A Thousand Words

Books read this week: Years of Wrath 8/10 (David Low), Deadhouse Gates 7/10 (Steven Erikson), D.O.A. Extreme Horror Anthology 5/10

They say a picture is worth a thousand words: for David Low, that's an enormous underestimate. Years of Wrath is subtitled "A Cartoon History 1932-1945", and is composed entirely of David Low's magnificent cartoons. Low is often compared to Gilray, but Low is both a far superior artist and a much sharper political commentator; in fact many of his cartoons verge on the prescient. That said, I would dearly love to own a book of Gilray's prints, and perhaps I would appreciate them more were I as deeply familar with the politics of the 1790s and early 1800s as I am with the 1930s and 40s. Still, the sheer amount of information, nuance and humour that David Low is able to cram into a simple monochrome drawing is absolutely phenomenal: his summary of the Nazis 1942 summer campaign in three words ("Stalingrad or bust") cannot be bettered, and his assessment of the V1 offensive (casting Hitler as a naughty schoolboy, launching "mad Adolf's pilotless planes for planless devilment" across the channel) is also pitch perfect.

I think Low's cartoon celebrating the liberation of Paris is a perfect example of why he was both a great artist and a great political cartoonist (needless to say the two don't necessarily go together). There must have been a strong temptation to draw the Eiffel Tower, or the Arc De Triomphe, or some other stereotypically Parisian landmark, but instead we get this masterpiece. We have a view of what is unmistakeably Paris, without the need to overemphasise the landmarks: just the spires of Notre-Dame in the far background. And we have the population of France, represented not by De Gaulle, or some other major political figure, but rather personified in the anonymous, jubilant Resistance fighter. Low seems to say: this is not a day for celebrating individual generals or politicians, but rather the liberation of an entire people. It's a cartoon that makes you want to get up out of your chair and start singing the Marseillaise.

Of course, I approach Low's cartoons as historical record - and I have tended to assess them as such - but one also needs to consider their impact at the time. And in this, I think Low's most important contribution was that he made the Nazis look ridiculous: to paraphrase the Godfather a man in Hitler's position can't afford to look ridiculous. This was something that Hitler knew, of course, and that's why David Low was on the Nazi death list, had the invasion of Britain succeeded. Low is such a gifted artist that we never forget the horror under the surface of the Nazi regime: consider this cartoon from 1942 or (one of my personal favourites) this one from late 1944. I think the use of humour as a weapon is often underestimated. I remember reading, years ago, a social history of Nazi Germany, and in the chapter on humour there was a section on the jokes the inmates of the concentration camps and the death camps told to each other, and I remember thinking then, and indeed I still think now that it was the most magnificently, astoundingly courageous thing I had ever come across. To stand in the closest place to hell on earth human ingenuity has been able to devise, to refuse to be afraid, and to laugh at your tormentors is an incredible thing to which words really can't do justice.

Fond as I am of Low, I do feel that, before finishing my review of Years of Wrath I have to acknowledge that  his cartoons about the war with Japan are problematic. Of course, all cartoonists deal in caricatures, and the essence of a caricature is the exaggeration of characteristics to the point of parody. But, even allowing for that, to a modern eye his portrayal of the Japanese is quite racist, although Low does nevertheless deserve credit for his longstanding support of Indian independence, and his objections to racial discrimination in Britain (although that last cartoon does not appear in Years of Wrath). And there was, of course, a war on.

I find I have said rather more about Low's book than I originally intended, and my other two books are both quite lightweight, so I will deal with them briefly. Deadhouse Gates is the second book in Erikson's Malazan Book of the Fallen series, and just as good as Gardens of the Moon, the first book. I still find that Erikson sacrifices world-building to the demands of an ever more convoluted plot, although Deadhouse Gates was better in that respect than Gardens of the Moon. I am also slightly worried that the series may become infected with philosophy (a recurring risk for long fantasy series). I think Erikson has some interesting points to make about the inefficiency of a feudal society, but that may be my reading on the Thirty Years War bleeding in; as I have now read most of the third book in the series (and most of the book on the Thirty Years War), I think discussion of that can wait until next week. D.O.A Extreme Horror Anthology is (as one would expect from the name) an anthology of horror stories. Unfortunately it's not particularly frightening - for much the same reason that most of the video nasties from the 70s are not very good movies: the authors concentrate on the "extreme" and neglect the more basic elements of plot, characterisation and suspense which is necessary to create a truly chilling tale. Of course, the cardinal rule of horror fiction should be "don't show, don't tell" - an imagined horror is always worse that one you can see, just as a mystery is always more fascinating than it's solution - which is a requirement which comes into conflict with the whole idea of the "extreme" as if you don't show anything, it wouldn't be extreme. The anthology is therefore hoist by it's own petard somewhat, although I guess allowances should be made for the very, very high tolerance I have for sex, gore, violence and the just plain wrong in books: a less jaded reader might have found the stories in this book more shocking, and therefore more horrific.