Gorgeous, if deeply annoying.
Eric Drooker, Blood Song: A Silent Ballad (Harcourt, 2002)
I knew this book was going to annoy me while reading Joe Sacco's introduction (which, by the way, is excellent); he introduces Drooker as "hard-left" and goes on to explore the themes found here in light of that. And, as I expected after reading that-- I had no idea what the book was actually about when I grabbed it off the library shelf-- yeah, I found it intensely annoying. So why does a book that drove me bats get four stars?
Because it's not the tale, it's the way you tell the tale. Had I not first read Sacco's introduction, I might not have glommed onto everything Drooker was on about here, and thus, it wouldn't have annoyed me. Because Drooker knows how to tell a tale and let the politics bleed through. Which I find amazing, not because he did so, but because this is the second book I'm reviewing this week where a message writer actually gets it right (the other being China Mieville's Un Lun Dun).
Drooker's book-- which other than a Melville epigram on the opening page is entirely wordless-- concerns a young woman who lives in a small village somewhere. The first few pages show us a day in the life; a father catches fish and takes it home to the family, where it is cooked and eaten, and everyone goes to sleep. Normal stuff. The next morning, the girl goes off to get water. When she gets back to the village-- well, this is why I didn't know what was coming. The back matter doesn't spoil the story, so I'm not going to. I'll just say that things are not at all what they seem in this world. From there, the girl finds her way to a much larger city, and the latter half of the book concerns what happens to her there.
Drooker's genius lies in his ability to make a very muted palette of colors (with a few notable exceptions; there's a yellow butterfly who recurs throughout the story, for example) convey so much information, with no words involved. The girl is walking back through the forest with the water, and her trusty canine companion is chasing that yellow butterfly. Then, suddenly, both dog and butterfly stop at the edge of the woods. It seems like such a small thing, but subtle differences in the dog's posture, the sudden closing of the gap between them, hint at something momentous. That's good stuff right there. Very effective storytelling. Drooker also has a wonderful eye for pace (and reflecting the pace in the characters, such as the closing of the gap between the dog and the butterfly), and that, more than the wordlessness of the book, makes the pages fly by, for you will stop at regular intervals just to appreciate what it is Drooker is doing with the way his characters are portrayed. This is not to say Drooker doesn't get heavy-handed now and then (the framing pages of starting with the Milky Way, then drilling down to the scene, and going back up at the end), and my perverse conservative imp wants to intentionally misinterpret the final scene before that last pullout, but despite my distaste for the story itself-- which is manipulative and predictable-- when I closed the book, I knew I'd been in the presence of someone who does, surely know how to tell a story, and tell it well. ****
Amazing, clear, simple
I find "Blood song" amazing. I mean, amazing **********. A big story contained in a small book. A girl in a South Asian forest goes to fetch some water, and in the meantime her world is destroyed. She gets into a boat with her dog and starts rowing. Is the book a story of an immigrant from Vietnam? There are no explanations attached to the pictures. The story feels large, universal. It's the journey of a small individual in the world governed by powers: armies, fire, the ocean, racial domination. I thought crosses my mind; this could be a great animation movie, something in the style of 'Princess Mononoke', but, no, this book is a great artform as it is, a story compressed in five minutes flipping through a silent, breathtaking book. Amazing, clear, simple graphics, and not even a single word. I'm stunned.
I've looked up the reviews on Amazon and some of them accuse the book of preaching. Hmm, even preaching can be made into art, can't it?
Eric Drooker's Blood Song
This is a narrative related entirely in pictures, in the mode of such previous artist-storytellers as Lynd Ward. The novel begins in a nameless Asian country (Vietnam during the war?) and follows the central character (a young Asian woman, also nameless, of course) through the jungles and across the ocean to a large Western city (maybe New York), where further adventures ensue. This is probably enough of the plot to give you the idea, without giving anything away. A certain amount of surrealism is present, though perhaps less than in Flood!, a previous work by Drooker.
Drooker combines a unique, expressive drawing style with what I would regard as simplistic political posturing. (Leftist politics also seems to be part of the novel-without-words mindset; once again Lynd Ward could be cited.) Unlike the black-and-white scratchboard art of Flood! (a book I liked a bit more), Drooker uses color this time, albeit in a limied, almost monochromatic way -- the story is presented mostly in blue and black, with occasional stand-out flashes of more vivid color (red, yellow, orange) to accentuate a scene or a point.
All in all, I liked Blood Song fairly well, for the narrative skill (presenting a coherent story without ever using a written word is tricky) and the artwork. As for the politics, I'm willing to listen to any point of view, but I don't like propaganda presented as art. I believe that Drooker's work transcends propaganda, however, and truly tells a story.
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