MADreads

Apocalypse on a personal level

April 16th, 2009 Dennis - Central

This is the second go-round for Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean’s graphic novel Signal to Noise, it having been published previously around 1992 in a somewhat different form.  And while the thrill factor I usually get from reading new works by Neil doesn’t surround this volume, it’s still a pretty thought- and introspection-provoking work.  The apocalypse referred to in this review’s title is brought up for discussion early on in the story and is a thematic element throughout.

The year is 1999 and a film director in London has just received the news that he has cancer.  Rather than undergo treatment for it, he begins writing a film that he knows he will never have the chance to complete.  It’s the story of a small mountain village on the last day of the last month of the year 999.  The residents are gathering outside their village in the snow, waiting for the end of the world that they know is coming.  The director becomes obsessed with finishing the story.  Partly for the people in the film he is writing– if he doesn’t write down their story, those (fictitious) people will die with him.

And so he writes.  We’re seeing the images that’s he’s contructing in his head, and reading the dialogue that will be in the film, but the story of his last days is added as well, his contacts with his producer and his interactions with the upstairs neighbor who checks in on him.  And, of course, his thoughts about his life and work and the death that he knows is coming for him, just as surely as the people of that mountain village know that their world will come to an end.  It’s a story seemingly without much hope, just an approaching sadness with the inevitability we all seem to want to avoid facing, and a past we can look back on filled with cherished memories and haunting regrets.

Neil Gaiman’s narrative style works as well as it ever has, even though the story seems so bleak.  (And please, if you haven’t yet read any of Gaiman’s work, do yourself a favor.  It is that good.)  Dave McKean’s art is, from my point of view anyway, less user-friendly than a typical comic-book fan would expect.  He tends to use an abstract style that demands more attention than is usually demanded by most graphic novels.  For instance, there’s a sequence late in the book where the people on the snowy mountain are viewed from a great distance, their dark figures against the snow appearing to be some familiar pattern, which is revealed in a transition to a panel farther along which seems similar to the mountain scene, but slowly reveals itself to be the ridges of someone’s fingerprint in extreme close-up.

That’s partly the point of the whole work anyway.  The book title refers to the meaning (the signal) we’re trying to discern from all the streams of information (the noise) that threaten to overwhelm us.  Like the snow in a poorly received video connection (pre-cable/satellite days) that obscures the message we know is buried in there somewhere.

This is a highly evocative work, filled with nuance and sadness and wonder. And hope.

I should note that McKean includes some additional art works, interspersed throughout the book that exist separate from the main story that are even more experimental.  While they’re compelling in their own way, they don’t relate directly to the main story written with Gaiman.

Entry Filed under: Graphic Novel