The Adventures of Luther Arkwright, by Bryan Talbot
There have been great American artists who have worked beyond the public's ability to understand them easily, but none who have condescended to the public--none who have not hoped, no matter how secretly, that their work would lift America to heaven, or drive a stake through its heart. This is a democratic desire (not completely unrelated to the all-time number one democratic desire for endless wealth and fame), and at its best an impulse to wholeness, an attempt not to deny diversity, or to hide from it, but to discover what it is that diverse people can authentically share. It is a desire of the artist to remake America on his or her own terms.
[...]
The inability of the vital American artist to be satisfied with a cult audience, no matter how attentive, goes right back to the instinctive perception that whatever else America might be, it is basically big; that unless you are doing something big, you are not doing anything at all.
--Greil Marcus, from "Randy Newman: Every Man is Free"
If I have to disagree with Marcus anywhere, it's the American. British popular culture, and I suspect any modern mass culture, overspills with artists who sought to remake their country by incorporating all its diverse people and history into their work. If Marcus can step around the obvious example of the Beatles by saying, through Leslie Fiedler, that they are "imaginary Americans," then so are Alan Moore and Michael Moorcock and Bryan Talbot.
That would be a strange honorific to bestow on a work as undeniably English as The Adventures of Luther Arkwright, Talbot's much-loved and highly influential graphic novel, newly reissued from Dark Horse. First serialized in Near Myths back in 1978 and not completed for more than a decade, the story concerns a life-or-death struggle between two dimension-spanning superpowers, the utopian technocrats of Zero Zero and the sinister Disruptors, mostly played out in a parallel England that combines the Puritan Protectorate with the fascist 1930s. When Zero Zero agent Luther Arkwright, your run of the mill albino dandy messiah assassin, stirs up a Royalist counter-revolution, the English Civil War meets the Spanish one.
The Adventures of Luther Arkwright features a sci-fi apocalypse, a potpourri of religious iconographies, and an insurrection against a fascist government that serves as a barely-veiled stand-in for both Hitler and Thatcher; the end result sits somewhere between V for Vendetta and The Invisibles, though it precedes both. (In fact, Luther Arkwright is so similar to parts of The Invisibles that The Invisibles looks a little shabbier in retrospect. Karmic payback for The Matrix? Or was that the other way around?) Talbot's inspirations run to New Wave SF and Nicolas Roeg and David Bowie and especially Michael Moorcock. In combining them, however, he has created something far beyond a Jerry Cornelius riff: Luther Arkwright is a teenaged geek boy's will-to-power fantasy blown up into something else entirely.
A voracious and rollicking pastiche, for starters. Talbot's art alternates between meticulous line drawings and more painterly images, often on the same page, throwing in flashes of photomontage, blocks of text, and "found" art both real and fabricated for good measure. Meanwhile, the plot incorporates Egyptologists and czars and Roundheads and insectoid stormtroopers and Daughters of Albion and chain-smoking American reporters in trenchcoats--seemingly every period or genre that ever interested Talbot. This is the kind of work that sums up an artist's influences and then looks around to see where else they can be taken.
Almost two dozen characters play significant roles, a web of interactions that makes Luther Arkwright one of those rare works for which the term graphic novel doesn't seem like a misnomer. Talbot's work matches the novel's social scope, imagining multiple strata of societies in conflict with themselves and each other. It shares the novel's capacity for historical scale, reaching from the Norman Conquest to Thatcher's eighties in an attempt to grapple with a thousand-year history of violence and revolution. (I'm tempted to say that Talbot substitutes English historical depth for Marcus's more geographically-inspired American bigness, but that comes perilously close to repeating old clichés. I'm not sure it's wrong, though.) The novel is a form that, at its best, engages with entire cultures as well as individual characters, and Talbot doesn't flinch from the challenge.
Nor does he skimp on the characters, grounding the high action of lumbering dreadnoughts, barbarian girl-gangs, and kamikaze biplanes in the drama of genuine emotion. The ruthless Queen Anne, who spends the entire novel trying to be the spirit of Britannia and Arkwright's true love, has a wonderful, wistful moment when she realizes she's been eclipsed in both roles by Rose Wylde; those futile longings spark sympathy for a character who normally comes across as treacherous and scheming. Even the noblest characters do evil things (Arkwright gets the sympathy-for-the-henchman routine long before King Mob) while some of the worst earn our pity. Like any good novel, graphic or otherwise, The Adventures of Luther Arkwright aims to acknowledge the broadest possible range of human experience, from the flatulent cynic Harry Fairfax to the antiseptic idealists of Zero Zero. Nothing is too big for Talbot to attempt; like Marcus's vital American artist, his ambition is half the point and Arkwright's scope is its own greatest success.
I believe that the reason the story remains so fresh and interesting is because under all the glorious invention and wild adventure, glamorous characters and exotic machinery, Talbot deals in fundamental realities and makes stern self-demands.
He is interested in reality. He is curious about reality. He isn't, thank God, afraid of reality.
--Michael Moorcock, from his introduction to the Dark Horse Luther Arkwright
Ambition isn't everything. Talbot's skills as writer and artist grew considerably during Arkwright's long completion, and the early chapters display a talent still in development. The anatomy is sometimes tentative and the plot rams up against iron walls of narrative convenience. (Why don't the Disruptors just take Arkwright when they grab Firefrost out of the pyramid?) But ambition delineates the possible, setting upper limits on a work's capacity for meaning and invention. Talbot's ambitions are virtually boundless, and he fulfills them with astonishing regularity.
The novel rapidly outgrows the potentially limiting dualistic moral framework of its Disruptors-versus-Zero Zero scenario to present a more seasoned view of politics and human nature. The monarchy Arkwright installs is scarcely better than the dictatorship he topples--both are laden with scathing evocations of Margaret Thatcher. Sometimes Talbot almost implies Arkwright is backing the wrong side: his erstwhile allies in the imperial Prussia and czarist Russia join the war because they despise the Puritans' once-democratic revolution, yet The Adventures of Luther Arkwright is a democratic work to its core. The strategists on Zero Zero prop up the Restoration as a gambit in their own battle against the Disruptors, a proxy war fought in a game of apocalyptic brinksmanship, but Talbot never quite lets them off the hook for it. The consequences of Royalist victory are too similar to those of Puritan oppression, and Talbot too cynical about any revolution.
He breaks down the dualism of his fantasy-novel source material in other ways that transcend politics. One of his recurring themes is the reconciliation of opposites, an idea incarnated in the doomsday weapon Firefrost and in Arkwright's various sexual and spiritual climaxes. The book's artistic tour de force occurs when Arkwright, in the midst of being tortured by the Puritans (this was back in the swell old days when heroes were only the victims of torture, not its perpetrators) escapes into meditation and recalls his birth, his upbringing, and his relationships with three women. Talbot's breathless narration modulates four characters, four seasons, four elements, and at least four musical genres, each one matched perfectly to the rest and culminating in one of those rare breakthroughs where the experience of reading matches the intensity of Arkwright's experience. There are epiphanies here, too, but they are the epiphanies of gnosis, of samadhi, of Beethoven's Ninth or "Memory of a Free Festival"--epiphanies of a consciousness reaching outside itself and finding something else out there. The union of the individual and the infinite. Satori must be something just the same.
The Adventures of Luther Arkwright is one of the first British graphic novels and one of the best of any nation, surpassing imitators and forerunners alike. Take advantage of the new edition at your earliest possible convenience, if only to remind yourself that ambition, epic scale, and the democratic impulse toward wholeness cannot be reserved for Americans alone.
Ah, I'm happy to see more talk of this, and particularly your attention to the reaching out - I think that one of the crucial themes of the book is that those who wish reality to be no more than suits them are always in the wrong, and that the beginning of truth is the turning outward from oneself. It's what makes people as diverse as Luther, Rose, and Fairfax all on their way to a wisdom that will escape others.
Posted by: Bruce Baugh | January 22, 2007 at 12:19 AM
"Karmic payback for The Matrix?"
Morrison's accusation of plagiarism always seemed like horseshit to me. Although there are some other commonalities between the Invisibles and the Matrix, the main thing they share is just an extended riff on Cartesian hyperbolic scepticism. Or, as any first-year philosophy student can ask, like, how do we know we're not massively deceived about the external world, man? So they're both "just" rip-offs of Descartes (via Philip K. Dick, I guess).
But "Arkright" is indeed the bomb.
Posted by: Jones, one of the Jones boys | January 22, 2007 at 01:35 PM
I'm thinking less of the Cartesian skepticism (or Platonism), more of the iconography and plot structure: magic mirrors, the ritual of the white flame/"There is no spoon," the skyscraper initiation, the average-guy chosen one being inducted into the revolutionary cell by the bald-headed sunglassed badass, even the look of characters as comparatively minor as Jolly Roger or as transitory as the leather-wearing Ragged Robin. "Bloody Hell in America" would seem to be the main point of overlap, and there are too many commonalities to write them off as "horseshit." (Seriously, this from a guy who sees Freamon/Morgan Freeman??)
Posted by: Marc | January 22, 2007 at 11:57 PM
That sound you hear is me eating my words...
Posted by: Jones, one of the Jones boys | January 23, 2007 at 11:04 AM
I should add that I'm happy to see none of those things in Arkwright, which never doubts that the world is real--any of them.
Bruce (if you're still reading), I'd like to hear more about Harry Fairfax. It seems like the story rejects the wisdom he initially offers Arkwright--hedonism licensed by absolute cynicism about the ability of anyone in the human race to amount to anything. But when Firefrost hits Arkwright with its illusions (remind anyone else of Dane and the Archon in "House of Fun"?), Fairfax's cynicism helps see him through. He must give Arkwright something of value, which makes him more than just another version of Elric's earthy sidekick, but I'm still not quite sure what. Any thoughts?
Posted by: Marc | January 24, 2007 at 02:53 PM
Marc, I'd say that Fairfax is a guy headed in the right direction, just with more to learn. That's one of the things about Talbot's work in general - there are these gradations. He's not about to hit satori or anything, but neither is he living in his own head like most of the leading royalists and puritans (and at least some of Zero Zero's rulers, too). Onew ay of looking at it is that he has enough sense to disbelieve the illusions offered him, even though he hasn't yet found anything else, and of course disbelieving illusions is exactly what Arkwright needs later.
Posted by: Bruce Baugh | January 24, 2007 at 03:19 PM
Revisiting the novel, I see that in their second scene together (the one with the Hogarthian splash page of the Maze) Harry's misanthropy masks a genuine question--what is the purpose of life? It's Arkwright who says there is none, that life is just a chemical accident (most likely in keeping with the doctrine of Zero Zero, whose only oaths are the names of scientists and materialists). He's the one who appears to be devoid of illusions--in their first scene he literally calls bullshit on Harry's belief in demonic possession. Maybe Harry isn't quite the cynic he thinks he is (The narrator later calls him "a self-styled realist"). When Arkwright rejects Firefrost's first illusion, he does so because its disdain for humanity reminds him of Harry's rant about "maggots"; Arkwright's response, "Bullshit," is a callback to his earlier dismissal of Harry's superstition. So Harry works almost as a negative example of the cynicism and superstition Arkwright has to overcome--Zero Zero materialism sees him through.
And yet there's something likeable about Harry. He's endured a shitty life (easy to see why he might think all of humanity, himself included, are maggots) and he still keeps going, surviving encounters that get Arkwright captured or killed and always staying one step ahead of the Puritans. His cynicism, even if it is half posture, is a refreshing alternative to all the people who are too wrapped up in their ideologies to assess the world honestly or practically (including Zero Zero councillors who debate the moral suitability of the Ragnarok program while the multiverse collapses around them). And in the end, a bit of Fairfax cynicism helps Arkwright through the second illusion, the false monk with the false promise of victory and enlightenment ("If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him"). Harry seems like someone who secretly believes life must have a purpose, he just hasn't found it yet; his cynical bravado is alternately useful and misguided, although by novel's end Arkwright has outgrown it, along with much of his old self.
Posted by: Marc | January 25, 2007 at 10:06 AM
Harry has two obvious qualities in his favor: he's funny, and he's brave. The exchange "How dare you fart before His Majesty?" "Sorry, didn't know it was 'is turn" is the sort of thing lots of readers might wish they had the chutzpah to say. Certainly I do. And he's out there risking life and limb for a cause he's committed to even as he continues to doubt that he or anyone else is more than a biochemical automaton, which reminds me of the sort of heroism Camus talked about, and lived out.
Posted by: Bruce Baugh | January 30, 2007 at 08:12 PM
Damn, now I have to get the collected _Arkwright_.
I've read two or three scattered periodical issues, fished from cheapie bins at comic shops over the years, but never got in at the start, so the swirling complexity of the story sort of dead-armed me. As a result I've never essayed the thing from start to finish. But I've been waiting eagerly for Talbot's pending "Alice," and have taught the very ambitious _One Bad Rat_, to good effect, so it doesn't take much to convince me that _Arkwright_ deserves a thorough, attentive read.
Plus, the Moorcockian elements are like "old home week" to me. :)
Looking forward to getting the new model _Arkwright_.
What say you with regard to _Heart of Empire_?
Posted by: Charles Hatfield | February 10, 2007 at 11:39 AM
Still waiting for Dark Horse to pump out the new edition... I've heard it isn't as good, but Arkwright sets the bar so high that the sequel can fall short without disappointing. And I'm glad there is a sequel, since Talbot paints the political situation so ominously at the end of Arkwright.
Posted by: Marc | February 10, 2007 at 01:10 PM
Heart of Empire isn't as good as the original, but it is still mighty damn good, and the payoff is entirely worthy despite what felt like a bit of a slog getting there sometimes.
Posted by: Bruce Baugh | February 10, 2007 at 11:20 PM