Author: Posy Simmonds
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Rating: WARTY!
Based - very loosely - on Thomas Hardy's Far From the Madding crowd, this graphic novel was less than thrilling. It was bloated, with too much baggage to be enjoyable. It's a compilation of a serial comic strip which ran in Britain's's The Guardian newspaper.
I picked it up because it was ostensibly about a group of writers living on a farm (employed as a writer's retreat) in England, which I found interesting, and because I was also intrigued by the format, which consists of a lot of drawings and a lot of text, so it can be seen as a very wordy graphic novel or (if you squint a bit) as an illustrated regular novel.
The text and graphics are heavily and randomly mixed, some parts of the story told in pictures as in any graphic novel, and other parts in paragraphs of text, as you can see from the sample images included with this review (my blog only).
Because it was set in England, I could identify with it in some regards, but this wasn't enough for me to like it. I've also read Far from the Madding crowd, but other than a rural setting featuring sheep, I couldn't discern any connection between the two works! It's been a long time since I read Hardy's novel, so maybe my dim memory of it has impeded my making the connections to this one. OTOH, it was somewhat difficult to tell the difference between the Ovis aries sheep, and the Homo sapiens sheep, so who knows?
The story - which isn't set in the same era as Hardy's but in modern day southern England - was focused on a long-suffering wife of a slut of a husband. He's a published rutter - er writer - who uses the farm as his launch-platform to fire priapic rockets, North Korean style, all over the place in a series of affairs. He made me sick, but his wife actually made me more sick in that she repeatedly forgave him for his indiscretions - which frankly were actually much more like out-discretions.
He gets his just deserts in that real cattle symbolically take revenge upon him for walking all over his wife, but this comes through no action of his wife's. She behaves more like a lamb to the slaughter to her husband's ram than she does a protagonist. So what was to like there? Nothing. I guess ewe pays your money and ewe takes your choice (sheepish grin).
The novel has been made into a movie. The only reason I'd want to see that is because Gemma Arterton (you may recall her from Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters or Prince of Persia: Sands of Time) is featured in it as the titular character, but mitigating against that is the fact that the woman chosen to play the part of Beth, the philandering writer's wife, bears absolutely no resemblance whatsoever to the character as depicted in the graphic novel. What, is it illegal in Britain now to hire a somewhat overweight actor to play a somewhat overweight character? Do union rules force them to hire someone who is as thin as a shepherd's crook, instead? What a betrayal.
