To Have and to Hold
Graham Chaffee, Fantagraphics, £21.99
Fog Over Tolbiac Bridge
Tardi and Leo Malet, Fantagraphics, £17.99
Two very distinct graphic thrillers both providing punchy pulp thrills. Graham Chaffee’s To Have and To Hold is a clipped, tight, pugnacious crime novel based around a bank robbery. In style and story it’s lean and stripped back. Set at the start of the 1960s it hits all the noir notes – double crosses, a femme fatale and the closing in of remorseless fate are all present and correct.
Tardi’s is a wordier and world-wearier pleasure. The politics at play in To Have and To Hold are mostly scene-setting window dressing. In Fog Over Tolbiac Bridge, Tardi’s adaptation of Leo Malet’s policier, they’re in with the bricks of the story. Set in 1950s Paris, private eye Nestor Burma becomes embroiled in a case that pulls him back into his anarchist past.
What stays with you is Tardi’s ability to conjure up Paris on the page. It’s a vision of Parisian stone, rain, desire and death. All in all, a worthy alternative to Maigret.
Deserter’s Masquerade
Chloe Cruchaudet, Knockabout, £16.99
Well, this didn’t go where I expected. Chloe Cruchaudet’s graphic novel is based on a real story of transvestism during the First World War and the years after, but don’t anticipate an earnest treatise on the horrors of those years. This is a slyer, sultrier thing than that.
The story starts with a romance, lurches into the violence of war and then heads off unexpectedly into post-war hedonism. Sketched out in pen, ink and spot colour, Cruchaudet’s art has a tidal fluidity to it, but it sharpens when required.
It is the story of Paul Grappe and Louise Landy who are married just before Paul is sent to the front. Coming face to face (quite literally) with the horrors of war, Paul decides to desert. Returning to Louise, he disguises himself as a woman.
But as a deserter the end of the war does not mean the end of his disguise. Soon, he is finding a job and finding that he rather enjoys being a woman. This does not do his marriage any favours and soon he begins to haunt the woods around Paris where the city’s swingers gather for casual group sex. Before long he is persuading Louise to accompany him. In short it’s a graphic novel about sex and death then. What else is there?
Deserter’s Masquerade is an adult story of desire and identity that follows a generation whose lives have been marked, twisted and destroyed by the impact of war. Paul is both a confident, overpowering character, but also a man plagued by PTSD. His nightmares are surrealist visions of the nightmare reality of life in the trenches. Death wins in the end, by the way. It always does.
Uncomfortably Happily
Yeon-sik Hong, Drawn & Quarterly, £23
This brick of a book (572 pages) works its magic slowly. It follows cartoonist Yeon-sik Hong and his wife when they decide to escape the crowded messiness that is Seoul and retreat to a small house on a rural mountain, only to find that, to begin with at any rate, they have just swapped one set of miseries for another. There’s no phone signal and no heating. But there are snakes in the grass and you can’t rely on the buses.
Meanwhile, sik-Hong is trying to make a living from churning out graphic novels to order and failing conspicuously at carving out time to do something he truly believes in.
The set-up is simple, but as he slowly details the minutiae of daily life, sik-Hong’s narrative begins to grip more and more. And it’s the detail that gets you – the sense of time passing and the endless challenges that pile up and up and up.
The art is minimalist and cartoony. And yet the rural location is often rendered in a much more realistic register, giving the eye something to linger on.
It’s a sharp character study too. This is very much a warts-and-all memoir, with sik-Hong’s wilful cynicism contrasting painfully with his wife’s can-do attitude. And all of it is offset by its moments of fantasy – cats standing up and talking; the family dog dancing with its owners.
The result is a slice-of-life graphic memoir that fascinates the more time you give time to it.
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