In this romantic comedy-drama, a reality-challenged title writer must navigate the perils and possibilities of two worlds: the one in his head, and the one in which he has a chance at real love.
London, 1929. Abel Lively is broke, alone and terrified of going outside his one-man movie studio, Lively Pictures. He couldn’t be happier.
To the untrained eye Abel might be a hermit secluded in a dirty garret with nothing but a projector and a dwindling supply of white paint to his name, but as the Cincinnati Kid, the star of his very own silent serial, The Spider’s Web, he leads a thrill-a-minute life of derring-do in an epic battle with his nemesis, Little Caesar. Weekly instalments see Abel’s alter ego and friends, including Wallace Beery and Edward G. Robinson, outfoxing the law, breaking hearts, slinging six-shooters and cracking wise.
In the intimacy of his studio Abel rubs shoulders with Greta Garbo and Clara Bow, but when Spider’s Web plot developments demand a damsel in distress, only one actress will do: Louise Brooks, quite literally the girl of Abel’s dreams. There’s just one snag: Abel doesn’t have any footage of her.
Enter Penelope Peabody, a former Paramount poster artist and current unemployed painter who shares Abel’s distaste for talkies and, more importantly, knows how to get her hands on the silent prints in Paramount’s vaults. Footage from Louise’s films propels Abel’s serial to new heights, but his entanglement with the outside world comes at an ever-mounting cost. As the story playing out on his screen falls victim to its author’s infatuation and begins to spiral out of control, so does another story: a story Abel has pushed offscreen his whole life. First he lost his head; then he lost his heart; now, he’s about to lose his hand.
When Penelope shows Abel Louise’s most recent feature, Pandora’s Box, she has no idea how closely she is following in its heroine’s footsteps; and when she opens the door to a world Abel has only ever glimpsed, she cannot guess the terrifying scale of the collision she is setting in motion. Soon, in a planet-spanning odyssey of mad scientists, barren wastelands, vengeful utility companies, ball lightning, draconian judiciaries, sinister machines, prophetic visions, unbearable heartache, crippling poverty, murderous phantoms, fiendish debt collectors and limited ammunition and broken shoes and ridiculous disguises and betrayal and courage and incarceration and skeletons and saxophones and an interfering Betty Boop, Abel and Penelope will face the collapse of their lives.
Can they build new ones? Can they do it alone? Can Abel choose between his head and his heart? Will he have to? What about his hand? And presented with the chance to design a life out of archive footage, animated assistants and the incalculable power of electricity, what kind of life might it be? The answers to all these questions and many more will be found this spring in Away with Words.
