Tuesday, May 30, 2017

Review: The Kindly Ones

The Kindly Ones The Kindly Ones by Neil Gaiman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Well, this one brings it all together. I know there’s a final volume (I’ve even begun it) but this is clearly the payoff, the coming together of the whole mythology and tone. We see the high and the low, the siblings and creations of Morpheus as our Sandman slowly disintegrates.

Parts of this are stunning. At a conceptual level, I like the idea that [SPOILER] Baby Daniel becomes our new Sandman. He has the same powers but, as someone explains toward the end, he is a new perspective on things. The Morpheus we knew is gone forever. The distant human elements of him no longer exist, and the dreaming alters with his passing. Since the dreaming is different for each of us every time we enter it, we humans may not see all that that implies, but we see enough. I’m a believer that the modern dream is the ancient dream but different. You can’t spend your life seeing images on a TV screen without having that affect the kinds of dreams that come to you in your sleep.

The sweeping quality of this is nice as well. We have an ingathering of major and minor figures that feels a bit like the end of a beloved TV series with guest appearances from all the actors we saw in earlier seasons. That did make me regret yet again that there’s been no consistent artist; it’s hard to welcome someone back when, in effect, it’s a different actor portraying him or her, but I’ll let that pass for now. The illustrations here are superior to the earliest volumes, and there’s a strong visual element. Our new Dream, clad all in white, makes an effective contrast to the old one, and he promises a new range of potential stories.

So, in the end, I find this has most of the virtues of the best of the series, but that it retains some of what kept this from being as magnificent as its reputation holds. The biggest problem for me is the way Gaiman seems to know the effect he wants and therefore twists things to produce them. We’ve seen Morpheus with more power than any other than his siblings, and then we’ve seen him bested by a two-bit British antiquarian. We’ve seen him rise above all emotion, and we’ve seen him fall deeply in love. With all that, you get the classic Superman problem: how do you invent effective adversaries for someone who can beat anyone you throw his way? You do it by creating a handful of characters who are so strong that they require rewriting the rules of the universe.

And we hear a lot about “the rules” here. That seems the catch-all excuse Gaiman throws out when someone asks, with common sense, “Why did you do that if you knew it would kill you?” I don’t remember Morpheus worrying over what it would mean to kill his son Orpheus way back when, but that’s the crime he’s on the hook for. (Wouldn’t someone of Morpheus’s omniscience have a sense of what that would mean from the Furies? Maybe it’s there, but I don’t remember. And I don’t see why the Furies would then take so many volumes to get around to doing their thing.) And, sure, he promised Nuala he would grant her a boon, but couldn’t he explain that leaving the Dreaming would make him killable?

A lot of people admire Gaiman for the vastness of his mythos, but I’d prefer a tighter cast of characters, one that more clearly held to both the narrative and the tone he’s telling. Others, like the author of the introduction here, talk about when Gaiman ‘found his voice’ for the series. I’m not sure he ever does. I think he’s perpetually retrofitting what he recounts.

But, again, I’m inclined to forgive all that. If I hadn’t heard so often that this is one of the great graphic novels – the equivalent of The Watchmen or The Dark Knight Returns, or even Maus! – I’m sure I’d have enjoyed it even more. It isn’t at the level of those, in large part because (despite my impression from the first volume) it isn’t a graphic novel. It’s a comic book series comprised of different volumes that try different experiments. It’s full of episodes I imagine Gaiman would not redo, and it takes a while to find its full story.

This is the climax of that full story, and it clearly contains some of the best of Gaiman’s most ambitious material for the series.


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