Tuesday, November 26, 2024

Here

Here by Richard McGuire (2014) 304 pages

The new film Here by Robert Zemeckis starring Tom Hanks and Robin Wright is based on this graphic novel. With such big stars the narrative thread must be more consistent and traditional, but I am still curious to see how it is adapted. This graphic novel is quite abstract with a "camera" view that does not move, but the time period depicted does jump wildly forward and backwards in time. It only gives you glimpses, often in small windows, into the broad stretch of time. We see ancient prehistory, history when no house is in the foreground, nearly the whole twentieth century history in the house that might be the main character, and speculation about our near future. There are some mini stories that are sequential over several pages: siblings sharing a joke, archeologists hoping to find relics on the property, Ben Franklin's family in a colonial house "across the street," a painter from the 1870s, and the building of the house in the foreground. After climate catastrophe, I especially loved the virtual tech imagined a couple centuries into our future. Following the time stamps is a nice mental puzzle, but I think the point is more to see the commonalities of how humans act and react to each other.
 

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