Grandville Mon Amour

The first thing that strikes you about this is that it’s a really lovely volume – a large hardback, perfectly printed on thick glossy paper, with a striking embossed two-colour cover. The next thing you notice, without any surprise for anyone who knows Bryan’s work, is that the beauty of the art justifies and all but demands such treatment. The first page is a splash, with anthropomorphic ravens with guns guarding the Tower of London: the clouds behind the Tower are especially magnificent. At the end of this prologue scene, there is a shot of someone dropping into the sewers, the figure lit from above, and that figure is perfect, as is the shaft of light.

Having said that, those two moments frame a scene of some brutality, as an at first apparently wretchedly cowed prisoner escapes from beheading, killing the guards and crowd. This highlights what this isn’t: despite the talking animals in Victorian costume and the loveliness of the overall look, this is very much not aimed at kids. Inspector LeBrock soon has a fairly traditional confrontation with his boss, and looks genuinely scary, as if he might tear out the boss’s throat any second. There’s also a scene later where LeBrock sleeps with a hooker. The animals do not give a cosiness or softness to this: the bad guy LeBrock pursues is as mean-looking a figure as you could hope to find.

There are other pleasures in the art: the ability to put expression on animal faces is extremely impressive, much as many are chosen for the right look in the first place; the sense of place is superb, steampunk touches flavouring the Victorian look, everywhere from streets to railway stations to brothels coming alive. Bryan is of course a comics veteran by now, and his storytelling is impeccable, controlling pace with immense skill and care, telling us nearly everything with the visuals. My only slight criticism would be that the computer-modelled colouring is here and there a touch plastic, giving simpler, smoother curvature than the body needs, especially when that body is furry. This is only an occasional fault – mostly the colouring is very well judged and just right, and handles lighting with a particularly delicate and pleasing accuracy. Alwyn Talbot is credited as colourist for the last three pages only, and these might be the best of the lot, particularly the moving last page.

I’m talking a lot about the art and not at all about the writing. As it happens, earlier on the day I read this, I finished a crime novel called Echo Park by Michael Connelly. In the little review I wrote for my livejournal, I suggested that he might be the best plotter of crime thrillers I’d ever read. This has a great deal in common with that novel, even in its details: in both, a serial killer escapes in suspicious circumstances, our hero pursues him off the books, they confront each other over a threatened captive woman, a person in the same position is revealed as behind it, then there is a twist where we find there is more behind that. This is not to suggest any hint of plagiarism – the similarity is not at all of that kind, and many of these elements are not new to either. What there is is a similar richness of story, a similar level of excitement and tension created and maintained, a similar quality of twist and surprise. The animal figures and the setting might be taken to imply a level of irony or at least pastiche, and while there are a few referential elements that might support such a postmodern reading, these are very minor, and the fact is that this is a high-class crime thriller by any measure. The jokey moments are in no sense used as an excuse for letting the standards slip in any way, as is so often the case.

So don’t be fooled by the prettiness or any perception of the animal characters as cute: this is a tough crime thriller that combines the quality of the best prose crime plotting with superb comics craftsmanship and absolutely beautiful artwork. I hope that the disjunction between talking animals and hard-edged crime story doesn’t mean this doesn’t find its audience – I assume that since Cape have plainly spent money packaging this so wonderfully means the first volume sold well, so maybe my fears are unfounded there.