GRAPHIC NOVEL: PETER MURPHYreview HabibiBy Craig Thompson Faber, 672pp. £20
ON BLOGS, in op-ed pieces and in message-board threads, the novel-is-dead knell goes out at least once a year. Popular fiction, sigh the intelligentsia, is no more than an excuse for ladies of leisure to take tea at the monthly book-club meet. The Literary Novel, once a fearsome beast, is dying a gentrified death in Victorian parlours. The Man Booker longlist has become a musty museum cluttered with Merchant-Ivory period yarns and middlebrow tales of the Home Counties classes. Vintage heavyweight prizewinners – Amis, Atwood, McEwan, DeLillo – are decreed past their peak.
But perhaps the doom-criers are looking for greatness in all the wrong places. Innovative fiction never died, it just moved to the realm of the graphic novel, a medium that has produced some of the most original and ambitious tales of recent times. Shaun Tan's The Arrival(2008) was a sublime silent movie of a book that contained not a word of English. Marjane Satrapi ( Persepolis), David B ( Epileptic) and Guy Delisle ( Pyongyang) all operate in territories that draw on the mythic, the historical and the multicultural, on a scale that makes the latest drawing-room yawnathons by Swift and Hollinghurst seem old hat and parochial by comparison.
Craig Thompson's Habibi, a seven-years-in- the-making epic, advances yet another case for the graphic novel's supremacy. Thirty-five- year-old Thompson, a Michigan-born writer and artist from a fundamentalist Christian background, made his name with 2003's Blankets, an autobiographical coming-of-age epic that was lauded by Timeas the best graphic novel of that year, won two Eisner Awards and inspired a fan letter from Art Spiegelman, the author of Maus.
Habibiis even more ambitious, a 672-page paean to the widescreen romanticism of Arabian Nights, the social realism of Dickens and the mystical riddling of the Koran. Thompson has stated that his intention was to "humanise" Arabic culture in the age of Homeland Security (it's surely no coincidence that the book is published 10 years after 9/11) using calligraphy, geometry, numerology and story-engineering to produce a "music for the eyes". But for all the aestheticism, Habibi("My Beloved" in Arabic) is primarily a love story, one that blurs the lines between the platonic and the erotic, between carnal desire and spiritual devotion.
The story concerns itself with Dodola and Zam, escaped child slaves who take refuge on a ship beached in desert wastes. When the older Dodola is forced to prostitute herself to bedouins for food, she acquires a near-mythical reputation as a desert succubus and is forced to serve in a Sultan’s harem, eventually becoming pregnant. Believing himself abandoned, the young Zam wanders through squalid city streets and is adopted by a eunuch cult straight out of one of Lou Reed’s sleaze symphonies. Years pass before the pair are reunited, both changed utterly, as the story moves surely towards a climax that incorporates the sacred mysteries of Arabic prayer, poetry and art. “Mystic tradition says there are 70,000 veils of light and darkness that separate us from our Creator,” declares one panel. “Every baby is born weeping for the soul knows its separation from Allah. And when a child cries in its sleep, it is the soul remembering some piece of what has been lost.”
Throughout, Thompson utilises elements of religious arcana, intricate geometrical systems and sweeping ecoallegories (water is a constant motif, from biblical floods to apocalyptic drought). If Thompson's brush strokes evoke the clean lines of Daniel Clowes, his narrative lines recall Salman Rushdie's century-spanning epics. Every last one of Habibi's pages is filigreed with near-fractal ornamentation, contrasting elaborate cosmologies with tender love scenes, ripsnorting chase sequences and quirky interludes. Your reviewer laments his inability to quote illustrations as effectively as text, but consider the following foxhole prayer uttered by Zam:
O Allah, you had to wipe out the filth of mankind during Noah’s time. I am volunteering myself for elimination now. Why create man in the first place? Man forsakes his Creator. Man desecrates Creation. Man consumes and excretes. Lusts and rapes. I am all these things. Why give life to a creature so depraved? A creature so incomplete? A creature so alone? . . . My prayer, as every prayer, is a wish to leave this world . . . You created us this way. Incomplete. Halves, desperately searching for our missing counterpart. What choice do we have but to construct an ideal, an idol, to impose on the beloved . . . “Every painter will go to Hell, and for every portrait he has made, there will be appointed one who will chastise him in Hell”. Dodola can’t save me from my own darkness.
There is only one discordant note in this extraordinary book: the author's use of modern American vernacular in an Arabic context. But that's a relatively minor complaint. With Habibi, Craig Thompson has created an epic love story, an adventure tale, and a lapsed Christian's hymn to the beauty of Islamic art.
Peter Murphy's John the Revelatorwas published by Faber in 2009. He has just completed his second novel
