An abduction, a vanished wife, a reclusive filmmaker and a collection of unsettling dolls provide the ingredients for The Boy Who Loved Dolls, the new novel from one of Australia’s leading novelists and poets, John A. Scott.
Twice shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award, the author turns to Contemporary Gothic with a story that moves between psychological drama, tragedy and the grotesque, creating a world where art, obsession and deception become increasingly difficult to separate.
Set in Australia in 1987, the novel centres on renowned and famously reclusive French film director Jean-Jacques Baille and his secluded country residence.
It is here that Susan Vaughan, an eccentric young film critic and independent documentary-maker, is given an opportunity to stay with her long-term cultural icon and conduct a series of videotaped interviews.
Initially, Vaughan’s project is everything she could have hoped for. She sets out to explore Baille’s groundbreaking films, examining their recurring themes, techniques and patterns, including the influence of his Australian-born wife, Anna. Her attention also turns to his latest semi-biographical film, opening up questions about the relationship between cinema, memory and lived experience.
But Baille is not simply an interview subject.
As Vaughan begins to discover more about the director, she encounters another side to his carefully constructed public persona. He is an obsessive collector and restorer of rare dolls, some of them beautiful, others deeply unnerving. The collection becomes more than an eccentric hobby, suggesting a darker fascination with preservation, control and the reconstruction of the past.
What begins as an intellectual investigation gradually takes on the characteristics of a psychological game.
Baille appears to be leading Vaughan towards something buried within his past, while the mystery surrounding Anna’s disappearance becomes increasingly difficult to ignore. The filmmaker’s carefully controlled interviews begin to feel less like conversations and more like a series of calculated revelations, with Vaughan drawn deeper into a story she may not fully understand.
At its heart, The Boy Who Loved Dolls explores the uneasy territory where art and life collide. It asks how much of an artist’s work can be separated from their private obsessions, and what happens when the person investigating the story becomes part of it.
With its secluded setting, unreliable revelations and atmosphere of mounting unease, The Boy Who Loved Dolls promises a contemporary Gothic tale that is as interested in the psychology of its characters as it is in the darker possibilities of the imagination.
The result is a novel built around mystery and manipulation, where every interview may reveal something new, every object may carry a secret, and the line between filmmaker, subject and investigator becomes increasingly blurred.
John A. Scott is the author of eighteen books, several of which have been translated and published internationally. In Australia, they have received numerous shortlistings (twice for the Miles Franklin) and received Victorian Premier’s Prizes for both poetry and fiction.
The film version of his novel What I Have Written, directed by John Hughes, from the AWGIE-winning screenplay by Scott, was selected for Competition at Berlin and Stockholm Film Festivals and won the International Mystery Film Festival, Bologna.
His major experimental novel, N, was shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Prize and was one of the Guardian‘s Books of the Year. His most recent work, Shorter Lives (Puncher & Wattmann, 2020), is a collection of nonfiction sonnets and prose poems resurrecting a project abandoned in 1967, shortlisted for the 2024 Prime Minister’s Award for Poetry.
A 240-page study of his work by Peter D. Mathews, From Poet to Novelist: The Orphic Journey Of John A. Scott, was released last year from Cambria Press, New York.
The Boy Who Loved Dolls is published by Puncher & Wattmann and is available from all leading book sellers including QBD Books.
Image: The Boy Who Loved Dolls – courtesy of Puncher & Wattmann