Hannah Berry: Britten & Brülightly
Oct. 19th, 2009 09:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustI had hoped that once the Readers of the Lost Art (graphic novels reading group) were meeting in the refurbished and reopened City Library, we would find it easier to get hold of interesting things to read in numbers which made it possible for us all to read them. So far it hasn't worked that way, and our current way of working round the problem is to choose a theme, and all read not the same book but books which relate to the same theme. Which is how I came to read this completely unknown quantity: A. went downstairs to the shelves, and came back with everything he could find which could be labelled crime - including Hannah Berry's debut graphic novel, published by Jonathan Cape.
It's very nearly classic crime: noir with a twist, not so much noir as dark grey. The tough-guy private eye is replaced by a melancholy figure with dark-ringed eyes, a man gradually broken down by a profession which involves telling his clients things that they only thought they wanted to know; the high key blacks and whites of the movie genre give way to the soft tones of watercolour paintings, the glittering cities of Chandler's California to somewhere in England where it is always raining. This transposition adds to the sense of displacement: Hannah Berry, interviewed in the Forbidden Planet blog, explains that her story is set at the time of the Second World War, but that she felt that if she allowed the wr into her story, the problems of her characters would seem trivial in comparison. So this is a wartime England in which there is no war.
The mystery is presented conventionally enough: the detective who is reluctant to involve himself, but cannot resist the entreaties of the beautiful woman in distress - in this case, because she does not believe that the death of her fiancé was really suicide. If the tragic aura of investigator Britten is less usual, this is nothing compared to his sidekick, Stewart Brülightly. Brülightly is a teabag (think about that name), who lives in Britten's waistcoat pocket. This has the immense advantage of providing someone to whom the detective can talk at any time, explaining whatever the reader needs to know, whose presence doesn't need to be explained - but Brülightly holds his own in these conversations, a down-to-earth Sancho Panza to Britten's Don Quixote (a true Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance). It's impossible to write about the book without quoting the exchange in which Britten reproves his partner: ":Don't be lecherous: you're a teabag," and receives the reply: "I'm a teabag with needs, Fern."
This quirkiness, a genuine - if not entirely original or realistic - mystery, and the pervasive melancholy are an odd combination. What brings them together in a harmonious, if unlikely, blend is on the one hand the assurance of the writing and on the other the skilful and gorgeous artwork. (There are some samples in the Forbidden Planet interview, and more on the Macmillan web site - these latter from the US edition, whose cover is different from the UK edition). The muted colours, the use of watercolour, but also the ingenious breakdown of the page into panels, the stunt 'camera angles': page after page is a pleasure to look at. I have some reservations about the lettering; not the script used for captions, which fits well with the style of the book, but the actual speech balloons were a little rough, and this jarred from time to time.
Quite the nicest surprise I've had in a comic since - oh, since Freakangels.
It's very nearly classic crime: noir with a twist, not so much noir as dark grey. The tough-guy private eye is replaced by a melancholy figure with dark-ringed eyes, a man gradually broken down by a profession which involves telling his clients things that they only thought they wanted to know; the high key blacks and whites of the movie genre give way to the soft tones of watercolour paintings, the glittering cities of Chandler's California to somewhere in England where it is always raining. This transposition adds to the sense of displacement: Hannah Berry, interviewed in the Forbidden Planet blog, explains that her story is set at the time of the Second World War, but that she felt that if she allowed the wr into her story, the problems of her characters would seem trivial in comparison. So this is a wartime England in which there is no war.
The mystery is presented conventionally enough: the detective who is reluctant to involve himself, but cannot resist the entreaties of the beautiful woman in distress - in this case, because she does not believe that the death of her fiancé was really suicide. If the tragic aura of investigator Britten is less usual, this is nothing compared to his sidekick, Stewart Brülightly. Brülightly is a teabag (think about that name), who lives in Britten's waistcoat pocket. This has the immense advantage of providing someone to whom the detective can talk at any time, explaining whatever the reader needs to know, whose presence doesn't need to be explained - but Brülightly holds his own in these conversations, a down-to-earth Sancho Panza to Britten's Don Quixote (a true Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance). It's impossible to write about the book without quoting the exchange in which Britten reproves his partner: ":Don't be lecherous: you're a teabag," and receives the reply: "I'm a teabag with needs, Fern."
This quirkiness, a genuine - if not entirely original or realistic - mystery, and the pervasive melancholy are an odd combination. What brings them together in a harmonious, if unlikely, blend is on the one hand the assurance of the writing and on the other the skilful and gorgeous artwork. (There are some samples in the Forbidden Planet interview, and more on the Macmillan web site - these latter from the US edition, whose cover is different from the UK edition). The muted colours, the use of watercolour, but also the ingenious breakdown of the page into panels, the stunt 'camera angles': page after page is a pleasure to look at. I have some reservations about the lettering; not the script used for captions, which fits well with the style of the book, but the actual speech balloons were a little rough, and this jarred from time to time.
Quite the nicest surprise I've had in a comic since - oh, since Freakangels.
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Date: 2009-10-20 02:17 am (UTC)That is quite wonderful.
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Date: 2009-10-21 08:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-08 01:29 am (UTC)(yeah, I found another tab that I'd saved)
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Date: 2010-01-08 11:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-08 01:57 pm (UTC)