hers. She decides to stay and see if she can be of use on set.

Marta’s story unfolds alongside of Jakob Nunget’s, one of the executives on the project, as he deals with the inevitable chaos that comes with making a movie: budget cuts, script changes, and on-set mishaps. However, for a novel about the film industry, very little movie making actually goes on. We see lots of running around the main office and driving to and from set locations, but not much on-set action. And, for an executive, Jake does very little besides checking out the sets and barking over the telephone. His narrative is mostly made up of him exchanging emails and wandering around looking for someone to have sex with.

Marta does a little better, but she is a novice to the film industry and can’t offer us an informed look at the business of making a movie. When a new actress is needed to play the villain, she finds one from the local talent pool, but that is the extent of her input into the movie. And, while she tries to find a useful occupation, such as doing rewrites or acting as the script supervisor, jobs for which she has no experience, the rest of her time on set is spent answering phone calls and, later, going on late-night drives around the countryside.

The story moves slowly at first. One hundred pages in and the only things that have happened plot-wise are that Marta has met with Jake about the consultant position, and has accepted, both of which are things that would have happened in the first half hour were this an actual movie. Instead we are brought down rabbit trails that have little to do with the over-all plot, such as the history of Marta’s apartment complex “Undre Arms,” one particularly bad date she went on, as well as Jake’s routines at the gym and his driving habits. These tangents offer no value to the overall story and character development.

The prose does have moments of real wit. Grubisic includes pages of the script as it changes, which are entertaining and highlight the stilted, awkward Victorian dialogue of the movie. For example, upon finding the crashed alien ship, Lady Swinburne says, “Merciful Heavens! It appears to be a mechanical device, but as nothing I have before witnessed,” to which Dr. Potter replies, “I concur, Lady. Not even within the great mills of Lancashire have I seen such a leviathan mechanism.” These pages of script are perhaps the most amusing parts of the novel, as they show just how ridiculous the movie actually is; it’s a quick job, something that will make a little bit of money if shown to the right audience, and the producers know it.

However, the prose also gets bogged down by unnecessarily over-descriptive sentences, often broken up by dashes: “Marta pulled in front of #10 moments after the early evening sun—pretty but strange: fulvous, the yellow-brown of topaz—had dropped behind the mountains. The sky had turned darker than comfort for driving, but an exasperating search for the public library—simple pragmatism: the motel offered no computer access—delayed arrival.” These sentences are a slog to get through and slow down the momentum of the story, especially when they make up the majority of the novel and often require a re-read to get through them.

This Location of Unknown Possibilities is a light-hearted story that doesn’t take itself too seriously, but heavy prose and main characters that don’t do a whole lot make this novel a more difficult read than it should be.

Now or Never | 342 pages |  $19.99 | paper | ISBN # 978-1926942605