Britain’s Observer newspaper looks at Bryan Talbot’s new book, and finds it rather pleasing:
I have been thinking about what I am going to say in this piece for days, and yet still I don’t quite know how to put it. The truth is that the book I want to tell you about is rather difficult to describe. Its publisher, Jonathan Cape, is calling it a graphic novel. Well, it is certainly a picture book, but a novel? No. It’s a history book, really, though that makes it sound too dull – and a detective story, too. But it also contains polemic, elements of fantasy, autobiography and literary theory. Then there are the old music-hall turns, the homages, the jokes.
Oh, stuff it. What I’m trying to say is that Alice in Sunderland, in which graphic novelist Bryan Talbot suggests that Lewis Carroll’s greatest source of inspiration was the gritty north east (and not, as most people think, rarefied Oxford, where he was famously a don), is one of the most exhilarating books I’ve read in years. It’s a minor masterpiece.
