Only the comic is truly serious

Isn't it great to read with a book in one hand and a dictionary in the other? Especially when the book has even more heft than the dictionary. Unless of course you are trying to eat an ice cream.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay would be a remarkable enough a tome even if it had nothing to offer other than its spectacularly erudite vocabulary. Though a grand vocabulary it is. And what a delightful description of the journalistic enterprise by the character George Deasey:

"A long, spriraling chute, greased with regular paychecks, to the Tartarus of pseudonymous hackdom."

What a beautifully and utterly peremptory definition! As a journalist, i can feel the grease on my backside even as we speak. I was interviewing a fisherman at Quobba last weekend, who had just pulled a son and his dead father out of the pounding surf off those treacherous rocks, and i was delighted to realise i knew how to spell the name of his boat, Recherche. Why? Because i'd been reading "Kavalier and Clay"! Result!

But this Pulitzer Prize winning novel has more to recommend it than its lexigraphic verbosity. Its weight is to be measured in more than mere ozzes and lbs.

It wrestles with what it means to create. With what drives us. Kavalier and Clay is a careering, rambling reminder of what it means to be young, driven, and talented - with the knowledge that you can take on the world. While it is ostensibly about comic books, its themes are creativity and escapism. Josef Kavalier, a young magician practising his craft in Prague, manages to pull off an unlikely escape to New York, fleeing the Nazi occupation of Europe in the thirties. Here he is thrust into cohabitation with his cousin Sam Clay, and a partnership of rare and raw creativity is born. Comics. To be precise, superhero comics.

As Joe launches into his abstract, cartoon war against the Nazis, through his character the Escapist, he engages in a very real battle to help his family escape. Sammy contends with his own private struggle with the inevitability of what he is. But it's not the plot, George! It is in the minutiae. The plot trundles on, with more than its fair share of bizarre twists and turns - how did we end up in Antarctica again? - but it's the buzzing undercurrent, the high-voltage flow of detail, the snatches of history, vignettes and embellishments, which electrify the reader and carry her onward through these 639 pages.

Kavalier and Clay is a finely crafted novel. Don't be fooled by its gauche cover: i've never read a superhero comic in my life, yet i thoroughly enjoyed this book.

And I love a book which tells you, on the very last page, about the typeface!
Oops, did i spoil the ending?