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A review by gluckenstein
Here by Richard McGuire
4.0
No doubt a smash in Tralfamadore!
One of those media objects that attempts to move its focus from the default — human characters — to something else, in this instance a place. I thought this a more radical and, for that, effortlessly successful experiment of this kind than something like Richard Power's The Overstory that labor to let its readers see the world through the eyes(?) of a tree.
There's a tricky balance a work like this has to maintain: not to fall back too fast or too hard to traditional plotting, which would render the whole undertaking a failure, and yet, ultimately, tell a story (or convey a message, which, for all intents and purposes of mine, is the same thing).
After one read-through I'm not sure how detailed a picture of the generations of the "here" room's inhabitants the slow accumulations of details over about 300 pages really draw. The main thread and organising principle of the book, anyway, seems to be simultaneously shattering of the illusion of permanence that home brings to its inhabitants and celebration of the continuity of human experience, or, broader, life itself. This is accomplished by a succession of atemporal resonances and juxtapositions, virtuosic for their blending of various snapshots of different 3-d spaces as well as different modulations of the art style, but also less impressive to a degree than, say, similar montages in Man with a Movie Camera for consisting of things that are — you know — made up.
Talking of made up, glimpses into the future, in my opinion, is where the graphic novel is at its least imaginative. History lesson of the vaguely Star-Trek future is in particular such a corny and uninspired choice. Encoding of the book's title in the charade scene near the end registers as a clever but superfluous postmodern flourish.
One of those media objects that attempts to move its focus from the default — human characters — to something else, in this instance a place. I thought this a more radical and, for that, effortlessly successful experiment of this kind than something like Richard Power's The Overstory that labor to let its readers see the world through the eyes(?) of a tree.
There's a tricky balance a work like this has to maintain: not to fall back too fast or too hard to traditional plotting, which would render the whole undertaking a failure, and yet, ultimately, tell a story (or convey a message, which, for all intents and purposes of mine, is the same thing).
After one read-through I'm not sure how detailed a picture of the generations of the "here" room's inhabitants the slow accumulations of details over about 300 pages really draw. The main thread and organising principle of the book, anyway, seems to be simultaneously shattering of the illusion of permanence that home brings to its inhabitants and celebration of the continuity of human experience, or, broader, life itself. This is accomplished by a succession of atemporal resonances and juxtapositions, virtuosic for their blending of various snapshots of different 3-d spaces as well as different modulations of the art style, but also less impressive to a degree than, say, similar montages in Man with a Movie Camera for consisting of things that are — you know — made up.
Talking of made up, glimpses into the future, in my opinion, is where the graphic novel is at its least imaginative. History lesson of the vaguely Star-Trek future is in particular such a corny and uninspired choice. Encoding of the book's title in the charade scene near the end registers as a clever but superfluous postmodern flourish.