Dispossession
A Novel of Few Words
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- £8.99
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- £8.99
Publisher Description
England, 1873. John Caldigate, a young gentleman, gets into debt gambling and decides to try his luck in the gold fields of New South Wales. On the outward journey, he promises to marry Mrs Smith, a divorced actress who is travelling in the same ship. Returning home a rich man, John marries Hester, the sweetheart he left behind. Soon, Mrs Smith also returns from Australia, penniless, and claims that she is already his wife.
Inspired by Anthony Trollope’s 1879 novel John Caldigate, Dispossession embeds the reader in a uniquely wrought experience of the mid-nineteenth century, including the first ever appearance of the Aboriginal Wiradjuri language in a graphic novel.
Taking unique advantage of the graphic form to conjure the material world of the Victorian era in a glittering waltz of intense colour and deep shadow, Dispossession is a virtuoso and intensely affecting graphic novel by a master visual storyteller.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Bigamy, colonization, and gambling wreak havoc in this graphic adaptation of John Caldigate, Anthony Trollope's 1879 novel. Driven by debts, John heads to the gold fields of New South Wales and promises to marry a former actress he meets there only to wed another woman upon his return home to England. This is a work full of intriguing conceits: the usage of Wiradjuri, an Aboriginal language, the six-panel grid used throughout, the arm's-length distance at which each panel is framed. But these conceits do not elevate the work and often feel like gimmicks. Moreover, the process of adaptation seems to have shorn off necessary details of the story, rendering it a dry confusion of manners. That said, Grennan, whose previous work was mostly academic study of comics, is a talented artist, whose sketchy pencil brings out the lush details of 19-century life without devoting slavish attention to each and every curtain there is a charmingly abstract quality to the way he renders Caldigate's complicated world.
