Sabrina by Nick Drnaso

The first graphic novel to be longlisted for the Booker Prize.

Sabrina reminds me a lot of The Killing. Forbrydelsen, that is, the Danish original. I've never seen the American adaptation, and never previously wished I had. Like the first series of Forbrydelsen, Sabrina examines in deep detail the effects of one young woman's murder on those around her, rippling out to those a degree or two removed, and then into the media and the political landscape. But it's very American: resolutely unglamorous, uncool middle-American, where nearly everyone is slightly overweight and not noticeably fashionable - maybe wearing Walmart clothes - lives in featureless modern housing and works in equally blank, soulless offices. Life lived to the sound of aircon hum under polystyrene-panelled ceilings and clicks on clickbait, a state-of-part-of-the nation novel. There are slankets and vertical blinds. His wife left after “she said I was detached and oblivious”. It’s a reflection and image of white middle-America in the late 2010s, the way The Simpsons used to be in the 90s – grown anhedonic, wired, tired, crueller and more paranoid, turned inward.

So after that paean, why only 4 stars? WTF? I’m just not that keen on the art style. I’m fussy about that with graphic novels and comics, and with the 'big' subject matter and high production values, I'd have liked more detail and realism. On the plus side, though, the rounded, almost childlike friendliness of it conveys how comfortable parts of America are with mile upon mile of buildings that would depress many Europeans, with things like the place of the military in US society, and with shock-jocks – and the paucity of detail and shading communicates the flat bleakness of normality, and of existing - just being not fighting - through shitty circumstances. (Two big half-page detailed panels stood out: one of a kindergarten - a page in a children’s book a character opens - and one of an auto sales lot. Another page from the same children’s book produced a fascinating sense of uncanny-valley dislocation, showing a spot-the-difference that has 25 differences instead of the stated 20, and two panels of animals at a dancing lesson where a lion looms, with unspoken sense of threat, over a mouse who’s apparently meant to be an equal, and not prey.)

Drnaso is really good on other types of detail. It’s not often in books that characters talk about things like getting a second opinion from dentists, or a trivial entertainment news story, without it leading to or meaning anything else. This is real, mundane existence trundling on, while not too far away, someone else is shattered by a life-defining event. Some things just seem better delivered visually: the simplicity of 11.34 on a clock owned by a character who works a back shift and has just got up; we see a holiday happening rather than reading one of the many hackneyed ways it could be verbalised. You can show the layout of websites the reader may recognise, and it seems undeniable that panels better evoke the state of being tired in half-light and clicking on stupid shit, and for a longer duration, than most novelists (other than maybe Tao Lin) would bother with. The art style really seems to come into its own here, as part of the cocooned feeling people have when they do such things.

It was around pp.70-80 when I felt real heft from this book; it had been seeming pretty clever, but then, something was sealed in the way it addressed what happened when the videotape of Sabrina’s murder surfaced: the local journalists, middle-aged and totally uncool but professional and human, the police interactions with the characters, and details like the unstereotypical realness of a landlord who wore shorts.

The only drawback was that, a bit later, it didn't really match the verbal and emotional urgency of real-life accounts of being caught up in conspiracy theories, like the account by the father of one of the Sandy Hook children. Or was that due to Calvin's personality and occupational experience? (Also, I wasn’t sure if Calvin would really be able to get the Special Investigations job after this happened. Would he not be too high a risk because of the intense scrutiny from obsessives? I would have liked it to have been explained if it didn’t matter.)

But if real-life conspiracy theory shows say things like the fictional Albert Douglas radio programme does here, then Drnaso just made me totally grok why people - people like a few friends of friends, former acquaintances and so on, not just ‘random idiots’ - fall for these things. At time of writing, I’ve never heard more than a two-minute clip of stuff like Alex Jones, focused on a contentious issue. Not all this preamble about the state of the world that would appeal across the political spectrum, and which you’d have to be doing really, really well in your life, and be at least semi-detached from the news, not to agree with at least somewhat… I’m nodding along and nodding along and only when he says the bit about the [US] government carrying out 9/11, or inventing shooting incidents, do I reject and switch off. And if the verisimilitude of the show Drnaso has created is anything like that of the online articles here, some of the real presenters must be very much like that.

Sabrina feels very very real, yet always manages to swerve being too ‘on the nose’, to mix metaphors. The closest to that Drnaso gets is when characters, having hoped for some distracting TV pabulum, end up switching on to (sod’s law; bleary, fatalistic sod’s law) a news item about the 9/11 museum, and a senior staff member at the exhibit says: “we want guests to leave with an increased sense of the value of a human life, that each one is important and won't be forgotten”… but then it’s only become even blunter to show this because of American policy and events that happened in the last few months, since the book was written.

Even if, like me, you don’t really like much of the American culture served up wherever you look, I think there’s something valuable in Sabrina: the tendencies of the media and the online world shown here are becoming almost global. Or maybe it’s even good because of not liking it, because it illustrates where all this stuff is coming from, the heart of a white Americanness that’s implicit background in that Hollywood blockbuster or New York literary novel: the Joe Averages in the flyover states who are the market or the silent cultural antagonist, but rarely talked about (at least for foreigners) in a way that is unvarnished but also, because of using fewer words and not referring to anyone’s voting habits, basically respectful.

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I wanted to write about Sabrina as a work in itself, unconnected to its Booker longlisting. Quite apart from the fact that the reviews on Goodreads will probably stay online considerably longer than the 2018 Booker Prize longlist is of interest to anyone other than a handful of geeks, Drnaso cannot be blamed for creating a work that isn’t up to Booker standards, as some posts do. A literary novelist publishing in Britain would always have it in mind. But a graphic novel has never been longlisted for the Booker before. (Although I consider that, like a female Doctor Who, it was well overdue - something some of us expected to happen quite some time ago, given prior discussions in the media*.) So it probably never would have crossed a graphic novelist’s mind to have a Booker-type set of expectations in mind. I think it’s unfair to star-rate Sabrina using its Booker Prize appropriateness as a criterion, although ranking it in the longlist as a separate exercise is an entirely different matter.

The Booker should be introducing readers to the work of authors that will wow them. I'm not quite as bowled over by Sabrina as I was by Paul Beatty's The Sellout or Richard Powers' Orfeo but it is very very good, and I'd certainly read more by Nick Drnaso if I had the opportunity.

(read and reviewed August 2018; the review on Goodreads.)


* Postscript with further explanation: in 2013, the chair of that year's Booker judges and one other said that they would welcome graphic novels and would have been happy to list one if they had found one good enough. As far as I'm concerned it's been pending since then. And as far as Doctor Who is concerned, I read something as a kid in the 1980s which suggested that there would be a female Doctor sooner or later, and it seemed like a matter of course, not least because a female prime minister was all I was old enough to remember at that point. So it seemed bizarre that people still thought there was anything odd about this recently. It's impossible now to trace where I read it (I thought it was the Radio Times) but it may have been extrapolating from a 1981 interview in which Tom Baker said “Well, you’re making an assumption that it’s going to be a man.” Or perhaps someone in the media had a tip about the behind the scenes discussions from 1986, which came to light in 2010.

The Long Take by Robin Robertson

Longlisted for the 2018 Booker Prize. A first for a verse novel?


I bloody love long narrative poems, and I wish there were a lot more modern novels in this form. Not sure why I find poetry faster to read - know it isn't the case for everyone. For me, it goes straight into the veins, and it omits the extraneous, leaving only the most vital impressions. Or maybe it's the presentation: shorter lines and more white space on the page make it visually easier to take in.

It was the form that made me keen to read this, but the US setting held little interest. If a prose novel about a demobbed Canadian serviceman adrift in post-WWII America had been longlisted for the Booker, I'd have been in no hurry to get round to it. And if The Long Take had been set anywhere other than North America, I could have seen myself giving it five stars.

I haven't read anything about Robin Robertson yet; it would be interesting to learn why a Scottish poet chose to set a long work there. I have a hunch that the protagonist, Walker, was one of those characters who appears to a writer from the subconscious: a British writer's use of Dad's Army names Walker and Pike for characters who bear little resemblance (other than Pike's youth) to their sitcom namesakes feels like the product of a dream.

The Scottishness of Nova Scotia, where Walker grew up, was a revelation, full of shielings and strathspeys and slaters. (The last of course being a better word than the standard English, reflecting the creatures' hard, flat dark-panelled appearance; 'woodlouse' has always sounded like it ought to mean another, leggier, creepy-crawly.) The place felt Scottish or British even without dialect words: at first in the nostalgic passages about nature, I thought Robertson was writing about Scotland, perhaps from a different viewpoint, maybe his own, and perhaps we would hear later in these sections about the writing process. (There turns out to be no such meta content.) He is at his most vividly poetic and metaphorical when writing about animals and nature - these are largely asides in this book, such as the spider that winches itself from the lampshade in Walker's apartment: were I to read more of his work, it would be nature poetry I'd look for first.

Thank you to this thread for a couple of insights. Firstly, putting me on the alert for elements of contemporary relevance; what jumped out at me, as if it had been highlighted, was the homelessness problem in San Francisco, Portland and Seattle, and characters' criticism of the government and media being more concerned with Russians it said Russians rather than Soviets) and McCarthyism than with the housing shortage. A modern feature of the narrative, when set against 1940s attitudes and writing, is that characters are never explicitly described by their race: there were once or twice names that might be Latin, or Native American, and characters who were explicitly stated to be black only once it came up in conversation, in both instances due to racists. (This approach seeks to transmit a sense of comradeship between men in the story as veterans and/or as homeless, regardless of colour, and to imply Walker's progressive outlook, in contrast with some of his contemporaries.) Secondly, a point which is a spoiler if you enjoy working out conundra while you read - but as I read a good chunk of The Long Take whilst I had a headache so bad it hurt even to put my head on a pillow, and could not have read anything very complex, it was simply useful: that Pike is probably more than one person. I would add that I think he only becomes so in the final chapter, 1953. As Walker's mental state deteriorates, Pike becomes a generalised identity he maps on to various antagonists.

The story sometimes felt nebulous, but the final chapter (about 1/3 of the book) pulled it together - and retrospectively it became increasingly obvious that this randomness and half-rootedness, interspersed with episodes of purposefulness, had always reflected Walker's state of mind, as trauma seeped in, even when intrusive memories of horrific army experiences were not at the forefront of his memories. I hadn't bonded with the book until that final third; what led me to was seeing the trajectory of how Walker worked with a group of disadvantaged people with whom he felt an affinity, only to later find his own situation deteriorating so that he gets closer and closer to becoming one of them; to being on the other side of the desk, object not subject. A revelation during that chapter also explains certain points earlier in the story. Though are we meant to be sure that Walker did those things - or to wonder if he imagined them in his traumatised state?

But The Long Take is not all psychological drama. It's immersed in the culture of its time. There is jazz. And it is a paean to US film noir of the late 1940s and 1950s, set alongside the messy real lives of some of the men who watched it in movie theaters, and witnessed it being filmed in the streets where they went about their daily lives. It is suffused with references to favourite scenes (the 'long take' is from Joseph H. Lewis' Gun Crazy aka Deadly is the Female), and characters are described as looking like actors of the period. (And at least one, from a 1958 film seems to denote a lapse of time once years stop being mentioned explicitly.) If you like these films this book will probably be rather amazing. I've hardly seen any of the films referenced, yet something is still added in the general understanding, as they conjure visuals for Walker's story in trenchcoat-clad black and white, and in the symbiosis between man and city, Walker disintegrating as 1950s LA becomes less human in scale, more corrupt and more corporate. (I could imagine just how much I'd love an equivalent prose-poem shot through with cinematic movements I know well, such as French New Wave, or British films of the 1960s and 70s. Or, for that matter, classic Ealing films being made on the other side of the Atlantic contemporaneously with these noirs.)

It is an impressive work in pulling together, as poetry and narrative, elements of this era that the public rarely regards together. The modern idealisation of the Greatest Generation, bulldog spirit and so forth disregards the extent to which the war was traumatic for many, and that not everyone could keep calm and carry on, no matter how much they wanted to. Noir and jazz, still seen as epitomes of cool were created against this backdrop. The death of Charlie Parker, born the same year as the protagonist, is starkly announced to make his and the reader's blood run cold. This is echoed (two years) later with the bombshell news "Bogart is dead", like another big bump downwards in Walker's trajectory: an end of an era and an icon of always keeping it together under pressure. In a very subtle way, using history, cinema and music, Robertson appears to be looking at the demands on men to keep up a façade, and how things may be when they can't. (The white men in the book are dealing with war trauma, the black men with that and racial violence.) But interpretation is optional here: this is a story so fully about itself and its setting (absolutely no sledgehammers here) that it also doesn't have to be anything else.

(read & reviewed August 2018; the review on Goodreads.)