Viewed from above, Overland, California is a patchwork community of red-roofed houses and bucolic sheep meadows. There is a church and a tennis court and a tranquil blue lake. Laundry snaps on the line in well-tended backyards; Sullivan’s Travels is playing at the local picture palace. It’s 1942 and the world is at war. But unremarkable Overland sits apart from the conflict.
It is only at ground level that the facade starts to flake. The Overland diner serves only coffee and doughnuts. The fire hydrants emit not water but steam. And the tranquil blue lake is a vast sheet of tarpaulin: toss an apple on to its surface and the fruit risks being sucked down a vent and dropped on to the shop floor of the Lockheed aircraft factory that is concealed down below. The town, it transpires, is more involved in the war than it would have us believe.
The concept of the ersatz American town is almost as old as the American town itself, typically built at speed and aping older architectural styles. It’s there in Nathanael West’s 1939 novel The Day of the Locust, with its pick-and-mix of “Samoan huts, Mediterranean villas, Swiss chalets and Tudor collages” and on screen in films such as Pleasantville and The Truman Show. But Graham Rawle’s tale of fakery is grounded in fact. In the immediate wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the US War Department recruited the services of the major Hollywood studios for what became known as “Operation Camouflage”. This involved disguising air bases and factories on the coast of California to the point where they blended in with the surrounding neighbourhoods. The Lockheed Corporation plant covered 40 hectares and employed 25,000 workers. But from the air it could pass for a suburb of Burbank.
Rawle’s master illusionist is George Godfrey, God for short, an art director on loan from the Warner Bros lot, who explains:
Warner Brothers studios are about the same size as the Lockheed plant. Same number of employees, give or take. Everybody working together to manufacture their product. Lockheed puts out one B-24 bomber a week, plus a number of smaller planes and parts. Warners puts out one class-A feature plus a number of B-movies and shorts. Some of those take off and fly; some of them get shot down.
Godfrey is determined his Overland will be bought by the public. It certainly casts a spell on the Lockheed employees who find their way above ground. First Japanese-American Kay scrambles through the vent to emerge in the lake “like Botticelli’s Venus”. Then pregnant starlet Queenie begins pushing a doll in a pram about the suburban streets, disappointed to discover there are no speaking parts on this set. Possibly Overland has even come to seduce its creator. When the project is mothballed, Godfrey cannot let it go. He wants to build a windmill to “add character” and insists that every road should be named. He steals a Baker Street sign from a Sherlock Holmes movie.
Rawle cut his teeth as an artist and designer (his “Lost Consonants” series used to run in the Guardian’s Weekend magazine) and this sparky, inventive novel betrays his pedigree. Overland is printed in the landscape format with the spine at the top, so that you read it as you might leaf through a flip-book. There are asterisks and footnotes and cutaways to news items. All of which gives the tale a gimmicky, PT Barnum-esque flavour. It reminds us that the story we’re reading is itself an illusion; a world tipped on to its side and framed as a breathless B-movie. If there is little depth to Rawle’s characters, that may be partly the point. He moves his cast around in much the same manner as the film crew reposition the prop sheep in the field.
In Godfrey’s opinion there is little difference between the Hollywood dream factory and the Burbank aircraft plant. Equally it might be argued that not much separates the fake town from the real. It is this conceit, finally, that makes Overland so appealing. Having arranged his stage-flats and his harum-scarum performers, Rawles manages to make them all feel of value. Thrown to the winds, their lives in ruins, his main players struggle to retrace their steps. They find themselves pining for the little cabin by the lake. They stagger through bland suburbia in search of Shangri-La. Maybe every town is a shell waiting to be furnished; every fiction a fake until we consent to meet it halfway. Overland was jerry-rigged over an existing structure. The fields are felt and the taps don’t work and the perfect little cabin commands a view of tarpaulin. The place is an illusion, but that doesn’t mean it’s not home.
• Xan Brooks’s The Clocks in This House All Tell Different Times is published by Salt. To buy Overland for £12.74 go to guardianbookshop.com.
