Retrospective - Comical

I've already remarked in an earlier post that I was well on with Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by the time we were on our way to the U.K. It was the perfect novel for a long journey - gripping yet breezily so, a novel of depth but never becoming weighty enough to demand putting to one side in order to cope with the experience on offer.

I preferred the first half of the novel, I suppose because of its exhilarating sense of youthful vigour, its evocation of the can-do spirit that marks the real America of the mind. That's not to say that the later part was disappointing - it remained unputdownable, which was a good job considering the multitude of distractions I had at hand once we'd arrived in Manchester with still a good half of the novel left to read. But I must admit I never quite got the point of the ins and outs of the protagonists' romantic and family lives. However, Joe (Kavalier) and Sammy (Clay) were instantly engaging, likeable characters so there was always that sense of wanting to know what would become of them simply for the sake of knowing.

The first half is also where the heady glory of comic books is evoked. Chabon makes more than a case for their importance as an art form: he utterly convinces the reader that they were probably the premier form of expression in the visual arts of the period. He is also convincing on our deep-rooted need for adventures we can escape into, and I was grateful for the ride.