A Hoeys page spreads across, not up and down, like a landscape rather than a portrait. Landscape is often important in their work: they've done multiple short comics showing the same scene - usually from a high, slightly tilted vantage point, to see multiple streets and cutaway buildings between them - with actions ramifying through the panels over the course of six or eight pages. And their crisp, digital art makes their places both precise and generic; we see streets and apartment interiors in detail, but those details are multiplied.
Add this to the fact that their worlds are typically vaguely historical, with big blocky cars and people in suits and no modern technology, and a Hoeys story is a window into a specific, distinct world - one clearly not our own.
In Perpetuity was set in an afterlife: a Greek-style, mostly unhappy one. The Bend of Luck showed us a world where luck was a physical commodity. Animal Stories could have been our world, almost, with six loosely-linked stories are centered on animals.
And their new book this year is The Shadower. It's set in the unnamed capital city of an unnamed country, in an unnamed year. The cars are big and boxy. The women wear skirts and the men suit jackets. Phones attach to the wall. Ibsen's 1879 play A Doll's House is "a hundred years old" - is that meant to be a vague placeholder for "really old," or more specific?
I doubt it's specific. The Hoeys are specific, but only about the invented details of their world.
A civil war has recently ended, uneasily. There's some kind of power-sharing system, and the city is divided into sector by green lines, guarded by soldiers who check passports and visas. Most people seem to stay in their districts; moving between them is difficult. (We think this must be a poor city, a poor country - commerce is not going to thrive in a system like this. But maybe this is what the little people endure, and the ruling class lives differently.)
Nadia is studying acting at the Academy of Dramatic Arts, which is both a prestigious national treasure and part of "a small college in her district." Her father was a theater director and her mother a stage actress; a bombing during the war, in her childhood, killed her father. Her mother has been living quietly, not acting, since then. Nadia is apparently good at acting, a devotee of her father's method - which he codified in his influential book The Methodology of Disappearing. It's a very deep acting style, of subsuming the actor into the role completely.
And she's tapped by one of her father's old comrades, Nikola, to do something for the Popular Resistance Committee - the group her father was a leader in, the group that rules this sector of the city.
She is to impersonate a café waitress, Miriam, in another sector. O'Brien, a leader of that sector's ruling group, the Revolutionary Provisional Council, uses that café as an office, meeting with important people all day long. Nadia is to place a listening device at O'Brien's table and retrieve it at the end of the day, for seven days.
She doesn't have a choice, of course.
So she "agrees." She studies Miriam, uses wigs and fake glasses and a fake facial mole to impersonate the other woman. She spends a week in a replica of the café, practicing. And then she is inserted into the other woman's life, and goes to work in that café.
It goes as expected for the first few days: nerve-wracking but she's prepared. Then, things start shifting, both for her personally and otherwise. Her father's teachings will be more important than she expected. This impersonation will not end the way Nikola promised.
The Hoeys - the book also credits the story to C.P. Freund and Peter Hoey, which I think means roughly what the same credit would in a movie: not the script but the original plot - tell this story in their usual chilly manner, distanced, mostly quiet, with an emotionless third-persona omniscient narration.
They give it the inexorability of a tragedy: we think most of the lives in this broken, separated city are tragic, one way or another.
