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  1. Culture
24 February 2013

Eustace

A strong debut with a compelling style somehow fails to nail the pacing.

By Alex Hern

Eustace
S.J. Harris
Jonathan Cape, 280pp, £14.99

Eight-year-old Eustace is a very sickly boy. Confined to bed through some unknown malady, he whiles his life away dreading the thin reedy soup (the only thing he can keep down); avoiding the affections of his innumerable aunts; and chatting to us, his imaginary strangers. He used to have imaginary friends, but then they were mean to him in the park, so he stopped speaking to them.

Were the struggle to just survive not such an occupation, the oddities of his life would give him much to tell us about. One day, Eustace’s brother, Frank, joined the army to meet men — which, in 1936, is a relatively ballsy thing to do — causing his mother to go into a near-terminal decline. She gave the servants the day off, and went to bed, leaving no-one to bring him any food. Quenching his hunger with narcotic cough syrup is one way to deal with that problem, but perhaps not the smartest.

Then Eustace’s uncle crawls out from under his bed, on the lam from the law. His secretary follows soon after. And then the booze and prostitutes arrive…

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If it’s not clear, Eustace is a strange book. The plot continues getting weirder from thereon in, and ends rather abruptly in a manner which is both the logical end-point and deeply fucked-up. A short epilogue in the form of a newspaper clipping provides the only real resolution any of the characters get, and emphasises how a book which begins as a potentially realistic story told through the heightened experience of a child goes well off in a different direction.

There is a clue from the start that odd things were going to happen though, and that’s Steven Harris’ artwork. One of the particular joys reading comics offers is the chance of synchronicity between artistic style and thematic elements, and Harris offers that in abundance. Rendered, as best I can tell, entirely in pencil and with copious amounts of white space marking Eustace’s fitful drifts into and out of sleep, the most immediately noticeable aspect of Harris’ style is his figure work.

Eustace looks thin, wan and sickly; his eyes are sunken deep into his head; his straw-like blond hair is combed-over in a way which suggests premature baldness. But the thing is, those are traits he shares with all Harris’ figures. Even the big, boisterous Uncle Lucian, who crawls out from under Eustace’s bed and turns his life upside down, has the same cutting cheekbones and thin lips.

While the similarity starts off as a distraction, it soon becomes clear that Harris’ intentions are more subtle. The similarity between Eustace and “Oubliette”, the first of many prostitutes who ends up in his room, becomes a minor plot point, while Frank and Eustace’s mother’s appearances aren’t exactly supposed to make them look hale and hearty either.

Similarly, a minor confusion at the start concerning Eustace’s asides to the reader is inverted quite wonderfully as it becomes clear that they are less aside than we think — and raise further questions about the poor boy’s health.

But it does all come back to that odd narrative. Weirdness is good, but when it extends to the pacing, which it does here, it’s less commendable. The whole structure of the book is someone with their foot on the accelerator of a clapped-out car pointed straight at a wall. It very slowly builds steam, eventually reaches a viable cruising speed, but then never quite slows down, and, eventually and suddenly, stops, causing pain for all concerned.

It’s not the first time that’s happened to Eustace, either. The story has its roots in a comic Harris did on the BBC’s h2g2 website (a sort of proto-wikipedia based on the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy which ended up being more of a weirdly-laid-out forum where a lot of the first wave of Britain’s online creatives congregated) which was itself suspended abruptly after six months. Harris’ other cartoon series, Paper Cuts, lasted over two years, and he returned to the site to pencil a further three last spring.

In a way, then, the book has been a decade in the making. Given the level of craft evident from a nominally first-time graphic novelist, that’s not something which will surprise you by the time you finish it. But the finish itself may be less to your taste.

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