The old world isn’t coming back, but at least one more volume of this series appears inevitable.
An oft-praised graphic novel of the Depression era belatedly spawns a sequel.
Following the picaresque hobo’s fable of Kings in Disguise (1990), writer Vance and illustrator Burr follow their latter-day Huck Finn, as recast by Steinbeck, into young adulthood. Freddie Bloch is now Fred (except when he isn’t), and he has left the life of riding the rails and living in hobo jungles for employment in a WPA circus. In a setup that is heavily fraught with symbolism and adds resonance to the title, Fred now serves as an assistant to an escape artist who nightly feigns his own execution by hanging. Enmeshed within the plot are a female writer (now also employed by the WPA), some union-busting thugs and a lot of characters from various back stories that both enhance the narrative and confuse it. For the workers, it’s the same old story: “The same demand for dignity and survival. The same answer from those who hold the power. The same lesson learned.” Yet, Fred’s role in this struggle between the powers that be and those who would challenge that power remains murky, even to him, as double crosses lead to the possibility of triple crosses. Relationships reveal various twists as they leap back and forth chronologically, as Fred learns at 18 what he hadn’t known at 13, when he first hit the road: “I’d had no idea how large the world was, nor how fragile the lives it contained.” As he attempts to put what he has learned into writing, to tell the story within this story, he learns another lesson: “Most of us don’t want a better world, kiddo. We just want the old one back.”
The old world isn’t coming back, but at least one more volume of this series appears inevitable.Pub Date: March 11, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-393-06220-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2012
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
Gorgeous and troubling.
Cartoonist Kuper (Kafkaesque, 2018, etc.) delivers a graphic-novel adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s literary classic exploring the horror at the center of colonial exploitation.
As a group of sailors floats on the River Thames in 1899, a particularly adventurous member notes that England was once “one of the dark places of the earth,” referring to the land before the arrival of the Romans. This well-connected vagabond then regales his friends with his boyhood obsession with the blank places on maps, which eventually led him to captain a steamboat up a great African river under the employ of a corporate empire dedicated to ripping the riches from foreign land. Marlow’s trip to what was known as the Dark Continent exposes him to the frustrations of bureaucracy, the inhumanity employed by Europeans on the local population, and the insanity plaguing those committed to turning a profit. In his introduction, Kuper outlines his approach to the original book, which featured extensive use of the n-word and worked from a general worldview that European males are the forgers of civilization (even if they suffered a “soul [that] had gone mad” for their efforts), explaining that “by choosing a different point of view to illustrate, otherwise faceless and undefined characters were brought to the fore without altering Conrad’s text.” There is a moment when a scene of indiscriminate shelling reveals the Africans fleeing, and there are some places where the positioning of the Africans within the panel gives them more prominence, but without new text added to fully frame the local people, it’s hard to feel that they have reached equal footing. Still, Kuper’s work admirably deletes the most offensive of Conrad’s language while presenting graphically the struggle of the native population in the face of foreign exploitation. Kuper is a master cartoonist, and his pages and panels are a feast for the eyes.
Gorgeous and troubling.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-393-63564-5
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
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