[REVIEW] Baranko's The Horde

It was a minor irony that just as I was about to review Ivan Baranko's graphic novel The Horde last night, lent to me by talktoolooose, the man himself phoned me to invite me over for dinner, a game of On Assignment with National Geographic, and a viewing of the Eurythmics' 1987 Savage video album. (More on this tomorrow.)

The Horde starts from interesting premises. It is the year 2040, and Russia is under the rule of a former science-fiction writer simply referred to as "the Dictator." The Dictator is profoundly interested in the occult, particularly in the more esoteric aspects of Lamaist Buddhism. Going through old NKVD and KGB archives, he learns of an executed Mongol cleric who claimed to be able to transmit the spirit of the great conqueror Genghis Khan to Stalin, to let Russia serve as the nucleus for a second greater Mongol empire stretching from the Atlantic to the pacific. The Dictator is intruiged. In the deserted and flooded Siberian city of Kyzyl, in the meantime, the cleric's great-granddaughter is meditating, trying desperately to reach Genghis Khan before the worst happens, while the Last Chechen (one of nine, actually, a survivor of the nuclear bombardment that ended the Third Chechen War) is off on a solo mission to allow him to enter heavenly Chechnya.

The art is gorgeous, strongly reflecting Francophone traditions of bande dessinée rather than American or Japanese counterparts, and wonderfully human. The ideas in the plot--the audacious intermingling of a dysfunctional cyberpunk universe with Buddhist mysticism--are also entrancing. The problem with The Horde, though, is that this graphic novel, originally presented in three issues, reads like a rough draft of a much longer work. The cyberpunk and the mystical elements of the plot are dislocated from each other, never truly meshing save near the end of The Horde, and then imperfectly. The Buddhist mythology itself is simply presented to the readership, apparently assumed Apart from the Last Chechen, a character with the simplest of motivations, the novel's characters are only briefly described--the Patriarch, for instance, certainly an interesting character in his own right, isn't given the detail that he merits.

The Horde is a good graphic novel. Frustratingly, though, it contains the ungerminated seeds of greatness. I'd give it three or three and a half stars out of five.

[URBAN NOTE] Subway Rides

One small pleasure I've discovered recently in Toronto is the view from the front of a chain of subway cars, standing in front of the window by the door to the conductor's room. The sense of speed and movement as the train advances is particularly strong on an underground subway route, like the Yonge-University-Spadina line south of Rosedale or on the Bloor-Danforth west-to-east route. Sometimes, I imagine that I can almost see the blueshift.