Alice in Sunderland

Like desperance (and samarcand and durham_rambler, for that matter), I was in Sunderland yesterday for the first public appearance of Bryan Talbot's extraordinary book Alice in Sunderland. For as long as I've known Bryan - for five years, at least - Alice has been a work in progress, an exploration of his adopted city, and every meeting has brought a new titbit of information, a new page of dazzling artwork, in which huge amounts of detailed information are organised into a lucid argument (here's an example). Sunderland tends to be overshadowed by its neighbours on the Tyne, it never aspired to City of Culture status; for long centuries it was not a city at all but an industrial town ("the biggest shipbuilding town in the world," my father used to boast), but a town whose history goes back to the earliest days of English Christianity.

Part of that history is my own; my father was born in Sunderland, and until my grandmother died when I was seven or eight, we spent our summer holidays there. I remember being shown the stuffed walrus in the museum and told that this was the very walrus about which Lewis Carroll wrote in The Walrus and the Carpenter (it's gone now, although a walrus has appeared in nearby Mowbray Park). It has been a particular pleasure to share with Bryan some of the stories I know from that connection - the Victoria Hall disaster about which William McGonagall wrote so movingly, for example.

So last night's event - the opening of an exhibition of artwork from the book at the Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art - was very much a Long Awaited Party. It also had a slightly surreal quality: Alice in Sunderland plays a number of tricks with reality, illusion and the depiction of reality, and last night's gathering did much the same thing. The artwork on display was wonderful, but so much of the finished artwork was created in the computer that the framed drawings - the pure and often uncoloured line - could be misleading. I heard one visitor remark "I don't know why, I'd expected it to be in colour..." and had to reassure her that yes, most (though not all - this is a book that has some of everything) pages were fully coloured. Some of the fascination for me was seeing the skeleton beneath the finished pages. But if the art on display was like the bones without the flesh, many of the guests were characters from the book, escaped from its pages and walking around: Bryan himself, but also desperance who appears with Colin Wilbourn in the section about the sculpture project on which they collaborated and Michael Bute, on whose research into Lewis Carroll's north-eastern connections Alice draws heavily. Bryan Talbot has called his book "a dream documentary" but you could have wondered which dreamed it.

This isn't a review of Alice in Sunderland: apart from anything else, I was unable to buy a copy, as the gallery had seriously under-ordered (in fairness to them, they were clearly accustomed to exhibitions to which a catalogue is an optional extra, and hadn't grasped that in this case it was all about the book), and their stock of thirteen copies vanished away as softly and suddenly as you could wish. Which is fine, because there will be signings in bookshops, and I will have plenty more chances. So this is just a jubilation that something as ambitious and unexpected and magnificent as Alice in Sunderland can actually happen.