Habibi

Craig Thompson, 2011

(March 2012)

I really don’t know what to say about this. The only definite thing is that this book is gorgeous, inside and out. The publishers have given it a very worthy binding and the illustrations are beautiful - stunningly so. I’d love to get some of the original artwork, but it’s probably well out of my reach. As for where I stand on the rest of it, I’m not sure.

  

As I said at the beginning, these aren’t really reviews. Sometimes though a book demands to be more than a prompt for asides about my technological commute-occupier of choice. Occasionally, if I already have a pretty strong idea about what I want to say, I'll have a look at some other reviews and see how they match up. It’s partly why I went to town a bit on Loco’s book; lots of people were saying 'it makes you think,' but no-one seemed to be saying what it made them think in any depth.

I’ve avoided pre-emptive googling for this though. If I’m going to be uncertain, I should at least take ownership of that uncertainty. Habibi is set in a fictional Middle Eastern country with a name like a medieval Eastern European principality. And that slight note of dissonance continues to sound throughout the book. Lots of little things that don’t quite fit. A couple of snails boarding the Ark making wisecracks about being hermaphrodites, Issac and Ishmael’s absurdly comic of expressions of relief, and Noah the fisherman, who despite being insane has still somehow managed to construct a Heath-Robinson water purifier.

It's extends to content as well as tone. As those examples would suggest, religion, specifically the Abrahamic religions of the book, is a major theme, as are: race, gender, oppression, survival, sacrifice, motherhood, childhood, slavery, capitalism, modernity, tradition, numerology, calligraphy, environmental degradation, and sex. Let's not forget the sex. You're definitely not allowed to forget the sex.

That’s a big old list, and I think this is where the dissonance comes from. The net is cast a little too widely and a lot of little things, and a few big ones, wriggle through. The persistent cracks in tone make it hard to know exactly how straight to take it. It's the same problem as with meta-bigotry in comedy; you have to hit the spot every single time or it's just plain old bigotry. Given the pretty grim situations the two leads consistently get placed in, the ending also feels a little trite and sentimental.

It’s well worth reading, but I can easily see how many people might have serious issues with it. Which is perhaps exactly what ‘well worth reading’ should imply.