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Jan. 11th, 2012 04:43 pmThe thing about Hiromi Goto's Half World is that in my head it's a shadowy, noir-flavored animated film, accompanied by a scratchy soundtrack of a thirties jazz band. It feels so much like this in my head that it's hard to write about it as a book.
I mean, as a book, it's an interesting book, and doing some bold things. The opening scene involves our heroine's parents trying to flee Half World, a place of eternal purgatory where hopeless inhabitants are forced to live out their greatest trauma over and over. The toll is a little finger; there are no sharp implements around; the heroine's pregnant mother bites her father's pinky off. You may gather that this book is NOT PLAYING AROUND.
And that unborn child grows up to become unhappy, exceedingly un-special adolescent Melanie Tamaki, who has to find her way to Half World fourteen years later to rescue her mother and discover her inner strength and alter the eternal cycle of doom. And this is all a satisfying story, reasonably complex, if sometimes weirdly balanced between the horror of the setup and the deus ex machinas/helpful gears of prophecy required to make the YA fantasy plot work out all right, and that would be fine -- but then the visuals!
Half World is all black and white and grayscale and Melanie's living color marks her out like a brand; she covers herself in dead-white makeup, and is given away, at one point, by her blood. Melanie's mother plasters their Canada home with bizarre, twisting prints of Escher and Bosch in an echo of the place she comes from. And there's a grotesque hotel where the grotesquely tormented try to drink and dance away their sorrows, and a climactic scene takes place at a terrifying party in the hotel's penthouse suite with a piano that plays by itself, and you may see what I'm talking about when I say that this book calls out to be animated. It demands a creepy soundtrack. In my head, it has one.
(This was a Floating Diversity Book Club read and you can see other reviews/opinions/discussion over here.)
I mean, as a book, it's an interesting book, and doing some bold things. The opening scene involves our heroine's parents trying to flee Half World, a place of eternal purgatory where hopeless inhabitants are forced to live out their greatest trauma over and over. The toll is a little finger; there are no sharp implements around; the heroine's pregnant mother bites her father's pinky off. You may gather that this book is NOT PLAYING AROUND.
And that unborn child grows up to become unhappy, exceedingly un-special adolescent Melanie Tamaki, who has to find her way to Half World fourteen years later to rescue her mother and discover her inner strength and alter the eternal cycle of doom. And this is all a satisfying story, reasonably complex, if sometimes weirdly balanced between the horror of the setup and the deus ex machinas/helpful gears of prophecy required to make the YA fantasy plot work out all right, and that would be fine -- but then the visuals!
Half World is all black and white and grayscale and Melanie's living color marks her out like a brand; she covers herself in dead-white makeup, and is given away, at one point, by her blood. Melanie's mother plasters their Canada home with bizarre, twisting prints of Escher and Bosch in an echo of the place she comes from. And there's a grotesque hotel where the grotesquely tormented try to drink and dance away their sorrows, and a climactic scene takes place at a terrifying party in the hotel's penthouse suite with a piano that plays by itself, and you may see what I'm talking about when I say that this book calls out to be animated. It demands a creepy soundtrack. In my head, it has one.
(This was a Floating Diversity Book Club read and you can see other reviews/opinions/discussion over here.)
