20080930.Berlin.Review

Book: Comic
Author: Jason Lutes
Year: 2000
Pages: 212

Every now and again, a comic comes out that assures me that the medium can tell certain kinds of stories in a way that no other medium can touch. Every now and again, a comic comes out that despite its natural humility asserts itself as a model to which the medium should aspire. Every now and again, a comic comes out that just flat-out knocks me off my feet and makes me think that everything is going to be alright after all.

That comic this time round is Jason Lutes' Berlin: City of Stones.

It's not that Berlin presents such a rosie vista of the panoply of human history. It doesn't. It's not that Berlin will offer a solution to the din of political strife that will always wrack the tired bones of human society. It won't. And it's not even that Berlin allows true love to conquer even the dankest moments of our human despair. It can't.

What Lutes' book does, however, is demonstrate that creative geniuses still stalk the earth. The great classical composers are dead and gone. The sculptors who decorated the world with marble and jade are survived only by their stones. The giants of the jazz era have passed into mere memory. Bach. Beethoven. Mozart. Michelangelo. Bernini. Rodin. Satch. Bird. Trane.

And here is Jason Lutes.

Among the geniuses of the comic form (Ware, Smith, Eisner, Hernandez, etc.), Lutes is in the top tier. His work is careful, planned, and makes use of so many narrative tricks that they cease to be tricks and exist merely as natural part of his extensive visual vocabulary. Recently having taught an introduction to comics creation, I had a hard time not using Lutes' work in every example I had prepared to illustrate technique. There is so much story built into every page that his works are the kinds that continue unfolding upon subsequent readings.

With the recent release of the second book of the trilogy, Berlin: City of Smoke, I thought it best to reread City of Stones so I could jump right into its sequel. This was my third complete read of the book and fresh narrative details continued to make themselves known. With the story and plot developments more or less solid in mind, I was able to pay closer attention to some of the methodology behind Lutes' work here, taking special care to follow his panel transitions and the way he allows the story to flit from character to character. This is all the product of a special kind of genius.

For those unaware, Berlin follows numerous characters through the end of the Twenties and the start of the Thirties in Wiemar's Germany. The economy is a disaster. The government is breaking the terms of armistice. Political turmoil grips the city as communists and fascists fight to save their country from its fate. And of course, there are the Jews, living under the quiet threat of a future none would predict. Yet despite it all, Berlin is still trying to be a Great City. There is still wealth and privilege (even while the workers begin falling to poverty and starvation) and veiled acceptance of the libertines. And the press is still free. Somewhat.

Berlin follows a Marxist journalist, a country-mouse art student, a nightclub singer, a family divided over politics, a Jewish tramp, the boy with whom he trades goods, a lesbian, a socialite, a policeman, and a handful of political radicals (both communist and fascist). Its weavings can chart a difficult path to traverse, but the work pays well and is worth every moment of inspection.

Rating:

Check a sample of Berlin: City of Stones via Amazon's Search Inside feature.

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Book: Comic
Author: Jason Lutes
Year: 2008
Pages: 200

As far as middle chapters go, City of Smoke runs pretty much better than expected. Second acts generally fend off some of the energy and presence of the first in order to properly explode into the final act. While maintaining his virtuosity over the form, Lutes does calm things down a bit after the May Day massacre that concluded the first act.

City of Smoke largely explores two themes: the robust nightlife that ruled Berlin's hidden quarters and the growing political strife between factions of the citizenry. And the two societies seem largely oblivious to each other. The night society drowns reality in celebration and excess, while the workaday masses are drowned by concerns for a faulty government, a crashing market, and the evidence of a revolution at hand.

As in the first, journalist Kurt Severing is our guide and it is largely from his perspective that we are probably meant to absorb the story (though not entirely—as his appalling disdain for sweet, sweet jazz marks him as unreliable). It is through Severing, who supports Marxist ideology but refuses to participate in anything more demonstrative than his occasional journalism, that we first discovered the city in the first book, City of Stones; and it is again Severing who provides teetering balance to the ruckus between the night and the day societies.

Lutes, in addition to his mastery of the comic medium, proves himself an excellent student of the human state, capturing intricately the poison that infects us all. Of course he depicts flawlessly the poor, huddled masses as they struggle to stave off starvation and fight for a political hope that will surely disappoint (as political hopes are wont to do), but further, he delivers too the poison that inflames even human joy and celebration. We are given witness to ecstasy and abandon, but realistically, we also are allowed to see the darkness that threatens from the horizon, that in some sense has already leapt into the lives of the happy.

And Lutes does this in such a way that he doesn't come off as depressing so much as he does real. There is a veracity to his work that the reader cannot help but admire. As far as story direction, I didn't like some of his choices for some of his characters. But they were always real choices. And I respect the story for it. And they set up well the story to come.

As a minor critique, there were small moments in this second volume when I felt the usual creator's care diminish. A page here with shaky art. A panel there with a name plainly omitted from the text balloon. On the whole these things did not harm the book for me. But I did notice them.

My only real complaint is now that I have finished Volume II, I've got a good half-decade's wait to see Lutes' conclusion.

Rating:

Check a sample of Berlin: City of Smoke via Amazon's Search Inside feature.

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Notes:
Here are two great interviews with Jason Lutes in regard to Berlin:
• PBS interview
• Comicbook Resources interview

Also, about a year ago, I reviewed another book by Lutes (though he only contributed the writing), Houdini: The Handcuff King.

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20080908

As promised in Friday's post (which, if you haven't already, I recommend clicking on the images and investigating the little Flash presentations I prepared to help explain the theory), here are the two samples of that fateful Sunday night's comics-making session. As the kid's were hesitant and embarrassed to even let me see their efforts (most of which were surprisingly inventive!), I didn't really think pressing them to allow me to put their stuff on the internet would be much of a fruitful endeavor. So, with that in mind, the two samples I have are mine and the Monk's. We basically had an hour and a half to do whatever it was we were going to do.

I provided several creative prompts for everyone, just 'cuz coming up with a story idea on the spur of the moment isn't always the easiest task. The Monk chose for her comic the brief plot description: A man jumps off of a pier to escape certain doom. And here is what she came up with!

I thought this was a particularly inventive use of panel framing (the panel shapes are meant to mirror the shape of whatever is victimizing the man in a given panel). Despite complaining that she has no artistic talent (and having difficulty with figuring out how long stick-figure legs should be), The Monk does evidence plenty of creativity. I loved that she applied onomatopoeia to both smelly garbage and hopping over a caterpillar (something tells me she's read a little too much manga!). Especially interesting was the division of the first and last panels in the rectangular row (my favourite being the panel containing nothing but pilings and buzz-saw waves).

For my own comic, I chose from a list of titles and built my comic around that. So then: Road Trip!

About halfway through (while drawing panel four), one of the kids suggested that I have a dinosaur involved, so that's where that came from. If anyone's curious, all along Route 66 (or 40 as I believe it's now known), there are piles upon piles of Americana. In one particular stretch, some entrepreneur decided to use huge, horribly-wrought dinosaurs to hawk his goods. Here is a photo I took of one of them. Probably the most notable thing you can tell from mine is that I don't have a ton of patience. Panels five through eight get increasingly sloppy. And then the final panel was just a big rush because everyone was finishing their work and I figured my time would be better served by examining and complimenting people's work.

20080905

On Sunday evenings, I host this Sunday thing for the high-school-aged at our church. From 6:oo to 9:oo, we spend the evening doing whatever I think would be good for them. Sometimes I'll teach for that whole time. Other times we'll watch a movie or listen to music and discuss how they, as believers should react/interact with such artifacts of pop culture. Sometimes we'll just hang out and maybe run several board games. In short, the liturgy is variable.

Last week we did arts & crafts. Specifically, an introduction to the fine art of making comics.

Knowing I only had a couple of hours to teach and for them to do, we kept it simple and introductory. We mostly focused on the types of transitions artists use to take a reader from one panel to another. Hm, wait. Let me back up. I started by asking three questions.

Question #1: What is comics?
Answer? Well, let's prevaricate here. Comics is such a newborn phenomenon that the language to discuss it is only just beginning to form. Generally speaking, comics uses a series of static images sequentially composed and combine these with text to tell a story. That's the sort of panel-to-panel comic that we're fairly used to seeing. But comics don't necessarily have text. I read an issue of G.I. Joe back in the day ("Silent Interlude") that had no words, and a story told simply with pictures. We also have single panel stories like Dennis the Menace or The Far Side. Nothing sequential about those.

So yeah, our understanding of just what is comics needs a little work still. One thing is for sure though: comics is a medium.

Question #2: What is a medium? A medium is simply one thing that stands between two other things and acts as a vessel of transmission between the two (sometimes in one direction and sometimes in two). In the Old Testament warnings against consulting mediums, the reference is to those who act as an intermediary between the living and the dead. Comics then is a medium—and specifically a medium of communication. Like literature, film, music, painting, oratory, and possibly even videogames, comics seeks to take the communication of its author and transmit that communication as accurately as possible to its reader.

Question #3: What is of primary concern for the communicator? Clarity. Without clarity, the communication is obscured and its meaning lost. Depending on how much clarity an author imparts to his work, that is how close a reader can get to the author's intended message.

We went over all of this with the kids.

Now Scott McCloud, one of comics foremost theorists, divides the goal of clarity into five coherent sections for the would-be comics crafter to attend. We, having limited time, breifly focused on just the first division: the author's Choice of Moment. This concerns which static scenes from the story's events an author will choose to relay. There's really a lot to this and a story can take a different shape depending on what is shown and what is concealed. But as a group, we focused more on the transitions between those static images (for it's often between panels that the interpretive work of comics occurs).

Scott McCloud labels six types of transitions when he speaks of Choice of Moment. I'll describe and show examples of these transition types and then I'll show you the only two samples from the comic-making extravaganza that I currently have available.

1) Moment-to-Moment
Moment-to-moment transitions forces a deliberate pace, encouraging the reader to take special note of the passage of time. By extending a single scene or action over more panels than strictly necessary to convey the action, an author can ratchet up tension in time-sensitive situations (let's say a grenade has been tossed and we're seeing a man jump in slow motion to cover it with his body) or make a scene between to people seem extra awkward by presenting several times in a row the same panel of them sitting in silence (with perhaps minor changes to illustrate broken attempts at conversation) or give us a sense at how dreadfully long something is taking. Here's an example exerpted from Derek Kirk Kim's short story, Same Difference.

2) Action-to-Action
These transitions are perhaps the most common type of transition in American superhero comics. These panels follow a single event or single series of events through the actions that make up the event(s). The following example, from Jeff Smith's Bone illustrates the action of Running for One's Life from Rat Creatures.

3) Subject-to-Subject
Reminiscent of film editing, the subject-to-subject transition follows the directors camera around a scene, shooting everything and editing in only the important parts. An author can use this kind of transition to highlight particular versions of events, giving the reader an otherwise impossible series of vantage points. This example is from Kaoru Mori's Emma and has been adjusted for left-to-right reading for those unfamiliar with reading Japanese graphic texts.

4) Scene-to-Scene
These transition occur frequently across pages, when the action in one scene ends on one page and the action of another scene begins on the following page. Sometimes though and author will break scene one or more times on a page for the sake of his point. Christopher Hick's wonderful adventure, Mister Blank, begins with a montage of its protagonist Sam Smith's work day. Each panel cuts to a different scene: Sam in traffic; Sam being yelled at while clocking in; Sam at his desk; Sam on the coffee break; etc. Hicks captures entirely Sam Smith's work experience in a page of panels. Our example below is from Joe Sacco's non-fiction comic, Palestine, in which he interviews Palestinians and Israelis in regard to Palestinian/Israeli relations.

5) Aspect-to-Aspect
These transitions are diversions from the body narrative and are generally used to give a sense of place or atmosphere. See how Jason Lutes uses this technique to round out this scene from Berlin.

6) Non Sequitur
These are panels that, of course, come out of sequence. If they relate at all to the preceeding panels on the page, there relation is only abstract. It's not a commonly used device as it can be confusing and hinder clarity, but Chris Ware uses the transition to good effect on this page from Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth.

Okay, so here's the thing. That took me longer than I expected to put together so I'm going to save the actual comics we produced on Sunday for Monday. But hopefully, you enjoyed that little lesson. I personally find the theory of comics pretty fascinating stuff.

20080730

Four reviews today.

• Battle Royale (film)
• Norwegian Wood (novel) by Haruki Murakami
• Franny and Zooey (novel) by J.D. Salinger
• Y: The Last Man (graphic novel) by Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra

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Film: Speculative Fiction
Director: Kinji Fukasaku
Year: 2000
Runtime: 122 min.

Wow. Battle Royale was... incredible. This thing was so brutal and compelling that even the Monk could not stop—despite having to avert her eyes every five minutes or so because of bloody, bloody murder.

At the time, Battle Royal was probably closer to spec-fi but now I guess it'd be alt-history fiction since its futuristic horror takes place in the early two-thousand-aughts. Essentially, youth violence, degradation, and autonomy has risen to such a level that the adults are mad as hell and are just not going to take it anymore. So, like any reasonable society, they pass the BR Act, a piece of legislation that requires random classes of ninth graders to be shipped to specially created military camps. While at these camps, the students are given a bag containing a map and compass, some food and water, and a random weapon (anything from a sub machine gun to a pot lid). They are to use the resources at hand to... well, to kill every other student. If within three days there is not a single survivor remaining, the collars fastened to the necks of each survivor will be triggered to explode.

So yeah. Not the most forward thinking of governments.

In any case, despite the sillinesses of the film like the incredulity with which one would approach the idea of a BR Act, Battle Royale is just as I said at the beginning: ruthlessly compelling. Watching these kids deal with either the fact that their friends were murderers or that they themselves would soon be murderers was an arresting concept. The filmmakers give the viewer just enough backstory on a number of the participants to make their involvement and eventual grisly end all the more cinematically worthwhile. And when he confrontations begin, the level of tension does not ratchet down.

Despite flaws in story, script, and subtitling, Battle Royale was worth every moment I spent glued to its unfolding.

Trailer 1
Trailer 2

Rating:

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Book: Novel
Author: Haruki Murakami
Year: 1987
Pages: 304

Having read Kafka on the Shore, Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, After the Quake, and Sputnik Sweetheart, I decided it was high time I read the novel that really put Haruki Murakami on the Map of Superstardom. Norwegian Wood, by all accounts, was the work that made his later triumphs possible. Still, I approached the work guardedly, recognizing that popularity and quality rarely go with hands clasped in loving security.

In short, my fears were deftly allayed.

Norwegian Wood, while boasting none of that surreality that drew me so strongly to Murakami's later works, is still on all counts an excellent novel. It foreshadows the art that he would later hone in more incredible works but is not overwhelmed by its place as Prototype and stands stubbornly under its own worthy powers. The book is emotionally satisfying, wryly humourous, and carries enough of the psychological burden of true romance that I couldn't help but enjoy the journey.

As far as the story is concerned, Murakami pits a young, collegiate protagonist (Toru Watanabe) against a world made crazy by ill-founded idealism and the fascism that idealism nurtures. The world around him feeds on dreams and the need for rebellion—not worthy rebellion but only that typical rebellion that the young feel is necessary to young lives. Even in the midst of his cynicism toward the mindless abandon of his classmates, Watanabe finds himself abandoned to his desperate love for Naoko, the psychologically wounded girlfriend of his now-deceased best friend from high school. Even as he labours to support Naoko through her lengthy convalescence, writing her letters and occasionally visiting her remote community, Watanabe takes the edge off his pining by participating in two oddly similar friendships, both with fellow students of his particular university. These work to show him both who he wants to be and who he does not want to be.

I'm not certain if Norwegian Wood should be classified as romantic fiction, bildungsroman, or as something else. Certainly their are elements of the two well-mined genres, but I can't help feeling that the novel is perhaps something more worthwhile than either of the two classifications. In any case, I liked it well enough and it's normal enough to appeal to even those who aren't ready for Murakami's more curious work.

Rating:

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Book: Novel
Author: J.D. Salinger
Year: 1955
Pages: 208

I am the luckiest person in the world. The last few months have led me through an unbroken string of good books. I have had so much fun reading that I'm just in love with books right now.

And isn't that the way it should be?

In any case, Salinger's Franny and Zooey is the most recent in what I hope will be a continuing tradition of engaging, well-written stories. I have to admit I approached the work with some skepticism, having been wholly uninterested in Catcher in the Rye when it was forced upon me in high school (and now, I am looking forward to going back and reading Catcher).

It's really in the dialogue that Franny and Zooey shines. I found their discussions completely absorbing and their subject-matter intriguing. Even the correspondences represented in the work are fun and filled with the kind of silly banter that reminds me of my own letters to my wife before she was my wife.

As far as story goes, it really is pretty slight and primarily relies on four distinct conversations over the course of a few days in which Franny has a sort of spiritual nervous breakdown. I found the whole thing—the breakdown, the conversations, the conclusions—all to be uncomfortably believable in that I could easily imagine such a set of things occurring somewhere in real life.

To conclude, Franny and Zooey is a short book that can be swallowed at breakneck speeds. It would be worth seven times the amount of time I spent on it.

Rating:

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Book: Graphic Novel (10 vols.)
Author: Brian K. Vaughan
Artist: Pia Guerra
Year: 2002-2008
Pages: 1487

Imagine a world in which every creature possessing a Y chromosome has just died. In a single moment, the world's animal population has been reduced by roughly half. This is a world where most of the world's politicians, most of the world's scientists, most of the world's military, most of the world's pilots, most of the world's film-makers, and most of the world's businessmen are no longer with us. This is a world of chaos and desperation, a world trying to find its way in the cataclysm-wrought darkness.

And this is a world of nightmares and madness for Yorick Brown, the lone surviving man.

Y: The Last Man begins on July 17, 2002—about a half hour prior to the great extinction, and introduces Yorick, his pet monkey Ampersand (also male and also a unique survivor of the coming pandemic), and the beginning of a large cast of well-conceived female characters (for the curious, publisher Vertigo offers the first chapter in PDF). The second chapter picks up several weeks after the plague hit, revealing a world very much changed. Apart from those women who are simply scrambling to survive in and make sense of this new world, the new society-in-flux has given rise to numerous factions struggling with and abusing power. From the ultra-feminist Amazons who burned all the sperm banks to assure that the world would never again be plagued with men to those women who were involved in politics and the military prior to the fall of man, author Brian K. Vaughan presents a world that believably captures both the horror and hope of the human condition.

And all the while Yorick is racing from Boston to find his would-be fiancée Beth, who was participating in anthropological research in Australia when the plague hit.

It's a very slow race. The entire scope of the ten-volume series covers approximately five years and follows Yorick as he and his two companions Agent 355 (an American spy) and Dr. Allison Mann* (a bioengineer who hopes to clone Yorick to preserve the human race) as they traverse the globe (via foot, train, and boat) in search of Yorick's Beth. Because of their travels they experience enlightening episodes with Amazons, astronauts, agents, assassins, actors, antagonistas, androbots, atheists, angry Arizonans, and a whole mess of lesbians (both long-time and newly blossomed).

As far as speculative fiction goes, Y: The Last Man is really the creme de la creme, hitting all the right notes and being funny, grim, and mind-blowing for its duration. Vaughan has lessons to leave and pedagogy to forge, but he never gets preachy—and the moment he begins wading in that direction, his characters themselves seem to call him on the carpet for it. These are intelligent people and pretty well representative of the human race. While the book most overtly concerns Yorick and his quest, this is merely a framing device for an exploration of humanity itself (and to a lesser degree, women). Vaughan succeeds wholly in taking a genre concept that could have been been the basis for the typical male fulfillment fantasy and spinning into one of the most worthwhile fables of the last hundred years.

Y: The Last Man gets my highest recommendation.

Hm. As an epilogue, I suppose I should speak briefly about the art. Largely visually composed by Pia Guerra, the illustrations of the book sing in their subtly. This is not a book featuring dynamic duos or caped crusaders. It's about real people. And Guerra's line captures that about as well as any artist out there. So goo is her skill that I cannot imagine any other artist succeeding so well at capturing Vaughan's story, characters, and setting. Her talent is made more so obvious by the occasional instances of filler artists.

*note: Allison Mann is A. Mann, get it?

Rating:

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20080721

Wow, I was excited to see the Watchmen trailer as a bonus to my visit to the theater to see the actually very well done Dark Knight. It really helps me see how they could make a decent film out of what may be considered the best graphic novel of all time (at the very least, it was the only graphic novel to make TIME's All-Time Top 100 Novels).

In any case, the trailer seen probably a record-breaking number of times (since it was tied intimately to the record-breaking box office of the Bat) has had repercussions. Watchmen is currently the #2 best-selling book on Amazon. And #1 in Literature & Fiction. Apparently only being beaten out by a pre-order item, the fourth Twilight book.

And just to give you a little perspective, Watchmen was originally published across 1986 and '87.

I'm a moderate fan of the book, but I'm excited to see what they do with it in cinematic form and I'm happy to see the book continue to garner recognition over the span of its years.

p.s., for the curious, the Pumpkins song playing over the Watchmen trailer is a slow version of "The Beginning Is the End Is the Beginning," which was originally written for the lamentable Batman and Robin movie.

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EXCURSIS:
Today is the 8-year anniversary of this blog. I have nothing special planned. No retrospective. Nothing really. I don't even have a lot to say. So instead, here's a replay of my blogiversary celebration from Year Four.

Bon-ape!

20080718

Four reviews today.

• After the Quake (short stories) by Haruki Murakami
• When We Were Orphans (novel) by Kazuo Ishiguro
• The Unconsoled (novel) by Kazuo Ishiguro
• Wanted (graphic novel) by Mark Millar and JG Jones

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Book: Short Stories
Author: Haruki Murakami
Year: 2002
Pages: 192.

Okay yeah, so really on a Murakami kick here. As I write this I'm also in the opening throes of his Norwegian Wood. In any case, After the Quake did nothing to halt my appreciation for his work. Despite the fact that many of his themes are here regurgitated. It's true, the flow of love for Haruki Murakami continues unabated.

That's not to say that there aren't high and low points in the collection of short stories. In fact a couple of the stories are merely Good.

In any case, in the wake of the Kobe Earthquake and Sarin gas attacks in 1995 and drafting on the slipstream of the amazing Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Murakami penned each of the shorts in the volume as some sort of response to the titular disaster. Each story is written in the third person (an uncommon POV for Murakami) and deals with the lives and souls of characters in the days and months succeeding the destruction of the city.

The book's opener "UFO in Kushiro" offers up a vignette that belongs thematically right next to works like Wind-Up Bird and Sputnik Sweetheart. An empty man, a shell since before his wife left him, runs an errand that takes him to far away Hokkaido, where he may or may not just happen to run into his soul. Being familiar with Murakami by this point, the story felt comfortable and lived-in, but I have to imagine that it would be rather abrupt for first-time Murakami readers.

The second piece, "Landscape with Flatiron," presents another level of tension (as the first story leaves the reader perhaps slightly on edge) and continues to draw the reader into the hollow lives of people who seem to see just beyond the world we inhabit. "All God's Children Can Dance" was my least favourite of of the tales and features a a man deeply unsure of his place in the world, struggling with his own genetic fallacy, having been told that he was the Son of God from his youth and having a tremendous penis as his only evidence of this supposition. "Thailand" was enjoyable and follows a woman vacationing in Thailand around as she finds answers to spiritual questions she did not know she had.

Unquestionably my favourites in the collection are the final two offerings: "Super Frog Saves Tokyo" and "Honey Pie." The former opens with a bank employee coming home to find a man-sized frog waiting to speak with him about important matters—the prevention of imminent doom to the city of Tokyo. This was absolutely a joy to read. The latter is utterly pleasant and, in a way, in so doing defies expectations. Murakami is many things and his genius is sometimes unpredictable, but I was shocked by how... pleasant... this tale was.

When all is done, said, and forgotten, Murakami's book will still be about men and women in this cold world who are shaken from their stupor and confronted with the opportunity to fill their hollowed-out lives with that undetected mass that had been missing from them the entire time. The Kobe earthquake acts as a catalyst for each of them, forcing self-evaluation, even when it comes in forms that cannot be recognized as self-evaluation.

Awesome little book.

Rating:

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Book: Novel
Author: Kazuo Ishiguro
Year: 2000
Pages: 352.

When We Were Orphans was, for me, a pretty fascinating exploration of the difficulties typical to the lens of overgrown sentimentailty through which one approaches the vaguely remembered past. As the narration continues, one wonders just how ephemerally Christopher Banks, the narrator, holds his grasp on reality. Quite clearly his recollections of the distant past are modified to fit his circumstances and the man he's become—and paradoxically, the man he's become is a debt owed to these remembered (sometimes falsely so) experiences—but it may be more than that. It may be that the strength of his memories are so robust that they exert force upon even his more immediate experiences, colouring them to match the pallette of the world he's inherited from memoir.

Christopher Banks is (or becomes over the span of years from which he narrates) one of Britain's brightest and most celebrated detectives, solving murder after murder with apparently little trouble. The man is quite plainly a rational genius. He does, however, have a great single ambition that propels him through his life—one that even drove him to his successful occupation. Banks hopes to one day tackle the most daunting crime of his life. The kidnapping of his parents.

When Banks was a youth, living in the British Settlement in Shanghai just post the turn of the twentieth century, his parents were taken from him. As an adult, Banks intends to return to Shanghai, solves the disappearance, and even perhaps have his parents restored to him.

As an abstract exploration of the nature of both history and memory, When We Were Orphans is an entirely worthwhile investigation, but my favourite conceit of Ishiguro's here was something far less integral (perhaps) to the story's primary goal. Banks throughout the telling speaks of this case and that, a series of murders and mysteries in which he is engaged to solve. Each one is solved to the adulation of British society and to the forwarding of Banks' reputation as one who understand intrinsically the criminal mind. And yet. Not once are we treated to any explanation of the details of such crimes or their solutions. While Ishiguro keeps us at arm's length from such unseemly designs (for they are not among his purposes in this tale), he takes special care to continuously draw our attention to the fact of such crimes and cases, perhaps foreshadowing the fact that it is the effect of the circumstance rather than the solution that truly matters in the end.

Perhaps finding solutions to tragedies do nothing in the end to soften the brute fact of the tragedy?

Rating:

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Book: Novel
Author: Kazuo Ishiguro
Year: 1995
Pages: 544.

The Unconsoled is almost certainly not a work for everybody. Or even, perhaps, for many. Ishiguro has crafted what is a pretty thoroughly boring, deeply rewarding novel. What at first appears to be a simple series of encounters between a renowned pianist—Mr. Ryder to you—and the inhabitants of a European city turns out to be anything but. Ryder is ostensibly meant to play part in the concert performance that will bring the city back from the realm of the culturally inconsequential and into the forefront of important society's good graces, but time, space, people, and his own memory constantly threaten to prevent his preparation for the event.

And not in any normal fashion.

Very quickly it becomes apparent that the tale is not meant to be interpreted with any of that base linearity that we typical confront in reading novels. Here time is quite fluid, slowing or accelerating or simply bending as Ishiguro requires it. Locations and distances also seem to wax and wane at will, turning the cityscape into a literary expression of some of Escher's more impossible settings. Conversations that must take place out of earshot are recorded faithfully by Mr. Ryder's narration. People who should be strangers happen to be Mr. Ryder's close friends, acquaintances, and relations. Or perhaps closer.

The Unconsoled is a relentless and wearying task, but for me the experience of Ishiguro's intricate work here was well worth the frustration. I may have wished the novel was a hundred pages more terse, but I can't really fault Ishiguro for the lengths to which he took me for it was only in those last hundred pages that my understanding of what may truly be going with Mr. Ryder began to crystallize. Not wishing to unfairly colour anyone's reading, I will leave the detail of my interpretation for other climes.

Let it suffice to say that The Unconsoled is one of those rare books that actually demands interpretation.

Rating:

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Book: Graphic Novel
Author: Mark Millar (writing) and JG Jones (art)
Year: 2005
Pages: 192.

As an example of the internet's new favourite word, Bildungsroman, Millar's super-villain crime spree Wanted is pretty much tit-for-tat. We follow its mopey hero (loosest sense applies) as he, well, butches up—emigrating from the country of the pissed-upon and hopelessly downtrodden to the utopian society of the Real Men and the hopelessly hedonistic.

Wesley is a real downer of a character. Spineless, misanthropic, and racist. A veritable cocktail of a social disease. Throw in a soul-sucking job and a relationship with a serial adulteress (is it still adultery if you're not married?) and you don't get a character that you quite feel sorry for, but maybe one who you just hope you never meet in real life. (Is loser contagious?)

Then, one day, everything turns around for him. The dad he never knew dies and he inherits billions. And a legacy that will prove far more interesting to him than money. His dad was the Killer, the most dangerous super-villain in a world run-and-ruled by super-villains. And dad's abilities, apparently, are passed genetically. Wesley takes up dad's mantle and joins one of the five syndicates that rule the world from the shadows. While Wesley remains misanthropic and racist, he does stop being spineless.

And then things go to crap.

Many of the ideas have been visited before but Millar manages to craft an entertaining tale. The action is well-paced. As is the revelation of what the villains have done to the world. The dialogue mostly works—though the level of filth the reader must wade through reminds me of juniour high (ah, those were the days...). Perhaps Millar's only serious misstep occurs in the last couples pages (and most particularly on the final page), as Wesley gives the reader a big ol' eff ewe, and does so awkwardly. It was as if Millar really wanted to have fun sticking it to the reader, but couldn't figure out how to really get that to flow from the story. I didn't mind hearing what a loser I was from Wesley. It was like hearing the fat kid call the slightly out of shape kid, "Fatty." There were no teeth to it. The only real problem was that it didn't work in the context of the story.

Rating:

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