From a practical perspective, though, Shubeik Lubeik has a different setup in that not everyone is simply granted a wish all at once. There's an extraction and manufacturing process involved, which takes time to ramp up beginnning in the 1890s, and government regulators around the world start cracking down their distribution and usage, so by present day, there is a significant wish industry but it's extremely costly now. (There was a low-grade "third tier" wish industry that was more affordable, but those wishes tended to be more of the monkey's paw variety and got a lot of people hurt, so those have been outlawed by the start of the story.) The upshot of all this is that wishes are thing that theoretically everyone still has access to, but they're realistically only available to the very wealthy. And, not surprisingly, those often get used for things like pet dinosaurs and flying cars.
Here's the thing, though: despite the amount of careful thought and consideration Mohamed's put into what a wish-enabled world looks like, and the amount of world-building she's put into those ideas, that is all totally ancillary to the point of the book.
See, Shokry's this owner of a small newsstand and somewhat reluctantly has three wishes for sale. Reluctantly because it's against his religion and the only reason he has them in the first place is because they were given to his father in lieu of payment for a job many decades ago. This gets casually brought up in conversation with one of his regular customers, who has their grandchild work up a better advertising flyer for them. They still take a while to sell because it's the equivalent of a small body shop trying to sell three brand new, top-of-the-line Rolls-Royces; everyone is going to question their legitimacy and assume it's a scam of some sort. But Shokry does eventually have someone take interest and saves up enough over several years to buy one.
We then follow an incredibly sad and powerful tale of how she's railroaded by the governement for her purchase (was the license transferred properly, etc.) and they throw her in prison under the assumption that she stole it because she was clearly too poor to actually afford it. The wish itself is largely irrelevant to the story; the focus is on her resistance of a bullying, authoritarian, corrupt system who try to force her to turn the wish over to them. (They need her consent or the wish won't work.) It's a story about how the powerful hold on to power by intimiadation and beaurocracy, and force everyone not in a position of privilege to remain under their bootheels indefinitely.
The next person to purchase a wish is a young man in college. He's found himself to be increasingly struggling with... well, everything despite having a very promising childhood. He wants the wish to "fix" everything, but he's not entirely sure what's wrong and doesn't want his wish to fail or get executed wrong or anything. In wrestling with the notion, he learns that he's suffering from depression, a concept he can't adequately communicate to his parents or most of his friends. Here again, the wish is largely irrelevant to the story; it's a spotlight on how depression manifests and how people suffering from it try to cope and how/why they're often able to mask signs of it to others.
The third person the book focuses on is Shokry's regular customer from the beginning. Shokry, upon learning of her impending death from illness, tries to simply give the final wish to her, but she relays a story of how wishes were used when she was a child in the 1940s and '50s, and how saving her hometown from a conjured dragon led her down a life path where she felt cotinually trapped, gaslit, emotionally abused, evetually unable to support her children. She used a wish she had been given for killing the dragon all those years earlier to essentially re-live her life on her own terms. She was at the end of her second life, and was ready to be reunited with her long dead children. The wishes here were decidedly more central to the story, but largely only to explain why she was refusing one now.
Most wish fulfillment type stories put an emphasis on facing the consequences of poorly-thought-out ideas. While there's nothing inherently wrong with that, it is something of a well-worn trope now. But what Mohamed has done has put her effort into exploring what people might say and do and think before they even put a wish into action. It's an exploration of people wrestling with their own inner demons; the wish fulfillment notion is just an excuse for their introspection. The chapter on depression I found especially powerful given how badly it's usually portrayed in media. Mohamed does a phenomenal job exploring what makes people tick, and conveying how they think and feel. The book was originally published in Arabic and won both the Best Graphic Novel and Grand prizes at the Cairo Comic Festival in 2017, and the English version was nominated for this year's Eisner Award for Best U.S. Edition of International Material. It's easy to see why. It's incredibly engrossing and engaging, and I encourage you to not be daunted by the 500+ page count or the fact that it has to be read right to left. Very well worth it!
The book came out from Pantheon Books last year, so it should be available from any bookstore. The hardcover retails for $35 US and is suitably impressive, particularly for a cartoonist's debut graphic novel.
0 comments:
Post a Comment