A filthy, fantastic and fitting continuation of a misanthropic classic.
Cartoonist and novelist Rowson revisits Jonathan Swift’s classic caustic exploration of human nature in this visceral, contemporary graphic-novel sequel.
Some 300 years after his ancestor first encountered a series of bizarre cultures strewn across the seas, a new Gulliver begins his own travels. Rowson (The Wasteland, 2012, etc.) situates his adaptation squarely in the present, tracking in from a celestial event, through a sky littered with satellites and contrails, to the silhouette of our hero—who holds a degree in “Socio-Anthropological Epidemiology” and a senior post at the “Secretariat of the World Institute of Forensic Therapy”—wading through surprisingly shallow waters. While this Gulliver is only vaguely aware of his ancestor (our hero was tellingly shanghaied during “a Global Forum on Trepanation and Kinship Autotomy”), he soon regrets not paying more attention to the “fantastickal stories” told to him by his aging father when he wakes in the custody of an exceptionally tiny people who mistake him for his forebear. Eventually retracing his ancestor’s path, from Lilliput to the country of the Houyhnhnms and all stops in between, this Gulliver learns that the original Gulliver’s influence on those he encountered has not always proved to be positive. The new Lilliput presents itself as a nigh-utopian consumer society, though the source of its prosperity is puzzling and its citizenry hide behind ubiquitous smiley-face masks. During a rousing speech about Lilliput’s boundless progress, Rowson undercuts the propaganda with an image of riot police violently suppressing the grinning populace while everyone else goes shopping. Gulliver himself faces extraordinary rendition and deportation during his increasingly desperate and scatological journey. (Excreta is essentially a character in the story.) Rowson gleefully plays with language, particularly in the impenetrable pomposity of Gulliver’s guides and the blatherskites of Brobdignag, which hilariously reveals itself when read aloud. The fastidiously crosshatched ink illustrations—part Ralph Steadman, part Heironymous Bosch—match the soiled material wonderfully, buzzing with decrepitude and madness. One suspects that Swift would approve.
A filthy, fantastic and fitting continuation of a misanthropic classic.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-78239-008-4
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Atlantic/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: Nov. 16, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
A gorgeous symphony.
Illustrator McGuire (What’s Wrong With This Book, 1997, etc.) once again frames a fixed space across the millennia.
McGuire’s original treatment of the concept—published in 1989 in Raw magazine as six packed pages—here gives way to a graphic novel’s worth of two-page spreads, and the work soars in the enlarged space. Pages unspool like a player-piano roll, each spread filled by a particular time, while inset, ever shifting panels cut windows to other eras, everything effervescing with staggered, interrelated vignettes and arresting images. Researchers looking for Native American artifacts in 1986 pay a visit to the house that sprouts up in 1907, where a 1609 Native American couple flirtatiously recalls the legend of a local insatiable monster, while across the room, an attendee of a 1975 costume party shuffles in their direction, dressed as a bear with arms outstretched. A 1996 fire hose gushes into a 1934 floral bouquet, its shape echoed by a billowing sheet on the following page, in 2015. There’s a hint of Terrence Malick’s beautiful malevolence as panels of nature—a wolf in 1430 clenching its prey’s bloody haunch; the sun-dappled shallows of 2113’s new sea—haunt scenes of domesticity. McGuire also plays with the very concept of panels: a boy flaunts a toy drum in small panels of 1959 while a woman in 1973 sets up a projection screen (a panel in its own right) that ultimately displays the same drummer boy from a new angle; in 2050, a pair of old men play with a set of holographic panels arranged not unlike the pages of the book itself and find a gateway to the past. Later spreads flash with terrible and ancient supremacy, impending cataclysm, and distant, verdant renaissance, then slow to inevitable, irresistible conclusion. The muted colors and soft pencils further blur individual moments into a rich, eons-spanning whole.
A gorgeous symphony.Pub Date: Dec. 9, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-375-40650-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
A not-very-illuminating updating of Chaucer’s Tales.
Continuing his apparent mission to refract the whole of English culture and history through his personal lens, Ackroyd (Thames: The Biography, 2008, etc.) offers an all-prose rendering of Chaucer’s mixed-media masterpiece.
While Burton Raffel’s modern English version of The Canterbury Tales (2008) was unabridged, Ackroyd omits both “The Tale of Melibee” and “The Parson’s Tale” on the undoubtedly correct assumption that these “standard narratives of pious exposition” hold little interest for contemporary readers. Dialing down the piety, the author dials up the raunch, freely tossing about the F-bomb and Anglo-Saxon words for various body parts that Chaucer prudently described in Latin. Since “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” and “The Miller’s Tale,” for example, are both decidedly earthy in Middle English, the interpolated obscenities seem unnecessary as well as jarringly anachronistic. And it’s anyone’s guess why Ackroyd feels obliged redundantly to include the original titles (“Here bigynneth the Squieres Tales,” etc.) directly underneath the new ones (“The Squires Tale,” etc.); these one-line blasts of antique spelling and diction remind us what we’re missing without adding anything in the way of comprehension. The author’s other peculiar choice is to occasionally interject first-person comments by the narrator where none exist in the original, such as, “He asked me about myself then—where I had come from, where I had been—but I quickly turned the conversation to another course.” There seems to be no reason for these arbitrary elaborations, which muffle the impact of those rare times in the original when Chaucer directly addresses the reader. Such quibbles would perhaps be unfair if Ackroyd were retelling some obscure gem of Old English, but they loom larger with Chaucer because there are many modern versions of The Canterbury Tales. Raffel’s rendering captured a lot more of the poetry, while doing as good a job as Ackroyd with the vigorous prose.
A not-very-illuminating updating of Chaucer’s Tales.Pub Date: Nov. 16, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-670-02122-2
Page Count: 436
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2009
PERSPECTIVES
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