Deborah Levy is a novelist, playwright and short story writer whose work explores memory and the messy intersections between identity, repression and depression – the people we are, the people we think we are and the chasm that can lie between. Her two most recent novels, Swimming Home and Hot Milk have been, among other things, powerful investigations of identity under threat. They are populated by characters who can’t seem to fully catch sight of themselves or each other. Stardust Nation, a graphic novel adapted from one of her short stories in collaboration with the illustrator Andrzej Klimowski, is a troubling crystallisation of many of these ideas using the graphic form.
Tom Banbury is a high-flying advertising executive; alcoholic but successful, he relies on “a slight shamanistic edge”. As he puts it, “it is our job to crash into the unconscious of the consumer and broadcast a number of messages that end with ‘buy this product’.” Unfortunately for Tom, as we begin the story, we learn that his colleague and friend Nick Gazidis has “somehow extended his brief as Head of Finance and crashed inside ME”. What this means is that Nick has absorbed traumatic memories from Tom’s past and is repeating them back as if they were his own. This is not the first time Levy has explored the thin membrane between characters in her work – in Hot Milk she writes about a mother and daughter, the daughter limping when the mother does, “my legs are her legs” – but here she takes this idea to darker and more surreal lengths. Tom’s is a past full of trauma: he had a violent father who “uncomfortable with the lack of excitement on home leave, he did tend to start small wars against his five-year-old son – usually with his leather belt”. Nick suffers a breakdown as a result of “taking on” Tom’s past.
It has been observed that Levy is a writer who builds her characters from inside out. She is far less interested in telling us how tall they are or what colour hair they have than in capturing the flickering self from within. And this presents an interesting tension within this work. In many ways, illustrations would seem to remove the need for many of the traditional hand-holding of literary fiction – she did this, I felt like this, he looked like this – but to begin with I found myself reaching for more. The central conceit of the story is powerful, but none of the characters seem to react to it. Klimowski’s art, too, seems purposefully designed to deflect attempts at realist interpretation – the characters look as if they come from propaganda posters issued by their own broken psyches. It took me a while to get used to how everything in this story seems to be drifting past just out of reach. This is partly a representation of Tom’s way of coping with his past – “While he beat me I used to imagine myself somewhere else, away from Lt-Col. Banbury, away from my forlorn mother.” Here he is shown in space as an astronaut. At another time of anxiety – telling his tutor that he is afraid, he projects himself outside on to the birds he is watching, and becomes a boy-headed bird.
There is a horrifying, dreamlike logic to the relationship between text and imagery. Nick ends up in an asylum, confused about who he is, guarded by his sister, who Tom starts imagining as a guard dog, and dreaming about her as a three-headed Cerberus figure. By the end it seems that Tom’s plan may have been to empty his bad memories into the vessel of Nick, that his reticence in showing an emotional response to Nick taking on his past is because it’s all part of his plan. Which makes the moment when Tom tells Nick what eventually happened to his father even darker – Tom washing his hands of the guilt, passing it on to Nick.
Swimming Home was famously too literary for literary London. Although two Booker listings have presumably put paid to that, this is still a brave and unapologetically difficult book. For a readership used to the more straight-forwardly confessional tone of the memoir, which is still the graphic form that receives the most attention, things may be too oblique, never resolving themselves.
Yet Stardust Nation leaves a mark, an echo of something unsettling made more unsettling by pinpricks of realism. There is a kind of joy in this slippage, in giving up on realism and delineation. As Tom says, “Don’t be frightened. We are all of us breathing in atoms that were once forged in the furnace of a star. There are tiny shards of your life inside them and their life is inside you too.”
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