Getting graphic: A cult grows up

SPEAKING VOLUMES

It began as a guilty one-night stand and rapidly blossomed into magnificent obsession. I realised just how far I'd gone when this conversation, between the lady who works in my house and the landlord's servants downstairs, floated up to me.

"I don't know what she does these days," the lady was saying. "She used to spend her time reading these big fat books, but now she's reading only comics like my useless loafer of a teenager does."

A world of privilege separates Anju, who works in three other houses in the neighbourhood, from the most important literary critics in the western world, but oddly enough, they share the same perspective.

The graphic novels that had been ravaging my soul and causing me sleepless nights, ever since I jumped on the bandwagon of the newest literary trend, are seen as suspect.

In Anju's view, they're books with pictures "" i.e, comic books, on par with recycled Amar Chitra Kathas or dog-eared Archie's digests. In the view of mainstream critics, graphic novels occupy a hinterland "" not quite respectable enough for literary prizes, but not quite as easy to dismiss as they used to be.

The first use of the term 'graphic novel' is credited to Will Eisner, who used it as a sneaky way to get his book, A Contract With God, seen by a mainstream publisher. (The publisher dismissed it as 'comics', though it is now seen as a serious attempt to break out of the superhero/ cute cartoon character straitjacket that the comic book world was wearing back in the 1970s.)

As Time magazine noted in a recent celebration of the silver anniversary of the graphic novel, Art Spiegelman, creator of Maus, disagrees with the term.

He prefers 'graphic literature', or 'graphic story' to describe works such as Maus, a darkly comic classic of Holocaust literature that featured grim rodents as the chief characters.

Maus is also a classic example of the discomfort that the graphic novel generates in the blinkered world of 'serious fiction'.

This year, the National Book Award ceremony in the US was enlivened by Stephen King's attack on the enshrining of High Literature versus Popular Stuff.

He slammed the book industry for being out of step with readers and for shunting everything that didn't come up to perhaps questionable standards of what is 'literary' into the garbage bin of genre literature.

Some of his examples were questionable in themselves: the moon will fall out of the sky before you get me to place Grisham and Garcia Marquez on the same plane, for insistence.

But King had a point, one that hits me uncomfortably every time a much-vaunted Brand New Talent is outdone in characterisation and emotional depth by the likes of, say, P D James.

Today, it's accepted that Maus belongs to the select group of novels that constitute great Holocaust literature.

If you look for Maus in any bookshop, though, you're likely to find it hobnobbing with a motley assortment of comic books.

One of the most brilliant books to be written in the last two years wasn't shortlisted for any of the major literary prizes, though in terms of ambition, scope, humour and depth, it's far ahead of anything that's won the Booker.

In the same period Alan Moore's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen may be more familiar to Indian readers from the relatively bland film version, but if you can find yourself a copy, do yourself a favour: buy it and never, ever let it out of your hands.

LXG brings together a corpus of fictional characters from Captain Nemo to Wilhelmina Murray from Dracula and Alan Quatermain, and lets them loose in a gorgeously Gothic European landscape.

The only reason Alan Moore's still a cult object of worship rather than a Page 3 lit celeb is because of the format in which he chooses to write: LXG, like his other work, is a graphic novel. It seems to me a strange reason to disqualify the book from the mainstream literary pantheon, given that we accept textually experimental novels without a blink.

Moore's also responsible for one of the finest and nastiest Jack the Ripper books ever written ""From Hell, which is to Patricia Cornwell's Portrait of a Killer what a serious investigation of the Kennedy assassination is to a webpage announcing that aliens from another solar system did John F in.

Another book that received critical hallelujahs recently, while being denied the right to compete in the same sphere as mainstream literature, is Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis.

The Complete Review made the point that Persepolis is technically a bande dessinee, an autobiographical comic strip, rather than a graphic novel per se.

Quibbling aside, Persepolis, a child's-eye-view of the revolution years in Iran, has been universally applauded "" the LA Times called it "one of the freshest and most original memoirs of our day".

But Persepolis, because it is in a format that combines images with text, is not eligible for conventional biography and autobiography awards.

Of course, not all graphic novels are in the same league, and some are happy to occupy the cultish world of more conventional comics "" hence the preponderance of X-Men and Buffy and Batman For the Nth Time books in this segment. Even here, there are standout performances.

Kingdom Come, which pits a league of worn-out, disillusioned, retired super-heroes against their newer and less moral counterparts, is one of them.

Good Will Hunting?: Blame it on the Internet. In a pre-email, pre-text message, pre-computer hacking age, the tangled tale of an affair between William Dalrymple and Farah Damji may never have become a cause celebre.

As it stands, thanks to an unidentified cyberstalker known as Ms Equaliser, everyone on Dalrymple's personal address book received a lengthy message chronicling the brief affair between him and Ms Damji, involving as a third party his wife's pink chiffon scarf; and the longer, messier affair between Ms Damji and Allen Jenkins, an Observer journalist.

Damji, editor of IndoBrit, told her side of the story in articles for the Daily Mail; 'exposes' of her somewhat rocky past were carried in another tabloid.

None of the three protagonists in this tawdry story come out well, but none deserved their private lives to be exposed in such a fashion.

Before the 'Send' button simplified the task of anonymous stalkers, the story would've remained dinner party fodder: now it's juicy tabloid fare. Dalrymple and Damji are both to be pitied.

The rest of us are nostalgic for the days of Byron, when Lady Caroline Lamb settled her scores through the comparatively civilised means of the roman-a-clef.

nilroy@lycos.com