Page 45 Review by Stephen
The loneliness of fear and the catharsis of creation.
Have you ever been bullied? It's not just the immediate incidents, when you're either being set upon verbally or physically knocked: it's the constant threat of the next encounter, and the worry that causes you to carry around inside wherever you go. Lying awake at night, wondering what you could do...
For young Blue it's worse because his Dad's just died and he doesn't want to worry his Mum. But Hopper's always out there being nasty just because he can be. Blue thinks about punching him in the face repeatedly in retaliation, but of course in real life he can't because he's weaker than Hopper. But imagine if there was someone else who could - someone wild, unfettered, and savage. And that's exactly what Blue does. He fills a notebook with tale after tale of The Savage, a boy of instinct and appetite living out in the woods by the ruins of the chapel near his house, and whenever he's most troubled the ideas come most swiftly, Blue compulsively filling the pages with raw sentences adorned with scrawls and sketches. Until one day the idea comes to him that The Savage could cross the bridge into town and break into Hopper's house and teach him a lesson. And the strangest thing happens...
This is masterful. Like Gaiman, Almond understands the workings of a young person's mind and has a knack for their language and sentence structure. This he replicates not just in Blue's account of what happened, but in Blue's "graphic novel" within that prose. There the language is more direct, the spelling wayward, and the font used to replicate his handwriting loose and uneven. They are also, as Paul Gravett points out, the only sections which McKean chooses to illustrate - well, those and the climax where the stories merge and Blue finally meets The Savage for himself. As to McKean, my God but the man is on form, rendering the wild boy of the woods in lithe and sinewy flesh, his torso bare, riding a pig in a midnight rodeo frenzy or dancing round the woods like a faun in a Bacchanal. The lines are swift and the forms slightly disfigured under a heavy shadow - impressions of what's pictured in Blue's imagination - and they're all washed over with foliage green or moonlight blue. He's also astute in what not to illustrate, particularly towards the end, where Blue discovers that The mute Savage has a visual imagination of his own.
Coming back to Almond, it's no easy trick to make a tale like this convincing where you're blurring boundaries of reality and fiction even when the reality itself is pure fiction. He's also steered clear of simplistic didacticism, choosing to lead gently by the hand rather than shove the reader forward. It's at this point that I usually fall into the trap I constantly set myself of pontificating over whether it's illustrated prose or sequential art, but McKean's interpretation is actually vital to the whole so for once I'll hop over that pit of pedantry and thank the pair for a damn good children's book which I relished as an adult.
