Raven Girl
Audrey Niffenegger
Jonathan Cape, 80pp, £16.99, 2 May 2013
A recent New Yorker piece by Sam Sacks made an impassioned call to Bring Back The Illustrated Book!, in the vein, apparently, of Bleak House, Vanity Fair, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. “The interplay between art and text is rich with possibilities that few fiction writers have even begun to explore,” he wrote, sparking a “hmmm” from fiction writer and practised explorer of the interplay between art and text Warren Ellis (author of the novels Crooked Little Vein and Gun Machine and the graphic novels Transmetropolitan, Planetary, Global Frequency, Freakangels, RED, and many more).
The fact is that the illustrated novel never went away; it just moved from being filed in “Fiction A-Z” to “Graphic Novels” in Waterstones.
Obviously there remains a difference between a graphic novel as most would understand it and an “illustrated novel”. There is a language of comics — speech balloons, thought bubbles, and the like — which is absent from illustrations like George Cruikshank’s art in Oliver Twist.
Nonetheless, authors and artists of comics seem far more willing to drop the conventions of their form than prose writers do. Jeff Lemire turned two issues of his post-apocalyptic Sweet Tooth on their side (literally), and scripted them in the style of a children’s book; artist Becky Cloonan illustrated Bram Stoker’s Dracula; and even in the safe and predictable world of superhero comics, Grant Morrison managed to release an issue of Batman which read like an illustrated short story (unfortunately, the computerised style of John Van Fleet, the illustrator, was universally reviled).
Now, however, Audrey Niffenegger is coming at the cross-over from the other direction. The author, most famous for her debut novel The Time Traveller’s Wife, has released a new novella, Raven Girl. Niffenegger, an accomplished draughtswoman, has also illustrated the book, which she describes as a “new fairytale”. Naturally, containing both words and pictures, it ended up on my desk.
Initially, I was disappointed. The book is “illustrated” in the most literal sense: Niffeneger draws what is being described in the text. There is no drive to use the images to expand on, or even better, juxtapose with, the prose. A passage of a man watching his Raven-wife fly into the air is illustrated with a picture of a man watching a raven fly into the air. Raven girl at a lecture in university is illustrated with a picture of a girl in a lecture theatre. And so on.
Niffeneger is, bizarrely, on the back foot by virtue of having written the actual book. She won’t elaborate on her own words, because she knows exactly what she meant; yet she was clearly writing prose which was later illustrated, rather than writing prose to be illustrated. The art is understated, pretty and simple; but that just plays into her habits, and without the drive to fill in background detail that you see in — to pick one of the most perfectly illustrated books ever — John Tenniel’s illustrations of Alice in Wonderland, one is left wondering what the point is.
Despite that, the illustrations do substantially change the feel of the book, by removing much of the ambiguity. Her attempt to write a new fairy tale involves many of the hallmarks of the old — interactions between people and animals, fantastical events, kings and queens — but seeing that this isn’t allegorical, that the raven really is just a raven and the girl just a girl, makes it seem less magical, and more weird.
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