Louis Riel

Chester Brown’s graphic novel Louis Riel, which he has been working on and publishing in serial form since 1999, is finally done, and published as a single volume. I couldn’t be happier…

Brown is like no one else in the field of comix – or literature of any sort, for that matter. His visual style has a deceptive simplicity: it seems at first glance rather primitive and minimal, with characters reduced to a few strokes, and backgrounds conventionally shaded in; but then you notice the meticulousness, the way Brown makes every line, every trait in a caricature, every last bit of shading count. Brown’s comix are powerfully expressive in the way they do so much with so little: formally, he’s a minimalist, but emotionally he is something rarer and stranger.
Chester Brown’s narrative subject matter has radically changed over the course of the last fifteen years. His first book, from multiple issues of his comic Yummy Fur, was the amazing Ed the Happy Clown, a truly weird and perverse, almost indescribable exercise in what I can only call bathroom surrealism. (There’s also a volume called The Little Man, containing some strange short stories written contemporaneously with Ed).
These were followed by work that couldn’t have been more different: two volumes of poignant, yet understated, autobiography, The Playboy and I Never Liked You, which somehow combine an emotional reticence with confession of the most excruciating embarrassments of adolescent sexuality.
In the late 1990s, Brown shifted gears again, publishing 11 issues of a comic book called Underwater, a fascinating and enigmatic account of two children, starting at birth, and moving gradually toward linguistic understanding; Brown abandoned the series mid-narrative, and I have no idea if he will ever return to it. (The Underwater issues also contained beautiful and troubling renditions of scenes from The Gospel According to Saint Matthew, which as far as I know have never been collected in a volume).
Louis Riel is again a radically new departure for Brown. Riel was a late-19th-century metis (mixed race, French and Indian) leader, who took up arms against the discriminatory policies of the Canadian government, and was eventually hanged as a traitor. (Canadians know all about him, but as an ignorant American I hadn’t even heard of Riel until Brown started publishing his series). Brown’s rendition of his life is cool and detached: we are never quite sure if Riel should be revered as a revolutionary hero, or pitied as a religious crank who somehow got out of hand, and whose manias unwittingly undermined the just cause he dedicated his life to serve.
At first I was disappointed by Brown’s reticence, sticking to the public events, and not providing anything in the way of inner, psychological motivations. (Brown does alter and embellish the facts a bit for poetic effect, as he indicates in his lengthy and meticulous notes for the volume). But gradually it became clear to me that this holding back was precisely the right strategy: not just because Canadian public opinion remains sharply divided on Riel to this day, but also because the void that Brown creates in this way is accurate, both intellectually and emotionally. The book would be diminished if we were given more detail (instead of a mere four panels, less than a page) of Riel’s mountaintop religious vision, which led to his being locked away in an asylum for several years.
For Riel (at least as Brown presents him) was not a conventional “great man” – quite to the contrary, he was someone who was thrust into circumstances in which he was compelled to act. He was not deeply reflective or self-conscious, he made many costly mistakes and misjudgments, he was pushed by events much more than he shaped them, and he was not finally very effectual. It is because of this, rather than in spite of all this, that Riel is an exemplary modern martyr; and it is Riel’s quality of ordinariness (or better, this status of being almost a man without qualities, despite his religious mania and his political role) that Brown captures. The cumulative effect is quite powerful, when we get to the final account of Riel’s trial and execution. No richer filling in could make more of an emotional impression on the reader than this reticence; and Brown convinces us as well that this is true of Riel himself, as much as it is of Brown’s narration of his life and death.
Something for further, and continued, meditation.