Driving Short Distances

This book is a graphic novel by Joff Winterhart - it was a birthday present from my brother, and I've just read the whole thing in a single sitting. It made me profoundly sad, and hopeful, and a tad confused about the relationship between these two feelings.

    What's it about? So there's a 27-year-old called Sam who is failing at life and needs a job. The second cousin of his absent father, a man called Keith, offers him one in his delivery business - the work essentially entails driving about for brief periods of time, getting out of the car, then getting back in and repeating the procedure. Over the course of the several months that Sam works for Keith, the pair make the same several dozen stops several dozen times, eat the same pair of pasties for lunch every day, and allow us as the reader an insight into a dizzyingly well-realisedly mundane community of genuinely believable characters, from a diversity of receptionists to jocular compatriots of Keith's from the local business community to a particularly flirty bakery employee to acquaintances of questionable history.

    Mundanity is the key word in that last paragraph. Almost nothing of import happens in this story - it's essentially a twinned character study between Sam's aspirations and Keith's mystery. And this is exceptionally well-drawn.* One almost feels as if postgraduate dissertations in psychology could well be written about these people, so complex and yet on-the-surface their portrayals are. Ultimately I think it's a story about hope - what we have always wanted to be the possible case of things despite where we start our stories, where we compromise to accepting our place when these plans don't quite work out, and where we desperately long to be when all chance of achieving what we once wished for have long since evaporated - yet how if we're lucky, or simply of a certain mindset, there is always either a get-out clause or the option to just decide to be content with out lot.

    This is a delightfully human book. I love the illustrations and these are at least half the fabric that carries the vibe of the story. The dialogue is so natural it almost feels like reading a comic-ized documentary shooting at times, and it is chock-full of minute profoundly-human observations that resonate deeply with the kinds of things one has always noticed but almost never heard authors mention. It's a brilliant well-told pair of character studies that goes on no longer than it needs to and doesn't try to do anything beyond its own scope. Even if you're not a fan of graphic novels per se, if you're a fan of any kind of pure fiction that's good because of what it says and affirms about humanity rather than because it has Big Exciting Moments, you'll almost certainly like this.

* And I'm not there talking about the art style - though that too is exceptionally well-drawn, with a minimalistic blue-and-brown colour palette that fits the soul of the story perfectly, and a shabby but detailed habit of portrayal that lends every frame a depth of character that makes the goings-on, basic as they may be, viscerally relatable and recognisable.