In their own little worlds

GRAPHIC NOVELS: The Beats: A Graphic HistoryEdited by Paul Buhle Souvenir Press, 200pp. £12 Tamara DreweBy Posy Simmonds Jonathan Cape, 256pp. £12.99

THE BEATS: A Graphic Historyis a book of two halves. The first half is a straightforward triple biography of the three best-known Beat writers, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William S Burroughs, written by Harvey Pekar with art by Ed Piskor. Although Pekar occasionally shows up to comment on the influence they had on other writers (including himself), this section for the most part sticks closely to the facts, and even when Pekar proffers a judgment or opinion, he expresses himself in rather a dry, bare way, with this spareness amplified by Piskor's simple, no-frills art.

It’s in the second half of the book, titled “Perspectives”, that the real juice is to be found: here Pekar and Piskor, along with a number of other writers and artists, offer short biographies of other (less famous) people on the Beat scene. Perhaps because of the variety of different art styles, or perhaps because the lives of these more marginal figures are less well documented and thus make for fresher reading, this part is lighter and more entertaining than the Kerouac/Ginsberg/Burroughs section, which is sometimes a bit of a slog to get through. It doesn’t hurt that most of the figures documented in Perspectives come across as more likeable than Kerouac and Burroughs; Ginsberg seems to have been a decent enough guy, but Kerouac and Burroughs apparently won their countercultural cred through a combination of genuinely innovative artistic work and dangerously solipsistic behaviour. In the best piece in the book, Beatnik Chicks by Joyce Brabner and Summer McClinton, Kerouac’s idol Neal Cassady is described as “a sociopath, dangerous to know and hurtful”. When considering the Beat generation, that hurt and that danger is something that has to be held in mind, though without letting it obscure the value of what they accomplished.

THE SOLIPSISMof writers is one of the themes of Posy Simmonds's Tamara Drewe; in it, Beth Hardiman, manager of the Stonefield writers' retreat, remarks: "A writer totally immersed in their own little universe pleases me no end . . . Outside, stuff happens. Inside, nothing much shakes their world, and if it does, in two minutes everything settles." The world of Stonefield and the surrounding village of Ewedown is rustic and peaceful, at least on the surface, but the arrival of the beautiful Tamara upsets the precarious equilibrium the locals and writers have achieved. Tamara is a former local who now plans to write, and who attracts the amorous attentions of several men, including Nicholas Hardiman, husband of Beth, and famous musician Ben Sergeant.

Like her earlier graphic novel Gemma Bovery, Tamara Dreweis a modern-day reimagining of a 19th-century novel, in this case Thomas Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd; but while the characters in Gemma Bovery frequently made explicit references to Flaubert's novel, Tamara Dreweis more allusive, allowing the bones of Hardy's tale of destructive passion to peek through for the benefit of those familiar with it, but standing on its own for those who are not.

Having originally been serialised in the Guardianat a rate of one or two pages a week, Tamara Dreweis packed with incident, but don't mistake it for a mere page-turner; Simmonds expertly juggles multiple perspectives on the comic and tragic events unleashed by Tamara's arrival, and retells the modernised plot with all of Hardy's compassion for human suffering, and a great deal more.

Simmonds brings to Hardy's story a sense of humour and of the absurdity of human relationships that Hardy never managed, and a distinctly modern preoccupation with the distortion of truth in storytelling. All the characters have preconceptions that shape their interpretation of what they see happening, while all the time there is both more and less going on than any of them can imagine. Although not quite of the same calibre as Gemma Bovery, Tamara Dreweis a remarkable work nonetheless: intelligent, multifaceted, and strikingly humane.

Katherine Farmar is a freelance writer and the author, with Ben Murnane, of Dublin on a Shoestring.Her comics blog is at puritybrown.blogspot.com