Is This Guy For Real? by Box Brown

Non-fiction comics are a lot more common, this past decade or two, then they were earlier - usually book-format, roughly divided into memoirs (my life!) and biographies and histories (this other guy's life! or this other thing!). I tend to think they've taken over a few existing niches in the publishing ecosystem, especially the kind of  vaguely interesting book that was the basis for thousands of middle-grade book reports.

I don't think Box Brown entirely works in that mode; his books are pitched at a slightly older crowd. But I think his career has come along with that wave - maybe sometimes helping, maybe sometimes being tossed by a market moving in a slightly different direction.

Is This Guy for Real? was his new book in 2018, subtitled The Unbelievable Andy Kaufman and being a comics-format biography of the titular weirdo comedian. But, more centrally, it was Brown's second book about a pro-wrestling figure (after Andre the Giant) - he's most interested in Kaufman's touring show where he wrestled women, with his feud with Jerry Lawler, and, more generally, how being a wrestling fan and later a wrestling performer formed his style of comedy and performance.

As a book, it's sometimes a meditation on "kayfabe"  - about not breaking character, about the side of comedy that hates corpsing and needs everything to be real, every second, to sell the gag from beginning to end. Kayfabe, for those who don't know, is a wrestling term that comes from a Pig Latin-esque mangling of "be fake," and refers to always maintaining the cover story: that wrestling is real, that the stories are not made up, that the performers really do hate each other, that everything the fan sees is just as competitive and definitive as any other sport.

That is not true of pro wrestling, of course. And the secret of kayfabe is widely understood now - but it was still secret in the '60s and '70s, when a young Kaufman first watched wrestling as a spectator, and into the '80s, when he participated in that world and the first cracks in the public display of kayfabe started happening.

Brown tells this story in order, as usual - he's a thoughtful interesting cartoonist, but he always seems to tell his stories in a straightforward way, with crisp cartoony art and narrative consistency. He starts with a young Kaufman, and his love of wrestling and Elvis and cartoons - and then continues those themes, showing how Kaufman kept those things central in his early comedy act.

Taxi is mentioned, but Brown doesn't give us much about that work - and mostly skims over the rest of Kaufman's acting career. The focus is on wrestling - Lawler is the character who gets the second-most page time, given his own sections to show the growth of his career and presented explicitly as parallel with Kaufman.

It's a perfectly reasonable take for a Kaufman bio, but it did make me think: there could be multiple plausible takes on a Kaufman bio, which seems unusual for a guy who died of lung cancer at thirty-five. I could see other creators doing a Taxi-oriented book, or one centered on his talk-show appearances (especially Letterman), or his comedy act. Kaufman was weird and particular, and his deal was that he never broke character during a bit - and that can be brought out in various ways.

But that's exactly what kayfabe is, so Brown's choice is inspired. It explains Kaufman in a way that another direction wouldn't have, and shows him in the world where his style and madcap crazy act worked the best, the places where he could be the most purely Andy Kaufman.

I can wish Brown had more space to get into the rest of Kaufman's work, but I think I agree with Brown: this is most important. This is what you need to know to "get" Andy Kaufman. It's a great bio of a really weird, hard-to-understand figure, that provides not just insight, but understanding and sympathy for what he was trying to do and the ways he felt he had to do it.

Portions for Foxes: Those Darlins

"Portions for Foxes" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song by a woman or a band led by a woman. See the introduction for more.

This week, something fun and zippy and happy for a change: Red Light Love by Those Darlins, a country-tinged rock song from 2009 that was later used in a car commercial.

There's some winking going on here, and each listener gets to decide for herself just how far this particular Red Light Love is going.

Red light love
Makes my heart stop
Drives me so crazy
I can’t even walk

On the surface, it's just about driving around aimlessly, having fun with someone you love and not being worried about anything in the world.

We don’t worry about getting lost because he knows his way around

Singer Jessi Zazu sings that with a smirk and a subtle emphasis at the end, just in case you thought this song was entirely serious and straightforward. 

This is a purely happy, peppy song that makes you want to jump into a car and drive away aimlessly with that special someone to make some Red Light Love of your own. Go for it.

Quote of the Week: Is It About a Bicycle?

'You told me what the first rule of wisdom is,' I said. 'What is the second rule?'

'That can be answered,' he said. 'There are five in all. Always ask any questions that are to be asked and never answer any. Turn everything you hear to your own advantage. Always carry a repair outfit. Take left turns as much as possible. Never apply your front brake first.'

 - Flann O'Brien, The Third Policeman, p.272-273 in The Complete Novels

The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien

The mill of time grinds everything, but it doesn't grind equally. You might think that a more-or-less conventional metafictional guy-writing-a-novel book would date more gracefully than a bizarre unexplained fantasia that eventually comes into focus as an afterlife fantasy. You might think that especially when the first was mildly successful for the author on its publication, and the second, despite his best efforts, was not published until the year after his death.

You might think that. But, in this case, the conventional wisdom is against you, and you would actually be wrong.

"Flann O'Brien" was one of a number of pseudonyms - I gather vaguely transparent, at least to the literary establishment he was part of - used by Dublin writer Brian O'Nolan for a little more than a quarter of a century, starting just before WWII. O'Brien was the novelist; "Myles na gCopaleen" wrote a daily slice-of-life column for the Irish Times; O'Nolan in his regular life was a civil servant. I'll just use the O'Brien name from here on for simplicity.

O'Brien's work, in newspapers and novels and plays, seems to have always been mildly satirical - he first gained fame by shoving his way into a literary feud in a "let's you and him fight" way that seems very characteristic. I think he had the born newspaperman's love for celebrating "regular people" and of lampooning the powers of the day, wedded to a fairly radical sense of what writing could be and do. The two novels of his I've read are both the kind of thing that could be called "experimental," even eighty years later.

I'm no expert on the period and the milieu, but I think I see a tension between a generally conservative moral outlook and view of the world - it was Dublin in the mid-20th century, which was a pretty conservative place to begin with - and a more radical impulse in creating stories.

So O'Brien's first novel was At-Swim-Two-Birds, a metafiction about a novelist writing a novel about a (radical, modern) novelist whose characters revolt at all of the horrible things they are made to do and take over Novel #2, while the top-level Novel #1 is mostly about the main character not writing. It's been called one of the funniest ever written, but - and this is the part I'd emphasize - primarily by men from Dublin who lived roughly contemporaneously to O'Brien. It is still funny, but it's also deeply obscure to those born and raised elsewhere and elsewhen.

O'Brien's second novel, finished in 1940 but not published until 1967, after he died on the previous April Fool's Day, is the even weirder The Third Policeman. It's narrated in the first person, by a man just as nameless as Swim's narrator (though they couldn't be the same person). It was also meant to be funny, and I found - perhaps because it was so odd and quirky and of-itself to begin with - it's still funny in the same ways, even for radically different audiences. It starts out in crime-fiction mode, with the narrator explaining admitting that he murdered the miser Philip Mathers, but first wanting to explain his life up to that point.

He was the son of a farmer and a tavern-owner who both died when he was young, and, was then sent away to school, where he developed an interest in the famous writer and thinker de Selby. As a young adult, he returned to his home, which was being managed and run by the tenant farmer John Divney. And then he spent some number of years just living there, with Divney still running the operation - and, clearly, sponging off whatever money was generated - while the narrator mostly just sat in a room, working on a massive concordance to the commentaries on de Selby.

That point is characteristic of O'Brien, so let me underline it: our hero's massive project is not original work, or even commentary on the famous work of another, but a third-level reference work that organizes other people's thoughts and writings to make them easier to navigate.

Anyway, this all gets covered very quickly, and the narrator grows into middle age. He and Divney - mostly Divney - concoct a scheme to kill and rob Mathers, which they then do. Divney runs off with the cash-box and hides it somewhere, leading to several more years of the narrator never letting Divney out of his sight. Finally, Divney tells the narrator where to retrieve the cash-box - under a specific floorboard of Mather's old house - and Chapter Two begins with the narrator having grabbed the thing he found under that floorboard.

The novel really starts there: the narrator has an odd conversation with the claims-not-to-be-dead Mathers, and emerges into a surreal landscape that is similar to his homeland, but somehow different. He travels down roads unfamiliar to him and meets the bicycle-obsessed policemen in charge there, eventually being charged with the murder of Mathers - who, again, he last saw alive, and who has supposedly been murdered in a different way.

Surreal events pile up, a gallows is built to execute the narrator, but he manages to escape with the aid of a band of one-legged men led by the bandit Martin Finnucane and makes his way back to the house where he lived with Divney.

And, yes, after Divney is shocked by the narrator's return, the reader is told that the narrator is dead: the "cash-box" hidden in Mathers' house was a bomb, and the narrator was blown up there. The policemen, their bicycles and station-houses, and the whole surreal world of most of Third Policeman, is actually Hell and the narrator is being tormented eternally for his sin.

To be clearer: the "this-is-Hell" is implied, but the edition I read - and, I gather, editions of Third Policeman generally - include letters from O'Brien explaining that, since the fact that the narrator is dead is entirely clear, but the rest of it has to be implied. (Though, I suppose, if you're Irish in 1940, a dead murderer could only be one place.)

This is a deeply weird - in most of the literary senses of that word - and amusing novel. Let me quote one bit, from pp.324-5 of the edition I read (an Everyman's Library omnibus of The Complete Novels) as an example. If this amuses you, you'll like The Third Policeman:

I opened the bed fastidiously, lay into the middle of it, closed it up again carefully and let out a sigh of happiness and rest. I felt as if all my weariness and perplexities of the day had descended on me pleasurably like a great heavy quilt which would keep me warm and sleepy. My knees opened up like rosebuds in rich sunlight, pushing my shins two inches further to the bottom of the bed. Every joint became loose and foolish and devoid of true utility. Every inch of my person gained weight with every second until the total burden on the bed was approximately five hundred thousand tons. This was evenly distributed on the four wooden legs of the bed, which had by now become an integral part of the universe. My eyelids, each weighing no less than four tons, slewed ponderously across my eyeballs. My narrow shins, itchier and more remote in their agony of relaxation, moved further away from me til my happy toes pressed closely on the bars. My position was completely horizontal, ponderous, absolute, and incontrovertible. United with the bed I became momentous and planetary

The Super Hero's Journey by Patrick McDonnell

This book was not published for children. But it is the kind of uncritical, deliberatively primitivist, quintessentially American "can't people just be nice" story that has no surprises or messages for anyone engaging it at a mental age anywhere above about ten, so...I'm recommending it only on that basis.

If you're the kind of reader where the glimpse of a vaguely Vince Colletta-ish drawing turns off all of your critical facilities, The Super Hero's Journey is for you: this is a book by and for the audience of (almost entirely) men who imprinted on Marvel comics in their (now seen as idyllic) youths in the 1960s. It's by Patrick McDonnell, best known for his long-running Mutts daily strip, working in a schoolboy-collage style, grabbing his favorite Kirby and Ditko panels to incorporate into a graphic story drawn in an approximation of how the young McDonnell copied those stories back in his youth.

The characters are the Marvel universe top-line as of about 1966 - the roughly original Avengers (pre-Hulk) on one side and the Fantastic Four on the other, with Spider-Man kibitzing somewhere in the middle. McDonnell explains in an afterword that his siblings identified heavily with the FF - he was one of four; no word on whether his lone sister actually wanted to pretend to be Sue Storm - and he got to be Reed Richards, so therefore Reed is the hero and problem-solver here. 

It's all utterly transparent: the adult McDonnell got a chance to play with the same toys he loved as a kid. McDonnell is so open and happy about it that it's charming, but there is a definite element of watching some obsessed elementary-schooler mashing his action figures into each other and throwing them off the arm of the couch.

Our narrator is the Watcher, of course. He introduces all of the main characters, who are all in their normal '60s Marvel conflicts - squabbling within the FF, mourning Uncle Ben, bemoaning the plot-driving problems they had at that early date (as opposed to all of other plot-driving problems that later creative teams created and solved and reinstated), and all vaguely unhappy - not just in the way that all Marvel '60s heroes were unhappy, but also in a more general "everyone is grumpy all the time" way.

This is because Doctor Doom has a new scheme to conquer the world, by making everyone angry and create "divisiveness." He has turned on the obligatory Kirby Machine, radiated the weird whatevers into the ether, and now everyone on Earth is mad as hell and not going to take it anymore.

McDonnell does not explicitly make this a political metaphor. But this is a 2023 book by an American. It comes down, in the end, very hard on the "everybody should just get along" side, and the anger is driven clearly and entirely by the villain figure who stands outside of society. It is sourceless, and pointless, and can be removed entirely without issue.

Anyway, there's not a whole lot of plot. The Watcher sees, deplores, and insists he can't do anything while dragging Reed around and aggressively nudging him in specific directions. Doom cackles and gloats. Everyone else punches each other. After about a hundred pages of that, Reed uses a machine to unleash an even more powerful set of Kirby Krackles, which are the Power of Love.

(I don't know if McDonnell means it that way, but there's a strong homoerotic undertone to this section, as if Reed and Doom should just kiss already and stop bothering the rest of the world.)

The philosophy is something like homeopathic Buddhism - the general idea is apparent, but so diluted that there's nothing specific, just the vague drive to be nicer.

This clearly means something to McDonnell: it is very much a labor of love. But that love is one part very vague and one part entirely nostalgia. I think you had to imprint on the '60s Marvel universe young - and have never gotten over that - to really love this book.

Freddy Lombard, Vol. 1: The Will of Godfrey of Bouillon by Yves Challand

When you discover a creator, there's always that question: is this work typical? If and when I come back for more, is it going to be the same sort of thing?

It's why genres exist, and why artists tend to stay within genres at least semi-consistently. It's why going electric - or country, or not country, or whatever - is a big deal: those are moments when big chunks of the audience can say "Hey, wait, this isn't what I was looking for" and walk away, possibly forever.

Of course, once the creator is dead, it's only of academic interest: no one's reaction is going to change anything ever again.

Yves Chaland was a Belgian comics creator who died young: his career spanned about fifteen years and he died in 1990 in his early thirties. I read his Young Albert a few months back: that was a half-page strip that ran in Metal Hurlant for about the first half of his career, and turned out to be more radical and political than I expected (in a good, committed, energetic way).

Chaland's most famous series is Freddy Lombard: the hero looks a lot like a grown-up version of "young Albert." (Though that may just be Chaland's style, or even how Belgian cartoonists tended to make their heroes blond young men.) So, going back to Chaland, Freddy was the next step - as far as I can tell, nothing else he did has even been translated into English, so it was an easy choice.

The Freddy Lombard series includes five albums: they've been published both as omnibuses and separately in English, but the current editions, from Humanoids, are individual and digital-only (for anyone else looking). And the first one is Freddy Lombard, Vol. 1: The Will of Godfrey of Bouillon, originally published in 1981.

Our heroes are Freddy himself and his two friends, Dina and Sweep. They are young, they are poor, and I gather every book sees them wander into some new adventurous situation mostly for those young/poor reasons. Here, they're driving a clunker through the rain on a deserted highway, trying to get to Sedan for some unstated reason. But the car breaks down, and they trudge to the nearest town, Bouillon, and stop at the local inn for dinner and lodging.

Of course, they're broke, and can't pay. The innkeeper threatens to call the cops, but the local Duke, George Bouillon, is also eating dinner there, and overhears the commotion. He offers both to pay for the three and to give them jobs. His famous ancestor, Godfrey of the title, liquidated his holdings in 1096 to fund a Crusade - but the persistent rumor for the last millennium is that he only spent half the money, and left the rest stashed somewhere, with a coded message for his son to say where. George has only just now reunited the two halves of the coded message, and plans to find and retrieve the treasure - but he needs diggers to get into the secret underground cavern he expects.

Freddy and friends agree - this is the kind of series, I think, where they agree to do whatever, because that's how the plots go - and head off to bed in the inn, ready to dig up treasure first thing in the morning. Meanwhile, both the innkeeper and another diner at the inn each separately wring their hands in fiendish glee (well, not quite literally, but close) at the thought of stealing away this famous treasure from the Duke and his new friends.

But Freddy has a dream of Godfrey's era in the night, and that takes up more than half the album - pages 6 to 22 out of 29 - which has a vaguely parallel but separate plot, in which Freddy, Dina, and Sweep help save Godfrey from bandits, become part of his household, and are involved in planning for the Crusade. The two expected villains from the frame story, the innkeeper and the unnamed other diner, also appear here in similar villainous roles.

Freddy is awoken, leaving the historical story/dream unfinished, by a commotion in the morning: the bible with the secret map has been stolen! Oh, wait, no, it hasn't. Great! So they're off to find the treasure.

They do, and it's not what they expected. One of the villains then traps them in the underground cavern, planning to come back much later after they are dead. But there's another way out of the cavern, and a mysterious figure shows it to them before disappearing. So they get out - without a treasure, but free and alive.

Yay! And bang the album ends.

It's a fun adventure story on every page, maybe a bit juvenile but in that vaguely Tintin/Spirou style. The overall plot, though, is the kind that turns out to be pointless in the end: not only is there no treasure in the frame story, but the majority of the book is about the dream, with no plot resolution for that at all. I guess it could be seen as a cynical, dying-fall ending - and maybe that's what Chaland intended - but it's an oddly structured book that sets up a bunch of expectations and then deliberately fails to live up to them.

Weirdly, that makes me more interested in reading more of Freddy's adventures. Chaland was an excellent artist, in his own variation on that Belgian ligne clair style, and he's clearly structuring this story deliberately to confound expectations. Standard adventure stories are a dime-a-dozen, quirky broken ones are rarer and more interesting. Now I want to see if Chaland did that for the later Freddy stories as well.

Audrey Hepburn by Michele Botton and Dorilys Giacchetto

There are a lot of biographies in comics forms coming out these days - the ones I'm seeing tend to be from European creators, mostly French, so my assumption is that it's just a normal part of the larger comics universe there. And, of course, regular prose biographies are common, in the US like everywhere else, so it only makes sense that they would exist in comics form, too.

Except that the comics form in the US has been shoehorned into a genre box for most of its existence - assumed to be only for superheroes and other visually splashy adventure stories, typically at least appropriate for children if not entirely aimed at them.

So I'm both happy to see them, and wonder, just a bit, about what that Euro market for nonfiction bande desinée actually looks like when it's at home. I'm sure that what makes it over to the US is only a subset - most obviously, the books about Americans and people who had major careers in America. So I wonder what those shelves look like, in a random store somewhere in Europe. But I don't know, and probably never will.

All that random thought was sparked by this new book: a solid, if a bit high-level, look at the film career of Audrey Hepburn, written by Michel Botton and drawn by Dorilys Giacchetto - two clearly accomplished, mid-career professionals from Italy whose work I've never seen before. It's a fairly new book: published last year in Europe and translated by Nanette McGuiness for this NBM English-language edition, which is out today.

Giacchetto has a bright, crisp style and an impressive focus on Hepburn's face throughout - she's good with depicting clothing design, too, and draws cartoony versions of all of the main characters while still keeping Hepburn obviously herself throughout. There's a lot of dynamics in her art, a lot of acting on the page in her figures, especially Hepburn. She doesn't slavishly mimic real faces for the other famous people in the book - her costars are often turned half-away or just show up briefly, though we do see a lot of her first husband Mel Ferrer - which also helps keep Hepburn central throughout.

Botton has perhaps a harder job, as he admits in a short afterword. The book is about 160 pages of comics, which is a lot - but still not much for a long, busy career in the movies, and even less for a full bio covering Hepburn's childhood and later UNICEF years. Botton does provide glimpses of both of those ends of her life, but not in depth: his core is that film career, which is what the audience really wants to see.

So we open with Hepburn at twenty, just about to get the life-changing part in Gigi, and there are only brief flashbacks amid the generally straightforward flow of successive chapters. Botton doesn't use captions or otherwise anchor the scenes in years or places, so - particularly for those of us who are not Hepburn fanatics - it may be opaque at times exactly what year a particular page takes place on, or whether we're in London or Hollywood.

But, of course, a more heavily written, caption-filled book would have less space for Giacchetto's art, which would be a great loss. So let me say, like most visual biographies, that this one is mostly for the people who know the general outlines already, who are Audrey Hepburn fans at least in a small way, and who don't need to be told the details.

For example, we never learn when or where she was born, and I don't think her third husband's name - he's an important thematic figure, supporting her in her late work with UNICEF - is mentioned, either. We do get at least a few panels about each major movie, usually with the name of the director and a sense of how it affected Hepburn.

Readers who love Hepburn's movies should jump on this book. Giacchetto isn't aiming to draw Hepburn slavishly, but her panels have Hepburn's energy and verve and style and enthusiasm and boundless smile. And the story is just the pieces those fans most want to see, arrayed well and told clearly. This is a model of the kind of book that knows what it needs to do and does it precisely.

Portions for Foxes: Swansea

"Portions for Foxes" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song by a woman or a band led by a woman. See the introduction for more.

This week: a quirky-sounding song of unrequited longing - something new and different!

OK, so I do have a clear style of music I like. So sue me.

This one is Red Mittens, from the Portland (Oregon) band Swansea, off their 2017 record Flaws. It's a semi-electronic dive into what feels like high school drama, as the singer stares and and sings to this one guy that she'd never actually say any of these things to in person. I say "sings," but it's mostly spoken, except for the refrain and a few other moments.

It's another song obscure enough that I can't find lyrics online, so anything later is my transcription, and errors entirely my fault.

I want to tell you I love Frannie and Zoey
I want to tell you I'm making a skirt out of neckties
I want to tell you I love....your...nose
But all I do is sit way back in the bleachers 
And watch your body
And I'm away from you by rows and rows

It's all on that level - specific, grounded, trivial-sounding. It's full of telling details of this one girl watching this one guy, who we're pretty sure has no idea, and never saying or doing anything about it.

Yeah yeah...yeah yeah

Take it as an object lesson of what not to do, or take it in remembrance of when you were also young and callow. (Which might be thirty years ago or yesterday, depending.)

Random Quote of No Relevance to Any Major National Figures Whatsoever

Mrs Pett, like most other people, subconsciously held the view that the ruder a person is the more efficient he must be. It is but rarely that anyone is found who is not dazzled by the glamour of incivility.

 - P.G. Wodehouse, Piccadilly Jim, p.220

Books Read: October 2024

As always, this is an index, it's mostly for me, and it's not even useful until I update it after the posts go live. If you happen to be reading this on the Sunday it posted, I hope your life is otherwise rewarding and interesting, because this isn't gonna help there.

Here's what I read this month:

Philippe Coudray, Bigby Bear, Vol. 2: For all Seasons (10/5, digital)

Hervé Bourhis, The British Invasion! (10/6, digital)

Jack Vance, The Book of Dreams (10/6, in The Demon Princes, Vol. 2)

Bryan Lee O'Nalley, Scott Pilgrim Gets It Together (10/11, digital)

Donald Westlake writing as Samuel Holt, What I Tell You Three Times Is True (10/11)

Howard Chaykin, Hey Kids! Comics! (10/12, digital)

Mike Mignola and Jesse Lonergan, Miss Truesdale and the Fall of Hyperborea (10/13, digital)

Xavier Betaurcort and Yannick Marchat, New Life (10/19, digital)

Julia Gfrӧrer, Laid Waste (10/20, digital)

Kate Atkinson, Behind the Scenes at the Library (10/20)

Reza Farazmand, Hope It All Works Out! (10/25, digital)

Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima, Lone Wolf and Cub, Vol. 4: The Bell Warden (10/26, digital)

John Banville, Snow (10/26)

Juni Ba and Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou, The Unlikely Story of Felix and Macabber (10/27, digital)

Charles Willeford, Pick-Up (10/27, in Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1950s)

Rick Parker, Drafted (10/28, digital)

I plan to read more books in November, in case you're wondering.

Quote of the Week, Supplemental: Sects Can Lead to Breeding

The girls thought the altar and the candles and the Mass very cute; one of them had been sometimes to that kind of service in Cambridge, Mass., at a place she called the Monastery, which Father Chantry-Pigg said was where the Cowley Fathers in America lived, but the other girl and her parents were not Episcopalian, they belong to one of those sects that Americans have, and that are difficult for English people to grasp, though probably they got over from Britain in the Mayflower originally, and when sects arrive in America they multiply, like rabbits in Australia, so that America has about a hundred to each one in Britain, and this is said to be on account of the encouraging climate, which is different in each of the states, and most encouraging of all in the deep south and in California, where sects breed best.

 - Rose Macaulay, The Towers of Trebizond, p.52

Quote of the Week: Whether You Want Hope or Not

When you stay too long in a place, you forget just how big an expanse the world is. You get no sense of the length of those longitudes and latitudes. Just as, she supposed, it is hard to have a sense of the vastness inside any one person.

But once you sense that vastness, once something reveals it, hope emerges, whether you want it to or not, and it clings to you, as stubbornly as lichen clings to rock.

 - Matt Haig, The Midnight Library, p.134

The Towers of Trebizond by Rose Macaulay

It's always a surprise, reading the supposedly-funny books of the past. Some of them still work - for at least some modern readers, and remembering they weren't ever funny for everyone anyway - and some of them can fall into that weird netherworld where the reader can't even figure out what was supposed to be funny.

The Towers of Trebizond is a 1956 novel by Rose Macaulay - the last-published book of a writer born in 1881, a voice-driven book largely about varieties of Christianity and the problems of faith, taking the form of a travel book and mildly satirizing the contemporary world of the travel writer along the way. That's the kind of thing that could easily feel very old-fashioned and fall flat today.

I don't know that I took all of the religious convolutions as seriously as I might have, but the comic material still worked for me, and the narrator's voice - the long run-on sentences piling up like logjams, circling every side of a question endlessly - was lovely, amusing, and deeply engaging in a way I really didn't expect such long sentences and paragraphs could be.

The voice is what makes it work, I think: the characters are mostly driven by manias, from the formidable feminist and Anglican would-be missionary Aunt Dot to her traveling partner, the far-too-High Church Father Chantry-Pigg, to all of the various oddball secondary characters this small group of English people meet in their travels across Turkey, supposedly trying to see if there's scope for a major missionary outreach to bring the locals to the Anglican Church. Laurie, the narrator, is a generation younger than Dot, just as tangled up in doctrinal questions but in a funnier way, and is presenting all of this in her long-winded, show-all-sides-of-the-question narrative to an unknown audience.

(Laurie and Dot are supposedly writing a book about their trip, but Towers of Trebizond is nothing like that book - Laurie's contributions were largely to be illustrations, which the novel doesn't include at all. It could, perhaps, be seen as an expanded, standalone version of the additional prose Laurie was expecting to contribute, the more travel-related material, if the reader is prepared to be very generous.)

"Group of obsessives go somewhere and bounce off the locals" is a time-tested comic plot, and Macaulay gets some good material out of it here. Though, again, this book is so heavily narrated that the bouncing is somewhat muted - this is a book that's funnier about how Laurie tells the reader what happened than about what actually happened. There are amusing moments, and lots of quirky characters, but this is a lightly plotted book - just a succession of day-to-day events, mostly small, that happen to a small cast.

Macaulay does manage to have unexpected emotional depth in her ending, which is mostly unrelated to the rest of the book plot-wise, but deeply connected to her thematic material. And I should also probably mention that Laurie - though in this book at least thirty or forty years younger than her creator - is very much an author insert, and the material of Laurie's life and background is drawn closely from Macaulay's. So this is the kind of comic novel with unexpected depths, the kind that is, at its core, serious about its religious questions without needing to keep them free from ridicule.

Is it still funny, almost seventy years later? I thought so: that's all I can tell you. This sat on my shelf for a decade, as a weird thing I thought I might want to read. Now it's a weird thing I did read, and I'm happy I did so. It's funny but not just funny, and the religious material is handled skillfully and is less parochial than I was worried it would be. You may feel the same.