I love these graphic autobiographers and their concentration on the miniscule humdrum realities of their ordinary lives. ( On Thursday I tried to find I love these graphic autobiographers and their concentration on the miniscule humdrum realities of their ordinary lives. ( On Thursday I tried to find a playgroup for my kids. On Friday I went to this really dull party.) I would buy all of them, every one, except that these are the least value-for-money books ever, they're always really pricey and you can read them in a couple of hours. But they're soooo nice.
This one is an account of a year as a "trailing spouse" in Jerusalem. Mr Delisle's missus works as an administrator for MSF so she spends a year here, a year there, and he trails along, as do the kids. Jerusalem is surely the prickliest place on earth – I haven't checked in the Guinness Book of World Records but can anywhere match its fantastic interconnected four-dimensional jigsaw webs of crossbraided Gordian-knotted undisentanglable multiple overlaid and palimpsested political, religious, geographical and psychological complexities? I don't think so. Jerusalem makes Gormenghast look like a late Mondrian painting. Come to think of it, Gormenghast might be based on the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, you know, the one where they haven't been able to move that ladder since 1923 because thirteen Christian sects are competing for ownership of the ledge the ladder in standing on and the window its top is resting on.
There is a very fierce one-star review of this book on GR, which portrays Guy Delisle as a typically crass blundering North American who has nothing but contempt for the many religious and cultural rules and regulations he meets. I did not see him like that at all. I thought he was rueful, curious and always self-mocking, acutely aware of being a non-believing outsider and keen to hoover up an much of Jerusalem as he could in his year. For instance, he notices a party going on next door :
There are people, music and coloured lights…looks like a wedding…hey, but there's only men!...I dunno how much beer I'd need to dance with one of these mustachioed men. Except they don't even serve booze, so you'd have to work up the nerve with mint tea or Fanta…what a strange party… not a girl in sight…just like a comics festival.
The tone of the book is progressively pro-Palestinian, meaning that he presents the facts as he discovers them by actually living in an East Jerusalem Palestinian neighbourhood. But in one of the final mini-chapters he goes on a tour of a settlement conducted by an actual settler to get their point of view included. So the politics of this political book are implied, rather than stated, or howled in your face as Joe Sacco would do.
There are so many really quite odd things to be noted in Jerusalem and GD encounters some interesting ones. There are ultra-orthodox anti-Zionists, for instance. These guys live in Jerusalem but believe the state of Israel should be abolished (because it was man-made and not made by the coming of the Messiah). Then there are ultra-Orthodox who believe Jesus actually WAS the Messiah (they keep a very low profile). There are religious Israeli Jews who wouldn't be caught dead in Jerusalem because it's full of nutcases.
Quite a lot of this book it taken up with detailing how difficult it is to travel between the West Bank and Jerusalem or between Gaza and Israel. You get a very strong sense of how a tense, potentially violent situation can flare up at the drop of hat. You also get the sense that you have to be pretty lucky to visit the Al-Aqsa mosque – he tries three times and makes it once, it's always being closed for some random reason. So I count myself lucky, I got in at the first attempt when I visited Jerusalem some years ago. It was one of the three times in my life when someone pointed a real gun with real bullets at me – we had missed the bell denoting chucking out time, and a guard came over to remind us to leave – NOW!!
I did think that sometimes Mr Delisle's straightfaced humour, or what I took to be straightfaced humour, could be horribly misread. One introductory panel says
PASSOVER (JEWISH EASTER)
Well, that could be construed as idiotic. But I think it's supposed to be a bit of self-satire (along the lines of "I'm just an oafish atheist, I know, and I don't know the Tomb of Lazarus from a hole in the ground")
But mostly I thought this was a truthful, gently self-deprecating tour of the outer visible edges of this strange geographical expression of the impossible nature of this poor benighted human race we belong to.
We went to Jerusalem once for a holiday. Man, what a place. Guys with automatics slung over their shoulder, walking around in jeans and t-shirt; looneWe went to Jerusalem once for a holiday. Man, what a place. Guys with automatics slung over their shoulder, walking around in jeans and t-shirt; looney bearded religious types jumping on to large flower pots and declaiming some stuff about the Messiah or the Dead Sea Scrolls or the End Times or Microsoft; girl soldiers with full battle gear on carring more big guns and with Big Hair and all glammed up as if going to the disco - riding on buses with all the civilians; more guys with machine guns getting narky because we didn't hear the closing bell in the Golden Dome gardens; a damned heatwave, 38 degrees, my friends, touching 40 one day so that going outside was like when you open the oven to get the roasted chicken out; the world's heaviest airline trip with the luggage taken apart and finger searched, going and coming, and armed guards going on to the plane; we came back from Jerusalem and we needed a holiday!
This is a splendid book about the ins and outs of the myriad societies which inhabit Jerusalem. ...more
I read a review of The Arabian Nights on GR which began - pessimistically and rather alarmingly - "I needed a book which I could lose" - the idea beinI read a review of The Arabian Nights on GR which began - pessimistically and rather alarmingly - "I needed a book which I could lose" - the idea being either that the reviewer has a form of dementia or is in an ongoing situation where they may need to flee and have no time to grab their reading material (I can't really imagine being that frantic but some people lead less sheltered lives than me).
Anyway, that reader should avoid Sir Stephen Runciman's towering, complex and riveting three volume history of the Crusades, because once you get going, you won't want to lose it. Indeed, you will be taking it with you everywhere, into the boardroom, the bathroom, into your most intimate boudoir itself. (What lives I imagine you living!)
This is a vastly tangled story, what with Caliphates, Seljuks, Byzantines, Franks, Abbasids, and starring roles for Saladin, King Richard Couer de Lion, Baldwin IV the Leper King of Jerusalem (he was 15, they carried him out onto the battlefield, he was dying, but you still had to have the King on the battlefield because the King was magic, even if horribly disfigured - apparently he was a sweet boy, everyone said so), Pope Urban Renewal II, monks called Fulcher, Kerbogha, the atabeg of Mocha, Baldric of Dol, Walter Sans Avoir, and not forgetting The Assassins (a backing group).
When they got there the crusaders built places such as Krak de Chevaliers. I mean, how cool is that?
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If you like your outrageous continent-spanning narratives big, bold and scholarly, or if you're done with A Game of Thrones, these three hefty volumes might be just what the Doctor of Medick ordered.
**
On a more serious note, the wonderful complexity of the Crusades are such that they represent the first episode of unprovoked Western imperialism (before the 11th century the West wasn't in any position to colonise anyone; and the whole thing didn't last that long, the Crusader states hobbled on for about a century or so and then were absorbed back into the caliphate, which was, of course, itself an imperial enterprise); but also, the Crusades represented the first interpenetration of the West and the East, which heretofore were sealed off from each other. The meeting of the two civilisations was violent, but did not remain so. When fresh convoys of Teutonic and Frankish knights arrived in Antioch and Jerusalem, the older crusaders often sighed with regret, knowing that these new hotheads would soon be wanting to carve their way through the infidel hordes and entirely disrupt the delicate mutual respect and economic intercourse which had by then, slowly but surely, been established. And so it went.
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