White Rapids by Pascal Blanchet

White Rapids
Pascal Blanchet, 2007, 156p.

White Rapids is a short, bold graphic work by young Quebec illustrator Pascal Blanchet, translated from French. Blanchet's interests are obvious from the outset: Architecture and mid-20th century graphic design. His 1950s palette is subtle, warm and consistent throughout, but styles mix and blend - some Googie swash here, Deco there, Streamline Moderne - though all with bold flat and architectural shapes.

Blanchet wants to tell the story of the rise and fall of a company town in remote Quebec. A common story in Canada, this one is unusual in that it is not a mining community, but rather a community built around a hydroelectric project. Founded in the late 1920s (see excerpt for lovely 20s Deco), peaking after the war, the town is then automated into obsolescence in the 1970s. He does tell this story, but only the lightest wisp of it - the bare essentials. There are no characters¹, only scenery, which is sometimes peppered with figures. But the scenery! Blanchet is a master with the architectural details, with perfectly coloured bevel and shadow. His set pieces are brooding, wistful and exciting, with a dynamic perspective.

There is a story here to be told in just the architecture. The work starts with the dramatic deco lines and early 20th century offsets of the Aldred building in Montreal², but tries to manufacture a matching suspense and drama in the narrative that doesn't make any sense to me. Then we have the dam at the centre of the story, with a sense of tension and release that made me need to use the washroom. And then the buildings in the town, pulsing and murmuring away - then later empty but not consumed, warm and with a sense of dust. All perfectly vibrant and powerful, despite the muted palatte.

Excerpt from White Rapids

Just as the drama at the beginning of the story rings false, the drama at the end is thin and twee. In the middle, there is some sort of sing-a-long tour of the town and its surroundings which I think is intended to stitch together various views, but which instead distracted me from the views.

Part of the problem here is that this is a graphic novel but not "comic" style - there are no panel divisions, and no convention of word balloons to lean on to structure the text. Full page and full spread artwork without divides and borders is perfect for his style, but he hasn't figured out how to integrate text. My inclination is that he simply shouldn't have - it consistently distracted from the work. Or perhaps I want him to delete all of the text to rid this work of its most painful aspect, the monumentally bad use of font. Each page has a distracting new font wedged into the artwork. Some are merely hard to read, others are ugly and hard to read. The undisciplined use of type and text here is mysterious, considering how disciplined his line and colouring is.

It is possible to have an extremely pleasurable reading if you gloss over parts of this work. The reader knows what the plot arc is from the back cover, so ignore the text (and the humans) and just look at the set pieces as they move by. In that reading, the post-war years with their supposed optimism and domesticity are one of the ephemeral moments of the century, quickly washed away by late century pragmatism.

Notes:

1. Okay, there is one realized character: a "legendary fish" named "The General", a trope so stale that The Simpsons mocked it a full 20 years ago. I'll be generous and note that General Sherman was a catfish, and The General was a sturgeon.
2. The Aldred Building still stands, and there are lots of great photos online. The excerpt is an establishing view of this building from early in the piece.

Kiirstin also reviewed this book at A Book a Week, and we had a short discussion about it which is posted after her review.

My Man Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse

A early collection of Wodehouse short stories, now in the public domain¹. There are eight short stories here, four of which are very early Jeeves & Wooster stories, the other four feature Reggie Pepper, who is obviously an early draft of Wooster, sans Jeeves.

My Man Jeeves
P.G Wodehouse, 1919

The Reggie Pepper stories have their odd moments, but Wooster without Jeeves is quickly tiresome and clearly out of balance.

The Jeeves stories are narrated by Wooster in a light, collegial tone with a double-helping of jazz-age aristocratic colloquialisms. Wooster is a member of the English idle classes, in a world of school chums, country houses, perhaps a show after dinner at the Drone’s club. Wooster isn’t particularly sharp, but the bulk of the young men in these stories are even duller, stumbling into money trouble or (more often) a problem of how to attract an engagement or escape from one. They all come to Wooster, but they come for Jeeves.

Jeeves is Wooster’s personal valet, with his own preposterous language. Where Wooster’s exposition is a meandering jaunt around the park, Jeeves is stiff and precise in an equivalently roundabout way. The prime charm, at least in these early stories, is the spousal dialogue between these two; it is extravagantly wrought.

Wodehouse apparently came to plotting late, and the plotting in these stories is pretty thin. I’ve been somewhat spoiled, in that I had watched these stories in season three of Clive Exton’s excellent TV adaptation². Exton took several of these stories and intertwined and even connected them, while retaining the bulk of the admirable dialogue in place. Stripped and split pea like this, they feel a thin soup indeed.

All four Jeeves stories are worth it for the dialogue. The Reggie Pepper stories are interesting as a precursor, but to channel Wooster for a moment: if I read them again, I wouldn’t, if you see what I mean.

Notes:

1. Available from Project Gutenberg, I read it on a Kobo.
2. Exton's series is great, but these stories all take place in New York rather than London or the English country side, and the obvious production challenges make these episodes pretty claustrophobic and a bit dull.

An Advancement of Learning by Reginald Hill

An Advancment of Learning
Reginald Hill, 1971, 254p

The second novel featuring Dalziel and Pascoe, Reginald Hill's Yorkshire detectives. I read the first novel about a year ago, and wasn't immediately inspired to continue with the series. One of the problems with reading mystery series from the beginning is that the first volume is rarely great. The author is figuring out the characters, the setting, and finding their voice and angle - even more so if this is the authors first series. For example, the first outings of P.D. James's Dalgliesh and Ian Rankin's Rebus - not terrible, but obviously not ready.

Hill's second outing is much more enjoyable. A series of grotesquely improbable murders occurs on a small and somewhat remote college campus. The setting is cozy-style - an insulated and incestuous knot of suspects, but appropriately for its time (the early 1970s) it is lashed through with generational and sexual tension, not to mention generational and sexual experimentation. Superintendent Dalziel is older, corpulent, coarse and direct. His sergeant, Pascoe, is young and university educated - a rarity in a policeman at the time. Pascoe's social science education is a target for constant mockery Dalziel, and the academic setting exacerbates his scorn.

Though credibility is stretched from the starter's pistol, the story is interesting and well told. Hill excels with his secondary characters, though he is more aggressive with scorn and with lust than most. The old maids are generally savaged, and the campus sweater candy is drenched in drool. Largely filtered through the protagonists, the sexism is era-appropriate, though somewhat dissonant to my 21st century ears.

Like James, Hill is concerned with the lives and histories of the primary figures in his mysteries, rather than the mechanics of crime. It makes a richer story, and Hill's writing is thoughtful without being heavy. In this case, though, the climax leaves us with sort of limp motivations for the central crimes. In this book, as with the first, Hill's crimes are improbable and his mysteries a bit soggy, but the thoughtful writing and considered characters makes the flaws easy to forgive.