The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 31 December 2019
by Nick Drnaso
Our particular political moment will be fodder for fiction for years to come. We are divided, divisive and mendacious. We are given to interpreting our reality with personalized curated sets of "facts", none of which we agree upon. Facts don't give a damn about our politics, but on the verge of 2020, our politics seems to be the only thing upon which we base our notion of the facts. One day, perhaps, we will escape this dismal and destructive spiral. For the moment, though, we receive perceptive and inscisive observations from such inventive writers and artists as Nick Drnaso, author and illustrator of this darkly compelling and yet vague graphic novel.
In the opening pages, our title character, Sabrina, has vanished. Her boyfriend and sister slip into gloomy states of despair, hopelessness, and grief. And we witness this state in Drnaso's remarkably evocative and deceptively simple drawings. The young man turns up at his friend's house in Denver, sequestering himself from the world and the news reports that surround his girlfriend's disappearance. The friend is in the Air Force, and has a professional familiarity with surveillance and computer security. Oddly, that seems relevant.
It's easy enough to zip through what many may consider a "comic" book. But a patient and attentive reader will step quietly through Drnaso's narrative drawings and fall into the mood of his story and the chilled minds of his characters. Sabrina's newsworthy disappearance (and we don't wish to give away how that is resolved) becomes the fodder for internet trolls and conspiracy theorists. Her family and friends are assaulted by alternative "facts" and demands that they come clean on what really happened to her. All they want to do is to deal with the situation and their grief in their own private way, but the political tsunamis of the moment in which we live won't let them. Privacy is a luxury fewer and fewer of us appreciate. We're lonely in a crowded world and many of us seek some underlying tale, some great controlling factor. In the absence of a deity, we find it in vast secretive networks of powerful and rich conspiracies. To put it simply, it's insanity. Drnaso manages to convey that reality (or lack thereof) in his drawings, his patient and spare story-telling, and in vagaries that may frustrate the reader. Check it out.
(Sabrina was the first ever graphic novel listed for consideration for the Man Booker Prize in 2018.)
See Also: [Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi]