Review: The Wake

The Wake by Neil Gaiman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This one feels like the kind of album a good band puts out after it breaks up and gets back together again. A couple of the “songs” sound familiar, reminding you of what you liked about the band in the first place. (That would be the first couple episodes, the ones that Gaiman tells us in the afterword were colored by the memorial service for the great Roger Zelazny, who died around that time and whose Amber chronicles are, for me, one of the great fantasy accomplishments.) One is a real hit – “Sunday Mourning” – and others take the comeback too far.

For me, “Sunday Mourning” is Gaiman doing what he does best: exploring the human contradictions within the mythology he has established. Robert Gadling has lived almost forever. We’ve seen him as Morpheus’s friend throughout, and they had a once-a-century appointment. He’s a fairly ordinary man with an extraordinary gift, and here he confronts a metaphysics changed by Morpheus’s death. It’s interesting at a human level – will he want to continue living if yet another of the consistencies of his life has vanished – and it’s interesting as an allegory. He is Everyman, and Morpheus has been his guide in many things. Morpheus’s death means he has to find his own way more dramatically than ever before.

We readers are, of course, Everyman and Everywoman ourselves. If something ancient of Dream has shifted, we too have to confront new classes of dreaming. It’s frightening but exhilarating, and that’s how Gadling comes to see it.

And, throughout, Gaiman is funny, something he sometimes misses the mark on.

At the other extreme, I don’t have much patience for the final episode, “The Tempest.” Gaiman tells us in the afterword that he thinks the series has always been about the nature of writing – and I’ll buy that at some point – but I find the whole Morpheus/Shakespeare collaboration overdone. I didn’t like it volumes ago when Morpheus essentially commissioned A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and I don’t like it here. If you don’t know The Tempest, I assume it’s frustrating. If you know it fairly well (and I suppose I do, having studied it in grad school and read it many times) then there isn’t much new.

Instead, the gambit works for people who sort of know the play, who, for generally admirable reasons, want to know it better. It feels good to be able to acknowledge one of Gaiman’s references to the play or to Shakespeare’s life and friends, but the bottom-line question is whether Shakespeare saw himself as Prospero breaking his staff. With the answer implicitly yes, there’s the deep awkwardness of Gaiman very publicly breaking his own “staff” – the franchise that is The Sandman.

Look, this is good stuff, but it’s embarrassing to ask to have it measured against the best of Shakespeare. This isn’t that at all, and the very good one-hit “Exiles,” in which the new Daniel/Dream intervenes in the life of a strikingly drawn Chinese vizier, would have been a far more compelling wrap-up.

Otherwise, this one is solid Sandman, which means it’s better than most graphic story work you’ll find. Still, with it getting uneven toward the end, it feels as if it was time for Gaiman’s band to break up for good and move on to its solo careers. I’ve gotten through all the albums now, and I may go back to hear some favorite cuts, but I’m ready to move on.


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