Page 45 Review by Stephen
"I am entirely, 100%, horrifyingly alone."
From Chris Ware, Master Craftsman, his strongest work yet. A self-contained volume, it opens with a young woman lying alone on her bed, curled up all foetal, trying to block out her own black thoughts which go round in circles but which boil down to this: "Is it possible to hate yourself to death? If it is, I'm trying..."
Beds prove to be the way that she measures the phases in her life. In only two of them is she not alone: one at the apartment of the boyfriend she once had, one in her old room at her parents' house, where she takes that boyfriend at Christmas. Now...?
"Whenever I go home, I sleep on a sofa bed, since my Mom turned my old room into an office a few years ago. I don't mind, though... because it helps me keep all the pieces in place."
And there she is at four different times of her life in four different places in that single room. Over and over again we see her lying largely on her back staring up at the ceiling, until the final, silent page plays itself out...
It is one long, adult lifetime of isolation and loneliness as she rakes over her memories, and you might notice I've used the words "she" and "her" rather a lot so far, because in so surprisingly few panels is she ever being talked to that I don't think we ever even learn her name. Her mother calls her "honey" a couple of times, and the family she lives with briefly after minding their house for a year on her own, refers to her solely as "Nanna". Otherwise she lies, sits or stands alone, boxed in by the panels like the ripe and colourful fruit boxed in at the market.
Flowers recur throughout the book as well. The first is a daisy-like flower which she plucks from beside her tenement's stone steps, carries upstairs to her apartment, "arranges" alone in an old jam jar and then sits and stares at. (She is very sedentary, and with good reason, but since it only dawns on you gradually within the book, I'll leave that for you to discover). She works at a florists, which she opens on her own, having been left a note by the owner/manager. There the blooms are splendid sprays of beauty and colour, the lilies like labia - and if you think I'm stretching things there, I can assure you I'm not and must warn you of one particularly explicit image here in case you leave it lying around the family home before reading it - in marked contrast to her own dowdy and sexless existence. Although she did have a boyfriend once, if you remember, and therein lies a secret...
Now, I'm very aware that all this talk of depression, loneliness and despair sounds like a bit of a downer. It is. It is, if that is your life through no fault of your own. For once, you see, Chris has created a character who is neither culpably repulsive nor feeble nor socially inept. This woman is actually kind, compassionate, and yet her treatment (when she is being treated at all) has left her entirely without hope for her own happiness or future. It's a terrible existence and it is upsetting, but it is some individuals' existence and well worth reading about. It's certainly very affectingly accomplished.
As lavish and lovingly coloured as ever, the pages here are a contrast of fixed, ruled lines around soft, shapely bodies. It's the very pinnacle of ligne claire. They also range from large double-page spreads as a tenement building charts its own history (""It's been a good life," it thought, shedding a shingle") to densely patterned pages of tiny panels, and herein lies my caveat for those unused to the trickier compositions of comics, for even I had to spend some time on a few of the pages pre-planning what order to read the maze of memories in. I'm thinking specifically of those spent as Nanny to the family's son. These double pages are arranged around a central photograph. If you look closely you'll see a few helpful directional lines, but mostly it's a matter of simply reading the left hand page and then the right, rather than being seduced across the spread.
If this is your introduction to Chris Ware, fantastic. I try not to use the word "genius" in reviews except glibly, but you are about to be introduced to someone whose own power of imagination and level of skill equals, in its own unique way, that of Alan Moore or Dave Sim. At which point people right-minded do tend to use the word "genius".
