It’s been quite a while since I read a graphic novel, and A Book A Day In May seemed like an excellent opportunity to remedy that. I bought Alison (2022) by Lizzy Stewart last year, on the basis of having seen it mentioned on various blogs and Instagram accounts. And also because I was in the lovely Caper bookshop in Oxford, and I don’t feel I can leave there empty handed.
The Alison of the title is Alison Porter, our narrator. In the opening pages, she tells us that she was born in 1958 in Bridport, Dorset – a town, incidentally, that some of my relatives live in. At 18, she marries a local boy a handful of years older than her. “He was nice. I was fast-tracking my route to an ordinary life. It made sense; an ordinary life seemed like the right thing to do.”
Before long, a much older man called Patrick meets her – and woos her away from her short-lived marriage.
I loved Patrick Kerr as a trapdoor out of my life long before I found I could love him as a man.
She has only experienced provincial mundanity. He represents bohemia, London, art – and she is swept away. But even in Stewart’s first illustrations of Patrick, he seems creepy – almost vampiric. We suspect long before Alison does that this will not be a happy ending.
Patrick affects to encourage Alison’s art, while also using her as a model for his own paintings, but he doesn’t seem to want her to have her own artistic voice. He insists on hours a day of drawing practice, trying to turn her into an imitator of his own style. Disillusionment seeps into Alison’s mindset. But she is encouraged and enheartened by a friend she makes – Tessa, a young Black sculptor. She is the only true friend that Alison meets in the maelstrom of artists who gather around Patrick and (deliberately or otherwise) make her feel ignorant, wrongly dressed, and inadequate.
Alison doesn’t end at the disillusion there. It covers many years, and it’s really about finding and flourishing in your own identity – though remaining clear-eyed. Her self-discovery doesn’t prevent her having problems, whether that be detachment from her parents or tragedies that befall people she loves. It is a very honest book – so realistic that I had to look people up to see if they were real (which they are not).
In a graphic novel more than anywhere else, the medium and presentation are fundamental. For the most part, Stewart uses simple line-drawings with (I think) watercolours that are somewhere between sepia and grey. You can see some examples in the Guardian review. There are pages of many frames, where they hold a conversation. Others have chunks of first person text alongside the drawings, and these are written in a beguiling manner with enough psychological depth to lend weight to the overall story. And then some spreads in the book are wholly illustration, and the only moments of colour in the book; in these, Stewart has more opportunity to play with style and format. It all works together very well.
I found Alison a moving graphic novel, dodging some platitudes and cliches even while telling a familiar story – the naive woman who is taken advantage of by a powerful man, and creativity that has to force its way through conventions. My only query is why the cover art is chosen – so different from the style found inside. Why wouldn’t they have used one of the many illustrations of Alison herself?
Anyway, I very much enjoyed the experience, and I won’t leave it so long before I pick up a graphic novel again.