26 Books

Sometimes reading a book is just perfect.

I’ve fallen so far behind with these posts that my memory of Under Milk Wood is of lying in the garden on one of the last really hot days of summer, drinking a long cold drink, listening to the swearing exasperated sounds of my neighbours moving out of the flat upstairs and luxuriating in the fantastic use of language on these pages.

I don’t think I’ve ever come across anything more joyfully written. There’s love and attention in every word, every tiny line that sketches the inhabitants of a Welsh village, its houses and landscape.

We start before they wake up, we follow them throughout the day and we go to sleep after they do. We come to love them as much as Thomas did.

They’re sometimes flawed people and they seem to live more in their daydreams than in reality. Sometimes the dreams are happy things, like Dai Bread the baker’s harem, or they can be traumatic, like Mr Pugh’s murder fantasies or Mrs Willy Nilly’s punishments.

The names are cartoonish and comic, the verses could have been patronising and twee but they’re never anything but wonderful.

It’s difficult to read the words without Richard Burton popping into your head once in a while, especially passages with a lot of Rs in them, but that can’t be a bad thing, can it.

This edition dispenses with the stage directions to have first voice and second voice dividing the narrative. The intorduction explains that they didn’t want to interrupt the flow by making you read ‘First voice’ and ‘Second voice’ however many times it would have been, and that in spoken form the change of tone isn’t such a split. I’m not so sure about that and would have appreciated the cue to separate the speakers

First voice often gives background, then second voice takes over when the specifics of a dream or a conversation are entered into, so you go from description of concepts to facts when you hear the difference. For example, compare the way you read these two passages, first with stage directions, then uninterrupted.

FIRST VOICE

From where you are you can hear in Cockle Row in the spring, moonless night, Miss Price, dressmaker and sweetshop-keeper, dream of

SECOND VOICE

her lover, tall as the town clock tower, Samsonsyrup-gold-maned, whacking thighed and piping hot, thunderbolt-bass’d and barnacle-breasted, flailing up the cockles with his eyes like blowlamps and scooping low over her lonely loving hotwaterbottled body.

Or, without first and second voices:

From where you are you can hear in Cockle Row in the spring, moonless night, Miss Price, dressmaker and sweetshop-keeper, dream of her lover, tall as the town clock tower, Samsonsyrup-gold-maned, whacking thighed and piping hot, thunderbolt-bass’d and barnacle-breasted, flailing up the cockles with his eyes like blowlamps and scooping low over her lonely loving hotwaterbottled body.

Loses a bit, don’t you think? I get the point that as an audio piece we wouldn’t hear a voice say ‘Second voice’ as we would reading it to ourselves, but I think you’d skip over the actual words after a few times, just taking the shape as a change marker. Still pretty marvellous though.

Watever you do with your life, make sure that at least one day of it is spent reading Under Milk Wood.

I’ve never read a graphic novel before but this, considered  groundbreaking, seemed like a good place to start. With rounded characters, complex plotting and a fractured narrative style, it’s said to be one of the first graphic novels to show that the genre could be taken seriously.

Graphic novel buffs can probably list a dozen titles that did all those things before Moore and Gibbons but that’s beside the point. Its reputation was what made me pick it up and I’m glad I did.

Watchmen

John Higgins (Colorist)
DC Comics 2004, Paperback, 416 pages, £12.99

Watchmen is set when it was written, in the mid-1980s, but it’s a different 1980s than the one we know. In this America there have been super heroes, or “costumed adventurers”, since the 1930s. They were outlawed, by those who considered them “masked vigilantes”, in the late 1970s but not before the emergence of a genuine super hero, Dr Manhattan.

The result of an accident in a radiation chamber, Dr Manhattan’s existence profoundly altered the course of the Cold War, helping America to win in Vietnam and giving Richard Nixon the chance to alter the constitution and remain in office.

The story begins with the murder of The Comedian, a retired super hero who by all accounts was not a very pleasant man. His murder troubles Rorschach, one of the few super heroes who defied the ban and continued to practice his own merciless brand of justice. Rorschach begins visiting his old associates in an attempt to find out the truth.

What follows is a complex examination of power. Nobody should have unchecked power, the book demonstrates, least of all so-called super heroes. Some of the super heroes in this book border on fascist, some are megalomaniacs and others are simply troubled. Dressing up in costume and taking to the streets to fight crime, Moore seems to argue, just is not the sort of thing normal people do.

Moore presents several models of morality and holds them all up to question without really supporting any of them. He even uses a graphic novel within the graphic novel to cleverly underscore and parallel some of the book’s main themes.

The book was originally released as a series of 12 comic books, each of which forms a chapter in the final book. Each chapter focuses mostly on a specific character, fleshing out their backstory while advancing the plot. At the end of each chapter except the final one, are several written pages – excerpts from books, doctor’s reports and so on – that add further background.

The highlight is the chapter that tells the story of Dr Manhattan, revealing as it does so that he experiences past, present and future simultaneously. The combination of words and images used to convey this is very clever indeed.

Watchmen is far more absorbing and thoughtful than I expected. I’d recommend it.