Probably the most frustrating thing about Glen David Gold’s writing is the length of time that he has taken between publishing his novels. Following the massive success of Gold’s debut novel, Carter Beats the Devil, fans have had to wait eight years for Sunnyside, his latest book. His first novel having been a fictionalised biography of the American magician Charles Joseph Carter, Gold has continued along a similar vein in Sunnyside, a fictionalised account of the career of Charlie Chaplin, the birth of Hollywood and the impact of the First World War on life in America. Similarly, one of the major themes of Carter Beats the Devil was the occurrence of seemingly impossible events, an idea which Gold has developed further to form the mass delusions that provide the excellent opening sequences of Sunnyside.

On November 12th 1916, Californian lighthouse keeper Leland Wheeler informs his mother that something is very wrong. Quickly taking up her telescope, Emily Wheeler is just in time to spy a small boat being piloted by the unmistakable figure of Charlie Chaplin as, buffeted by waves, it drifts towards rocks and inescapable disaster. This turns out to be just the first in a series of over 800 sightings of Chaplin that occur on the same day all over the country as Americans seek desperately for some distraction from their upcoming entry into the First World War. These sighting are disturbing for all involved but particularly for Chaplin who, having been elevated to super-stardom, is just beginning to experience doubts about himself.

At this point Sunnyside diverges to follow three disparate characters. Chaplin tries to concentrate on his career while taming his wandering heart, battling studio executives, facing questions about his patriotism and preparing himself for the arrival in Los Angeles of his loved yet still dreaded mother. Leland Wheeler discovers that he is in fact the son of the world’s last Wild West star and determines to move to Hollywood to become an actor. His ambitions thwarted by America’s entry into the war in Europe, Wheeler heads to the trenches of France little realising that when he finally makes it big in Hollywood, it will be as manager to the world’s first canine megastar. Meanwhile, Hugo Black finds himself under the command of the famous British General Edmund Ironside and embroiled in the often overlooked conflict against the Bolsheviks in the newly created USSR. A massive chorus of other characters, both real and fictional, become tangled up in the lives of the three leads as they, and America, head toward the modern age.

With Carter Beats the Devil, Glen David Gold created an almost perfect novel that mixed sublime storytelling with a compulsive narrative and pitch perfect characters, and with Sunnyside he comes very, very close to reaching the same level. Sunnyside is a great, sprawling novel comprised of finely woven threads of fiction and fact that continually entertains but does demand quite a bit of concentration and patience from the reader. Gold has done a marvellous job of recreating people and places but he does occasionally stray into the realm of too much information. Amongst the numerous entertaining subplots there are a few, the history of Liberty Loans for example, could perhaps have been edited out without detracting anything from the story. Ultimately though, there is so much great, enthralling material in Sunnyside that any minor flaws disappear into insignificance and the reader is rewarded with an epic bittersweet story about the various forms that the American dream can take.

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