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nicktomjoe's review
3.0
Three stars for a Garfield with Keeping illustrations needs some justification.
Jack - the hero’s name in folk tales - is to marry Jill, and yet he is mysteriously drawn to London and from there out to an island of horror and mystery. Here he seems to have no choice but to awaken a (or the?) Sleeping Beauty and to marry her. He finds himself back at his proper wedding, but haunted still by the ghostly Beauty from the island. “A strange wedding, with two brides...Once he had awakened the Sleeping Beauty, she would always be with him, would always be haunting him, and filling his heart with restless uncertainty and desire.” My word: at one level a great re-examination of the Sleeping Beauty story - at another a tragic myth of divided lives and loyalties. But for me it doesn’t quite fulfil its brief: the attempt to enter a world of eerie myth is accepted by Jack too readily, and the blunt illustrations of the mortals - bored and flat-faced- while they contrast well with the sensual lines of the Sleeping Beauty, do not evoke sympathy, and the time-slip element seems too quickly passed over.
Are author and artist - both masters in their own right- engaged in a project I haven’t understood?
Jack - the hero’s name in folk tales - is to marry Jill, and yet he is mysteriously drawn to London and from there out to an island of horror and mystery. Here he seems to have no choice but to awaken a (or the?) Sleeping Beauty and to marry her. He finds himself back at his proper wedding, but haunted still by the ghostly Beauty from the island. “A strange wedding, with two brides...Once he had awakened the Sleeping Beauty, she would always be with him, would always be haunting him, and filling his heart with restless uncertainty and desire.” My word: at one level a great re-examination of the Sleeping Beauty story - at another a tragic myth of divided lives and loyalties. But for me it doesn’t quite fulfil its brief: the attempt to enter a world of eerie myth is accepted by Jack too readily, and the blunt illustrations of the mortals - bored and flat-faced- while they contrast well with the sensual lines of the Sleeping Beauty, do not evoke sympathy, and the time-slip element seems too quickly passed over.
Are author and artist - both masters in their own right- engaged in a project I haven’t understood?
grubstlodger's review
4.0
This a strange thing - a short story done up as a long picture book; half fairy-tale and half realistic story, with a strange, unreachable meaning.
It’s essentially the story of Sleeping Beauty but odder, with ghosts and set somewhere in Victorian England.
I read it to fast because I wanted to reach the end, the process being too unnerving to read slowly.
An interesting curiosity - and the illustrations by Charles Keeping are, of course, brilliant.
It’s essentially the story of Sleeping Beauty but odder, with ghosts and set somewhere in Victorian England.
I read it to fast because I wanted to reach the end, the process being too unnerving to read slowly.
An interesting curiosity - and the illustrations by Charles Keeping are, of course, brilliant.
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