February 2014 – Aunty Muriel's Blog

Posted on February 17, 2014October 17, 2016 by Aunty Muriel · 3 Comments

My Top Five Favourite Comic Books, an Outsider: ‘Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes’ by Mary and Bryan Talbot

Today has been a rotten day, to be honest. When the metaphorical whistle blew on my day job, I waded across the sludgy campus to spend the afternoon in the library, where long-suffering library users like me who actually want to Do Some Work huddle hopelessly in the silent study rooms on level five, desperately wishing that other less considerate library users could at least make some effort to grasp the idea of silent study. ‘Silent’ means ‘shut up’. Whispered conversations are not okay, because we can all hear you, and if two people are whispering in an otherwise silent room, it’s very distracting. Shut. Up. No giggling, no whispering, no eating crisps or other noisy and/or smelly snacks, no noisy breathing, no listening to some ghastly whining female vocalist at full volume on your iNoisyToy, and if you must type rather than use a pen, please try to Do It Quietly. No need to hammer at the keyboard. You’re not using an Underwood.

The loud stage-whispered conversations in the library this afternoon would not be swayed by any amount of shushing from myself, so I moved to the other ‘silent’ study room where unfortunately everyone seemed to be suffering from pleurisy. At this point I gave up and came home, and now I’m in the mood to be spiteful so it’s the perfect time to write a blog post about this book which, quite frankly, was never going to make it into the magical Top Five.

To be fair, I should make it clear at the outset that, as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I’m not much of a one for biography. It’s just not my cup of tea. I simply find it rather dull, and biography in graphic novel form is for some reason even more dull. It just seems to go nowhere. David B’s Epileptic is a valuable exception, but Harvey Pekar’s The Quitter bored me rigid. Anyhoo, there was a bit of a to-do about Dotter because it was shortlisted for the 2012 Costa Biography Award, so I thought I’d give it a whirl. In a nutshell, Dotter is written by husband and wife team Mary and Bryan Talbot: she did the words, he did the pictures. The book tells of two dysfunctional father-daughter relationships: the story of the author Mary and her ‘cold mad feary father’, an eminent Joycean scholar, is told alongside that of Lucia Joyce, daughter of the famous James, whose promising career as a dancer is cut tragically short, with her parents being in no small way to blame for this.

At first it seemed as if all my preconceptions and worst imaginings concerning graphic biographies were going to be confirmed. The first 25 pages of Dotter are pretty awful: the exposition necessary to orientate the reader is, on the whole, clumsily executed, but I quite like the ‘typed’ narrative voice – it has an appropriate kind of nineteen-fifties feel to it. However, I hate the wifely interjections: ‘NB: My mother wouldn’t have been seen dead in a frilly apron’, and again on page 18, ‘NB: Bryan’s wrong again. In my school boys were seated on one side of the classroom, the girls on the other’. Well, why didn’t you tell Bryan this before the book went to press, Mary? You’re married, aren’t you? I assume this means you live in the same house and spend a fair bit of time together, so you could have told him, couldn’t you, instead of inflicting this rubbish on us? And if the cutesey interjections aren’t bad enough, the clunky dialogue on page 15 is just excruciating:

(Scene: university canteen)

MARY: Yeah, well, when I discovered Joyce had a daughter, I was curious. My parents were named Nora and Jim too!

RANDOM COLLEAGUE 1: No way!

RANDOM COLLEAGUE 2: So you’re finding parallels?

MARY: I bloody hope not! She spent most of her life in mental institutions.

RANDOM COLLEAGUE 2: Just like this place, then!

RANDOM COLLEAGUE 1: And you fit in so well!

Please, by all the gods, spare me. Spare me from other people’s wackiness.

The book takes off though, once Lucia’s narrative begins. Three different colour schemes help keep the reader grounded: full colour for the present day, sepia for Mary’s childhood, and muted blues for Lucia’s story, which, chronologically-speaking, is the oldest narrative; so we move therefore from a sort of black and white into sepia and finally into full colour, as if looking at a century’s worth of old photographs. Splashes of colour dribble into the sepia colour-scheme, and these splashes become increasingly dominant as Mary and Bryan’s history begins to catch up with the present time. This method of selective colouring is also employed to achieve other, striking effects: for example, the streaks of red blood following the birth of Mary and Bryan’s first son are foregrounded against the still predominantly sepia background.

The two storylines share similar themes of parental abuse and neglect, but it seems to me self-indulgent to parallel Mary Talbot’s sufferings with those of Lucia Joyce. After all, Mary had raised two children and gained a PhD by the time she was thirty and it is difficult to believe this would have been possible without some measure of parental support. Poor Lucia Joyce had made a promising beginning as a dancer, but was denied every opportunity to further this career and was eventually committed to a mental institution by her own brother after a nasty fight with her appallingly vicious mother. In the parallel narrative, Mary Talbot’s father seems to have been a nasty piece of work in some respects, yes, but Mary isn’t seen to end her days in the loony bin.

In fact, I think on the whole I’d have preferred to read the biography of Lucia that we see Mary reading at the beginning of Dotter.

Just two more points before I wrap this one up. The artwork is lovely and I’ve always liked Bryan Talbot’s stuff – his style is clear and clean, but astonishingly expressive nonetheless. He’s also the author of another very successful comic book, Alice in Sunderland. Finally, it’s interesting to compare the depiction of riot scenes caused by the Paris debut of George Antheil with the rendering of the same scenes in Catel & Bocquet’s Kiki de Montparnasse. Yes, I know the latter is biography and I’m not supposed to like it, but it’s also a rollicking story with boobs, bums and plenty of dancing and drinking, so it’s alright with me.

Posted on February 16, 2014May 24, 2014 by Aunty Muriel

My Top Five Favourite Comic Books, an Also-Ran: Joff Winterhart’s ‘Days of the Bagnold Summer’

Fifteen-year-old Daniel’s trip to Florida to visit his absent father and the stepmother who ‘would rather be seen as a friend’ is cancelled owing to the latter’s advanced pregnancy, and as a result Daniel and his mum Sue face a long six weeks together over the school summer holidays. Days of the Bagnold Summer is a narrative structured by the weeks of that summer, one week per chapter. Each page features a subtitle or heading which provides a theme for the panels to follow, some themes more abstract than others, and the drawings are mostly of human figures executed in a pencil and ink wash. A narrator is ever-present in the often lengthy captions, providing the reader with an omniscient insight into the minds of mother and son as the long weeks pass slowly by.

The six-week block of time that is the Bagnold summer is framed by a forthcoming wedding and the need to buy Daniel some black shoes to look smart for it. The story opens with yet another failed shopping expedition and ends with Sue and Daniel walking into the distance, growing smaller and smaller inside successive frames as they make their way towards the wedding venue. Daniel wears black trainers instead of shoes, having finally worn Sue down.

As far as the actual story goes, that’s pretty much it. But any idea of ‘plot’ is, of course, beside the point. The focus of Winterhart’s narrative is the relationship between Daniel and Sue, the relentless tedium of the summer holidays when one is young, how dreadful it is to be a teenager and how difficult to be the single parent of a teenager. Winterhart’s achievement is to generate an equal amount of sympathy in the reader for both Sue and Daniel without tipping over into sentimentality; even the repulsive Ky, Daniel’s bullying best friend, is temporarily the object of the reader’s pity when he responds badly to Daniel’s having been accepted into a local band. Ky is momentarily wrong-footed and we get a glimpse of his fragility in his short-lived ‘muted reaction’.

Sue battles to understand her teenage son and tries to establish a connection with him by mentally recreating her own teenage years. She remembers those years as ‘an incredibly difficult and lonely time’. Daniel himself is a typical fifteen-year-old boy: he listens to heavy metal and fantasises about being the lead singer in a metal band; he enjoys drawing, but his taste is limited to pictures of axes, corpses and skulls. He is revolting in the way that teenage boys are: he is scruffy, he never washes his hair, he drinks barbecue sauce straight from the bottle when Sue isn’t around. He is also inconsiderate and lazy, but only in an average-teenager kind of way and the reader knows that Daniel will improve with age. And Daniel’s thoughtless selfishness is matched by Sue’s ability to come up with excruciatingly embarrassing comments (‘Aftershave…make you smell a bit sexy for the girls’). The relationship between mother and son at this most difficult time of Daniel’s development is characterised by a tension which increases until it explodes into the inevitable row – pretty normal teenager-parent stuff. The most touching moments in the narrative are those infrequent times when Sue and Daniel actively understand each other, such as when Sue describes Ky’s mother as being a bit ‘much’, to which Daniel responds positively, actually looking at his mother for once and agreeing with a little smile and a ‘Yeah’.

Parallels between mother and son are drawn throughout – a disinclination to wear anything other than a black hoodie or a shapeless sweater, a desire to be admired as a musician, an innate inability to join in, a bully for a best friend – and the reader is left with a keen awareness of inherited traits travelling down through generations. Family history is invoked through the use of photographs and other memorabilia. Absent fathers provide another point of connection between the various characters: Sue’s father was a GI who left his wife and daughter to return to the country of his birth; Daniel’s father left his mother to set up home with another in the US; Ky’s likeable but flaky mother, like Sue, is struggling to bring up a teenage son on her own.

A gentle humour pervades the book which relieves the sadness of it and Winterhart almost never allows the narrative to become mawkish: the only false note is the overly-melodramatic story of Sue’s short-lived relationship with a strange, troubled boy when she herself was Daniel’s age. This implausible episode in Sue’s past of armed robbery and subsequent suicide feels out of place in an otherwise humdrum event-free world. Nevertheless, I like this book very much. And with every re-reading, it never fails to make me extremely glad that my teenage years are now a long, long way behind me.

Posted on February 9, 2014May 24, 2014 by Aunty Muriel · 1 Comment

My Top Five Favourite Comic Books, an Also-Ran: Stephen Collins’ ‘The Gigantic Beard That Was Evil’

Warning: spoilers!

Before I begin, allow me to say how much I love Stephen Collins’ work. Every week I cut out his comic strip from the Saturday Guardian magazine and glue it into my notebook. Many’s the happy hour I’ve passed in the library re-reading old comic strips instead of making notes on yet another article about Spark’s manipulation of narrative time in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, and here I am now, writing a blog post about Collins’ first graphic novel instead of sifting through aborted PhD chapter drafts to weed out the useable bits. May I also point out as a preliminary observation that as a title, The Gigantic Beard That Was Evil takes some beating, it really does. For me, this title encapsulates Collins’ work in a very neat way: a superficially childish locution which hides a deeper profundity…and is very amusing at the same time.

Not that there’s much to laugh at in TGBTWE. It’s actually a very sad story, beautifully drawn and multi-layered: I’m not at all sure that I’ve yet plumbed its depths and fathomed all its meanings. The story takes place on the island of Here, which is neat, tidy and soulless. The people who live on Here are also neat, tidy and soulless: they spend much of their time transfixed by the screens of their phones. Everything is homogenised as far as possible and everything is in its place. The daily routine continues unchanged day after day. The weather forecast is the same every day. People go to work every day, but they don’t really know what they’re doing or what their job is. However, this seems to be the way they like it.

Beyond the sea, however, lies There, a place of disorder and chaos. And There breaks into Here through Dave, our enormously likeable hero. Dave is not quite the same as the other inhabitants of Here because although he loves his quiet, orderly life, he doesn’t sit in front of the telly every evening as the others do: he sits in his front room and draws what he can see in the street. But Dave the artist becomes a conduit for evil when There invades Here in the form of an enormous beard which grows out of Dave’s face in the space of a few frames and resists all attempts to be shorn.

The moment a break in the routine pattern of repetition is established is the moment a narrative is formed. The remainder of Collins’ book relates the phenomenal and inexorable growth of the beard and how finally the beard – and Dave – are dealt with, all to the backdrop of The Bangles’ Eternal Flame, which Dave listens to over and over. The scary story of what happened to the fisherman’s son who sought to know What Was Over There functions as a standard literary device to provide a pre-echo and perhaps an indication of Dave’s fate, but on the other hand, perhaps the same fate did not befall Dave, because his drawings keep coming. Collins collapses the narrative levels here between author/narrator/characters: Dave’s drawings are identical to the author’s own and Professor Black’s final book is not intended for publication, but it’s clear that TGBTWE is that book. Dave’s departure leaves its traces. The world of Here is changed forever, and I’m left wondering whether There is so terrible after all. Perhaps the beard came to Here to encourage its inhabitants to embrace change and to face their fear of difference.

Collins is a satirist, after all, and like my very own Muriel Spark, he uses humour and satire as an effective means of attack. The Daily Mail is vilified in this graphic novel and elsewhere in Collins’ work as a rag for the mindless, a pernicious publication for those who want someone else to do the thinking for them. Its fictional counterpart The Here Mail’s hatred for and suspicion of all things that come from over There will be recognisable to all as characteristic of our very own hate-filled red top. Collins is also an eager parodist of consumer culture: his Exit Ian strip shows a dead man shopping for memorabilia of his own life in a heavenly gift shop before he is allowed to move on, complete with souvenir baseball cap. (You can visit Collins’ website here. Look down the left-hand side for separate links to the Guardian strips.) Once Dave has been removed, his house is turned into a museum and visitors’ centre, and the merchandise for sale invokes an unbearable melancholy while at the same time we can raise a wry smile at the familiarity of the scene.

Worthy of note is Collins’ use of the gutter, or the space between the frames. What may be lurking in the blank space which separates the images ties in with the thematic concern of TGBTWE, and Collins exploits this idea in the placing of captions and the fragmentation of the images. The gutter is also essential to the timing of comic book narratives, and in the image below we can see Collins using the gutter as a kind of film strip, both in external appearance and in its relation to narrative pace: each successive frame reveals the extent to which Dave’s beard has grown since the previous frame, so the reader is left in no doubt that the beard grows in a matter of seconds.

TGBTWE has much in common with utopian narratives: a seemingly perfect world is actually a hideous nightmarish dystopia, because the humanity has been wrenched out of it. In Huxley’s Brave New World the people are controlled by sex and the happy-feel-good drug soma; in Orwell’s 1984 people are controlled by terror and lies. In TGBTWE the people have become like the robots in the last of the Wright/Pegg/Frost Cornetto Trilogy, The World’s End. As is usually the case in utopian fiction, there is no room for art or artistic expression. Dave, the man who liked to spend his evenings with his pencils and his sketchpad, is the artist for whom there is no place in Here, the man who asked what it was that his company actually did (and didn’t get an answer), the man who suspects that the reason for the apparently meaningless routine is fear. The invasion of Here takes the form of a beard in a world of clean-shaven men and Dave always had that small, tough hair that would not be plucked, razored or waxed.

Why isn’t this wonderful book in my Top Five? I wish it could be, I really do, but I thought I was pushing it by lumping Tintin and Asterix together at #2. If I’d put this together with Gemma Bovery as I wanted to, then I would have been giving myself carte blanche to include as many books as I liked in the Top Five, and that’s cheating. So I’m afraid TGBTWE has to remain outside the Top Five as an also-ran, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t beg, borrow or steal your own copy right away. You could even buy one. Make sure you have a box of tissues nearby when you read it, however, because it’ll make you a bit weepy. Happy reading!

Posted on February 3, 2014May 31, 2019 by Aunty Muriel · 3 Comments

I Had That Sherlock Holmes In The Back of My Cab The Other Day

I’ve been living with my DVDs of the recent TV series of Sherlock (Gatiss and Moffat) for almost two weeks now and it’s got to the stage where I just have to write a blog post in order to clear my mind. As things stand at present, I cannot focus on anything except this new obsession of mine and I haven’t had a decent night’s sleep since watching the first episode (too excited to sleep!). Once this blog post is done, perhaps I’ll be able to get down to rewriting my chapter on the repetition in Muriel Spark’s use of prolepsis which has to be submitted in about six weeks’ time…I hope so, anyway. Otherwise I’ll end up frantically searching for a way to haul my conkers out of the fire. Again.

So, let’s begin by stating the obvious: in creating a series based on Sherlock Holmes, Gatiss and Moffat were dealing with a character already familiar to many: the super-sleuth of Baker Street, a violin-playing, drug-abusing loner, isolated by his intellect, but (marginally) humanised through his contact with Dr John Watson. Watson is the I-narrator and focaliser of the original Conan Doyle stories: he is the medium through which we observe events unfolding, and we watch Holmes solve the crimes through Watson’s eyes. Watson’s narratives are, of course, translated into a blog for the twenty-first century and the contemporary setting has necessitated other changes: Holmes and Watson refer to each other by their first names – there’s no ‘Elementary, my dear Watson’ (although I’m not entirely sure Conan Doyle’s Holmes ever said that anyway – I’m afraid I’m in a position of relative ignorance as far as the original stories are concerned), and obviously the technology is different – twenty-first century Sherlock uses a smartphone to access the information he needs. Sherlock’s brilliance is explained in twenty-first century terms – he describes himself as a high-functioning sociopath with a hard drive for a mind and John Watson makes reference to Asperger’s Syndrome in the Hound of the Baskervilles episode. But what is interesting is the extent to which the new Sherlock is still Conan Doyle’s Holmes: the way he talks, the way he dresses, the appearance of his flat at 221B Baker Street, and the fact that he almost always travels by taxicab. I was pleased that the villain in the first episode was a taxi driver, because taxis are important in this series (hence my title). So, the coat and scarf, the habit of talking in paragraphs or at least perfectly-formed sentences, the dated decor of the flat and the ubiquitous taxis, together create a distinctly nineteenth-century atmosphere. He is Sherlock Holmes still.

As far as the TV series is concerned, John Watson is not our only narrator. The camera closely directs and controls our view of proceedings, and in addition to this, many scenes are complemented by the appearance of words or symbols actually in the frame, appearing next to or on the characters: we see the wording of texts and other written messages, or signs either linguistic or pictorial that reveal a little to us of Sherlock’s thought processes. All this is easy for a twenty-first century audience to assimilate, of course: thanks to the internet, we are used to reading words and images together and I’m guessing most viewers would take the appearance of words onscreen on board without batting an eyelid, especially those well-versed in comic books. It’s only a form of caption, after all. The fact that we can see, for example, the words ‘Number blocked’ in the frame when Sherlock receives a phone call negates the necessity for a verbal explanation or a close-up of the mobile phone in question. The close-ups we do get are, for the most part, of the almost impossibly beautiful Benedict Cumberbatch as Sherlock, which is ironic, because of course we are not close to this character and never will be. We watch him work as he unravels the latest mystery: he looks directly at us so that we take the place of the object he is gazing at, but in spite of this physical proximity, we are kept at a distance by Sherlock’s personality: by his genius and by his inability to relate to other human beings, his failure to understand, for example, why a woman should still mourn her still-born daughter of fourteen years ago. He is apart from us. In fact, as far as he’s concerned, we may as well be the corpse he is studying so closely. It’s very noticeable that in the odd moments here and there when Sherlock pretends to be ‘normal’ in order to get someone to do what he wants or to draw them out in some way, the effect is jarring and just a little bit scary.

And our camera-narrator works hard to emphasise this distance between him and us in another way, almost an opposite way: Sherlock is put behind glass for us, as if the roles have been reversed and he is the specimen we are to study. There is a proliferation of scenes in which we see Sherlock through windows, reflected in mirrors or in his magnifying glass, in reversed images viewed in the rear view mirror from the point of view of yet another taxi driver…once you become aware of it, it’s astonishing how many times some kind of glass frame falls between the viewer and Sherlock, particularly in the episode entitled The Great Game. Other blockages and obstacles obscure the audience’s view: scenes featuring a single light source are wreathed in shadows and the characters seen in silhouette as a result; often an object in the foreground is blurry and the viewer is forced to focus instead on what lies behind the object; physical objects obscure the full picture and the viewer is left looking at a blind spot; characters shift in and out of focus so the viewer’s concentration is directed at the character who can be clearly seen. Even the scene changes are very often marked by something moving across the screen and temporarily obscuring what we can see. In this way, our view is closely directed and manipulated, as I said earlier, all of which is very fitting for the detective-story genre, when all is opaque until the detective can reveal what happened and why. And the why and the who and the how is finally revealed in the kind of analeptic narrative sequence much-beloved of the genre in which we see what we have seen before, but Sherlock’s voiced-over narrative directs us to view events in a different light.

The shiftiness of the narrative doesn’t even end there: in the credits for The Great Game, James Moriarty is listed simply as ‘Jim’, recalling his brief stint as Jim from IT, but we know who he is by now so why not list him as Moriarty? And am I right in thinking that Mycroft Holmes is never listed at all? If so, this is a nice touch – a gesture towards verisimilitude – we’re not allowed to know who Mycroft really is because he occupies a position of some importance and it all has to be kept very, very secret. Nice. I like it. Trying to make us think that the fiction is a reality – good! It’s all gone a bit meta– now, and that’s the way I like my fiction. Yes, Series 1 and 2 are pitch-perfect.

But what the hell happened in Series 3? The show went from Best Telly Ever to slap-in-the-face let-down. What had been a winning formula was overturned in favour of a dumbed-down version, with the intention of selling the show to a bigger audience, perhaps, but at the risk of alienating the existing body of fans. My DVD arrived complete with a flyer trying to sell me Sherlock-related merchandise, and three episodes later I felt the characters had been turned into marketable versions of their former selves. This was not the same show. These were not the same characters. I can’t fault the performances – the hugely talented cast are all working with the script that’s put in front of them, after all – but the writing was just awful: it was disrespectful to the characters, to the relationships that had been established between them, and worst of all, to the faithful audience. The end of Series 2 was incredibly powerful: an hour and a half of emotional intensity, which left me with the most appalling headache. The crying certainly didn’t help. No one is going to outdo me on grief here – the sight of poor smashed Sherlock on the pavement with blood all over his lovely face, and John Watson desperately trying to reach his friend – well, I had my knuckles in my mouth to stop me from screaming. By the time it got to John Watson’s graveside eulogy for his lost friend (‘please stop this, please don’t be dead’), I was blowing snot bubbles in between racking sobs.

…And what do I get in the first episode of Series 3? Silly slapstick in restaurants. Sherlock pretending that he and John are about to be blown to smithereens and then laughing at the expression on John’s face. A show that had fallen in love with its own cleverness and was attempting to emulate the parodic self-referentiality that so many US shows do so well: much of the humour of Buffy, for example, lies in the show’s ability to poke fun at itself and parody various genres within its own framework. But that’s not going to work with Sherlock, I’m afraid. We don’t want jokey fun Sherlock. We liked the sociopath. We don’t want a Sherlock who seduces women (Janine) in order to gain access to their bosses – he’s not James Bond, he’s Sherlock. I loved the disregard for gender that featured so strongly in the first two series: John’s sister is gay, Irene Adler tells us she is gay but she still fancies Sherlock, Sherlock might be gay but is fascinated by Irene Adler, etc. – it’s all people being attracted to other people regardless of genitalia, and this set-up is infinitely preferable to the repulsive James Bond-type scenario.

As you may have guessed by now, in spite of my horror at the travesty that is Series 3, I am utterly and irredeemably Sherlocked. But I won’t be buying the T-shirt. Please, Gatiss and Moffat, please bring back Sociopath Sherlock, the one we really loved. Otherwise he truly is dead.