Page 45 Review by Stephen
Do you ever have moments of clarity, out of the blue, when you become acutely aware of how far we've come as a race? How much we have achieved? And how much we've fucked up this poor planet? How... unnatural almost every aspect of our lives are now?
I was queuing at the local Morrisons check out, paying for my packaged, pre-made pizzas, my industrially fermented, corked and bottled wine, and a couple of tuna steaks carved and gutted by some person I've never met from the carcass of an animal which someone else had sailed out and killed for me... and I was waiting to exchange these goods for a swipe of a small strip of electronically coded plastic... and I looked out through the vast panes of glass which form the northern wall of the supermarket, across the out-of-town retail park - one great big scab of bitumen, metal and concrete - and I thought: "Jesus, what is so abhorrent about our natural landscape, that we want to do this to it?"
Two days later and I'm doing the Sunday zombie zone-out, watching David Attenborough's The Life Of Mammals. The camera is following the epic, relentless hunt of a... I don't know, bigger than a gazelle... by a single member of the Sand People of Africa (I hope I've got that right at least). First three of them track the beast following the smallest scuff of the ground and then by pure instinct through the thickets. When they're close enough, one gives chase for hours and hours and hours, until both human and animal are so exhausted that one can no longer stand. The man then looks the creature in the eye, and - more for ceremony than anything else, it's pretty redundant at this point - he spears it. More impressive still than any of this, is what happens next: the man venerates his prey, treating it with great dignity, and gives thanks for the life which will now sustain his family. He knows that to feed his wife and children it was absolutely necessary, yet he acknowledges what he has done, what he has taken away. And we rarely give it a second's thought.
Which brings us (at long last, I know) to BLOOD SONG, a silent graphic novel of phenomenal power and truly awesome beauty. The story is told in a series of double-page spreads comprised of two panels (the single horizontal image is divided into two separate, black-mounted frames), and the basic palette is a lunar blue with the occasional, startling dash of vibrant colour. It begins as a view of the Milky Way, quickly focussing in on our own sphere, before hovering over a mist-enshrouded, mountainous forest somewhere like Southeast Asia. We can see that the villagers there have harnessed the land for crops, but the picture painted is overwhelmingly of a natural, blissful existence, of a tranquil equilibrium amongst the lush flora and exotic fauna of the region, where an old man fishes for his family's supper and, the next day, his young daughter, joyfully accompanied by her dog, calmly fetches water from a distant stream.
But her childhood is about to end, abruptly, as she feels blood between her legs. She washes it from her dress before returning home. Now civilisation intrudes, and it is anything but civilised. Shockingly, this idyll is shattered - pierced through the heart by a bayonet and incinerated with a flame thrower. The girl and the dog flee desperately through thorns and trees, their stamina, born of a healthy existence and natural ability, outstripping that of the soldiers, and once more they find themselves in the womb of nature, with its sequestered beauty and colour and diversity... until they come to what should not be the edge of the jungle, but is.
That represents my best ability to convey the first half of the book. The second half takes them to a modern city, and if you've already read Drooker's FLOOD, you'll pretty much know what to expect only this is so, so much better. So much more moving, so much more devastating. What I cannot do is show you as many pictures as I'd like. I think my favourites are when the panel borders are broken by the dog and gulls, out in the ocean, but there are so many sequences to which Drooker has given a great deal of thought, or perhaps relied on an unfailingly impressive instinct, to create some superb effects, narratively and visually.
