From England to Alaska: this week’s reading

FAMILY BRITAIN: The Certainties of Place is third in David Kynaston’s series looking at Britain from 1945 and the end of the war through Margaret Thatcher becoming prime minister in 1979 (I read the fifth installment a while back). Like the other volume I read, it’s composed of diaries, interviews, newspaper articles and the like to give a feel of life as it was experienced; that works, though it also leaves me with questions (as with his Open the Box I can’t make hide nor hare of the disputes over education issues).

This look at Britain from 1951-1953 shows my friend Ross’s point that any year in the 20th century can claim to be The Year That Changed Everything. We have the death of King George and the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, a new book called Casino Royale, a train-worker strike that Thatcher would later cite as the moment unions got drunk with power, big sports events (Jean-Luc Goddard described Hungary crushing the British soccer as the last great triumph of socialism), Indian restaurants becoming a thing (they’d been around before but people were starting to notice), the failure of Britain’s supposed cutting-edge jet plane, the Comet, and a debate over whether the BBC’s new TV service should have commercial competitors (I was charmed to notice that Watch With Mother, which I watched as a kid a decade later, was born in this period). Plus Britain still struggling with rationing, efforts at slum clearance (and debates over where the government should clear slum-dwellers to), cinema and the Palais dance halls (you may recognize them from the Kinks’ “Come Dancing”) and an astonishing amount of smoking and drinking. I’ll get to the second part of Family Britain soon.

Several decades back, comics artist Barry Windsor-Smith pitched Marvel on a Hulk graphic novel that would share Bruce Banner’s rage as the Hulk sprang from childhood abuse; as Windsor-Smith was working on the story, it turned up as a plot point in the Bill Mantlo run on the book. Whether Mantlo or someone else ripped Windsor-Smith off or there’s a more innocent explanation, Smith’s concept surfaced in radically altered form as MONSTERS.

In this massive graphic novel, a teenage abuse victim volunteers for the military in 1964. Realizing he’s a guy nobody will miss, the military subjects him to a super-soldier type experiment, transforming him into a Hulk-like brute, though with more compassion.

I suspect this would have worked better as a Hulk tale, which might have been more focused. Here it wanders into endless long conversations and domestic scenes and flashbacks that make me think Windsor-Smith is shooting for something serious and literary. Instead it’s meandering and slow and didn’t really hold me (concentrating on the Hulk stand-in would have worked better). The art is stunning, though.

William L. Chester’s sequel to Hawk of the Wilderness, KIOGA OF THE WILDERNESS, is a much better book. Unlike the first one it held my attention all the way through, even though it’s quite meandering (for example having Kioga wander off and become chieftain of one of the Nato’wah tribes). The plot has the white forest god Kioga lead a tribe of Native Americans to their ancestral homeland so they can live free as their ancestors did before the white man took their land; once there, Kioga gets involved in tribal struggles while the white cast of the first book arrives to claim the lost land for the United States (the racial/colonialist politics remain dodgy). If good Tarzan knockoffs are your kind of thing, well worth a look.

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