Review: The Sandman, Vol. 7: Brief Lives

The Sandman, Vol. 7: Brief Lives by Neil Gaiman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I mostly enjoyed this volume of the series, particularly because it does what I think Sandman does best: explore its own terns and contradictions. This tells of Morpheus and his sister Delirium going on a quest to find their vanished brother Destruction. In some of the best ways from these episodes, it’s an allegory. We live in an age when we’re insulated from the kind of destruction that used to define and redefine cultures. Our technology protects us in our everyday lives, and our political institutions (which our current moment is putting to the test) protect us as states. There’s something appropriately sad in the way Destruction has simply checked out. He knows he isn’t needed in a world that is, for at least us privileged Westerners, so comfortably secure.

In any case, I admired this at that level on my own, but Peter Straub’s afterword helped me see it even more dramatically. The culmination here is the killing of Orpheus, a character I haven’t much appreciated before this. He’s striking in his immortal beheaded state, but he becomes really interesting in the way Straub frames this: for Gaiman here, all existence is brief next to the Everlasting. One man can live for 1500 years, but when Death comes for him it’s still the end. In what may be my favorite moment from the volume, the goddess Ishtar, diminished from two millennia without worshippers, moves into non-existence through a final, too-beautiful-for-humans dance. Everything human, even the gods we imagine for ourselves, must die.

This is, in other words, a meditation on change in the way that large parts of The Fairie Queene and other Renaissance works are. We get a glimpse of the world as it might look from the perspective of eternity, but then we are reminded that, as mortals, we will never be able to know what eternity feels like. Morpheus knows, and he knows that we cannot know, so his view of us humans takes on an intriguing pity and condescension. Add to that Delirium’s incapacity to understand the, to her, blink-of-an-eye span of a human life, and these characters take on a power we haven’t always seen.

I still think Gaiman could be more efficient with such a message – we get tangents and characters who seem to take us in other directions. And I am troubled by the inconsistent artwork, much of which strikes me as average at best. (It’s a shame Gaiman couldn’t have settled on a single artist and developed the project over time with him or her.)

Still, I feel persuaded more than I have been that this one has some real insight. I may never become quite the Sandman (or Gaiman) believer that so many people I admire are, but I am in this for the long haul, and am already teeing up volume number 8.


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