Form and Void

We've jumped on from the end of ‘Fall And The River'. Cerebus and Jaka are now travelling with Ham Ernestway and his wife Mary. Ham is of course a Hemingway pastiche, and Cerebus, who we shouldn't forget is still a little gender confused after Astoria's revelation back in Reads, hero worships this manliest of men. It's nor reciprocated though. Ham is taciturn and uncommunicative at the best of times, and it is left to Mary to do most of the talking.

And that's where things go wrong for this book. What Mary largely chooses to talk about it is a journey she and Ham took to a continent that doesn't half look like our Africa , whereupon Dave embarks on his reinterpretation of the real Mary Hemingway's African journals. It is, of course, brilliantly composed and drawn, but it has no connection at all to the Cerebus story, not even the tangential brushed kiss of Melmoth.
For a good chunk of this book, it feels as though Cerebus has become an encumbrance to Dave, and he is telling the story he wants to tell while inwardly cursing his 300 issue promise. It's a hint of how Dave's post-Cerebus career could have turned out - he could have pioneered and mastered the biographical comics form. The sequence goes on for dozens and dozens of pages. It's very well done, but it's not particularly interesting, and it tells us nothing about Cerebus, nothing about Jaka, and nothing about their relationship.

After the tale is told, the party retire. Later that night, Cerebus hears a gunshot, and finds Ham dead from a shot to the head. It is strongly implied that Mary has, at the very least, facilitated his suicide. This sends Cerebus into deep shock, and he blinks in and out of coherent thought for a while. When he regains his balance, we find him and Jaka in a raging snowstorm, trapped in a flimsy tent with dwindling supplies. Things are looking bleak, until Cerebus dreams of Rick, looking like he did back in Jaka's Story but with wounds to his hands that suggest the Cirinists have crucified him (I'm pretty sure this was hinted at earlier in Going Home, but I can't remember where). Dream Rick tells Cerebus how to reach safety, and also tells him that someone will come to him with a book. Oh my, will they. Will they ever.

Cerebus follows the advice, and, buoyed by the miracle, the couple progress through an increasingly desolate northern landscape until they reach Sand Hills Creek. Cerebus does not get the welcome he expected. His parents have died during his long absence, and his not being there to attend them makes him anathema to a small town rooted in old ways. An angry Cerebus drives Jaka away, back into the arms of the Cirinists who have been shadowing them all the way. A solicitous Mother hands her Missy (who had been left behind in the tent), Jaka clutches her to her breast and is driven off, inconsolably weeping. And that is the last we ever see of her.
Goodbye, Jaka. Wherever you ended up, I'm sure you came to like it more than you would have Sand Hills Creek. It was never going to work out with you and Cerebus, and I think both of you knew it. All the little nags and needles you threw at each other over the last two books showed that, no matter how good a game you both talked. That's the story of these last two phonebooks, really. A doomed romance, with both parties telling each other it's working. I don't know if Dave is writing from experience, but it feels painfully true. We always talk about his technical artistic skills, but he's not too shabby as a writer either.

Cerebus, meanwhile, is overcome with rage and grief. He rends his clothes, he prostates himself in the dirt, he howls. Aaaand that's where we end this book. It's interesting that there are a number of natural endpoints built into this last third of the storyline. You could choose to finish at the end of Minds. If you want a happy ending, then stop when Cerebus and Jaka walk off into the sunset at the end of Rick's Story. Or finish here, with Cerebus alone, broken and bereft. It's certainly the end of the storyline in some ways, with the next volumes moving us well away from the Estarcion we have known so far. But I've been promised Cerebus dying alone, unmourned and unloved, godammit, and I'm sticking around to see it.

The first half of Going Home was pleasantly better than I remembered. I can't say the same about this one. For me, it's the tipping point where Dave's magpie tendency to put whatever caught his fancy at a particular moment into the book finally overwhelms the story, exquisitely produced as it may be.
His decision to add an appendix detailing all his research into Mary Hemingway and her journals doesn't add to my enjoyment. He uses it to launch a sustained attack on Ernest's literary merit, and Mary's - well, everything. It comes off as nasty, a vituperative character assassination, and is exactly the sort of thing that gets him labelled as Dave The Crazy Evil Misogynist. Once again, it's also not reflected in the book itself. In the appendices, Dave is clear that he considers Mary domineering, self important and almost totally lacking in self awareness, while in the book she comes over as a strong woman, with good advice for Jaka on gender equality, dealing with a depressed and useless man. I don't know how he does it, but it's a hell of a trick.

(There are nuggets in the appendices, especially the translation of the guides' Swahili. Worth wading through the other stuff for)

On to Latter Days, then. In memory, it is by some distance the worst of all the phonebooks. Ulp.