Rousseau Redux THE NEW CONFESSIONS

By Martha Duffy

First there's the book, then the movie, right? Or maybe the movie -- or the mini-series -- comes first and then the book. Those are familiar enough - sequences, but how about this one: the book and the movie tied together in one package?

That's the magic trick British Author William Boyd has managed in his fourth novel. He tells the life story of a rather prickly film director of genius, one John James Todd, and in doing so describes the making of Todd's silent masterpiece so clearly and vividly that the reader may feel he has seen the nonexistent epic. Titled The Confessions: Part I, it is the first film in a projected trilogy that is to be the realization of Todd's dreams. Imprisoned in Germany during World War I, he read Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions, and it took over his powerful imagination. Todd's catastrophe is that by the time he has finished Part I to his maniacal standards, it is 1931, and the arrival of sound has rendered his 5-hr., 48-min. extravaganza a "splendid three-masted clipper ship . . . magnificent, but of another age than ours."

Todd's life is a walk through the 20th century, and Boyd makes a lavish, if somewhat raveled, tour leader. Todd's mother, like Rousseau's, dies giving birth to him, and he grows up with his dour physician father and his pompous elder brother, not knowing much of love except for the erratic attentions of Oonagh, the daily. An indifferent student, he is eventually shipped off to a boarding school that he actually enjoys, in part because he never takes rugby seriously and in part because he is able to develop his talent for photography.

These early scenes have a vigor and pictorial sharpness that mark Boyd's best writing. After reading the description of the Todds' house, the reader feels he could find his way around it in the dark. The chapter on the school is as effective in miniature as any number of public school classics. Todd's closest friend is an acne-ridden chap named Hamish who happens to be a mathematical wizard. Hamish is the goat of some brutish schoolboy pranks, but he is too intoxicated by his own theories to care very much. His presence gives rise to some authorial speculations on the wonder of numbers, their patterns and how they often reveal themselves to true adepts in pictures.

Todd launches himself slowly and awkwardly into the world. Self-centered, given to gusts and swoons of excitement, he is, as one of his actress lovers tells him, a "great, big, Grade A, ignorant fool." Nor is he a wholly attractive fellow. His sex life is a series of not so magnificent obsessions; like his idol, he deserts his children. Irritatingly, a paranoia starts to < flare whenever he loses what he desperately wants: "control, total control."

But Todd is neither a cynic nor a coward, and he never dodges the consequences of his own wild inspiration. Rousseau, he recognizes, is the "first modern man . . . ((who)) spoke for all of us suffering mortals, our vanities, our hopes, our moments of greatness and our base corrupted natures."

The making of Confessions: Part I is a splendid set piece within the novel. Over budget. Behind schedule. An actor's forgotten mother located and brought onto the set to shock her son into the horrified reaction the director seeks. A baby nearly dying of chills as Todd refines upon the perfection of a scene. A charming passage about young women picking cherries that turns out to be the high point of the movie. A rather exhilarating cast of show-biz types who figure in the production and usually take the director for the wrong kind of ride. It is zestful, sure-handed scenemaking; Todd himself would approve of his creator.

In the succeeding decades, Todd's fate resembles that of many European artists: a flight to California just ahead of the Nazis, bad -- though well- paid -- times in Hollywood, a ruinous tangle with the House Un-American Activities Committee (Todd has no political commitments whatever). Several of the cinema folk who surrounded Todd back in Berlin during the silent days turn up again, usually running true to bad form.

But some of the gusto is missing. As his hero ages, the author's energy flags. Promising situations are brought up only to be dropped, and the tour of the century ends rather limply. Still, Boyd, 36, a skilled and productive novelist (A Good Man in Africa, Stars and Bars), has succeeded in no small feat: writing a portrait of an artist that is both entertaining and intellectually engaging.