Ten Years in the Tub (59 page)

Authors: Nick Hornby

BOOK: Ten Years in the Tub

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It's been kind of a gloomy month, all in all, because Marjane Satrapi's two brilliant, heartbreaking graphic novels,
Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood
and
Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return
, aren't likely to lift the spirits, either. The story of Satrapi's childhood is also the story of the Iranian revolution, so she witnessed one violent and repressive regime replacing another; I got the same feeling I had while reading Jung Chang's
Wild Swans
, that the events described are so fantastical, so surreal and horrific, that they no longer seem to belong to the real world but to some metaphorical Orwellian dystopia. We know very little of the real world, though, those of us who live in the U.S. and Europe, just our small and relatively benign corner of it, and though we can see that the Guardians of the Revolution are human, just like us, it's pretty hard to find a way in to their humanity. Satrapi follows the trail of blood that leads from the overthrow of the Shah, through the fatuous and tragic war with Iraq, and on to the imprisonment, torture, and eventual murder of the leftists who helped bring about his downfall. And as the free-thinking daughter of left-leaning parents, Satrapi is able to use the small frames of her own life to create the bigger picture without contrivance or omission. (If the first book is slightly more successful than the second, it's because Satrapi spent some of the 1980s in Austria, so her personal and national histories take divergent paths.)

Satrapi draws in stark black-and-white blocks which bring to mind some
of Eric Gill's woodcuts, and these blocks quickly begin to make perfect sense; in fact, it would be pretty hard not to draw post-revolutionary Iran without themâwhat with the beards and the robes and the veils, there was and still is a lot of black around. You know how bad things were for young Marjane and her mates? A poster of Kim Wilde comes to represent freedom, and who wants to live in a place where that's been allowed to happen? I know myself well enough to understand that I would never have read a prose memoir describing this life and these eventsâI wouldn't have wanted to live with this amount of fear and pain over days and weeks. I'm glad I understand more than I did, though, and these books, it seems to me, provide an object lesson in all that's good about graphic novels.

I picked up Bernard Levin's
The Pendulum Years
, about Britain in the '60s, because there's a little story in it that I'd always thought would make a good film, and I wanted to remind myself of the details. But then I remembered that the book contained one of my favorite pieces of comic writing, Levin's account of the Lady Chatterley trial, so I reread that, and a few of the other chapters. The piece on the Lady Chatterley trial made me laugh all over again, but it struck me this time that, even though Levin does a great job, it's not so much his writing that's funny as the trial itself; it's hard to go wrong with this material. For the benefit of young people: at the beginning of the 1960s, Penguin Books published Lawrence's
Lady Chatterley's Lover
, the first time it had been available to the general public since 1928, and the publishers were promptly prosecuted. Penguin won the ensuing court case, but not before some very English (and, it has to be said, extremely dim) lawyers argued, with unintentional comic Ã©lan, that the book had no literary merit, and therefore Penguin couldn't justify its obscene content. The law's notion of literary merit was both revealing and instructiveâMr. Griffith-Jones, for the prosecution, doubted, for example, that any book which contains a misquotation from the 24th Psalm could be said to be much good. “Do you not think that in a work of high literary meritâ¦ he might take the trouble to look it up?”

Mr. Griffith-Jones was also perturbed by Lawrence's repeated use of the words
womb
and
bowels
, taking the view that your absolutely top authors, your greats, if you will, would get the thesaurus out. “Then a little bit further down
page 141, towards the bottom, at the end of the longish paragraph the two words âwomb' and âbowels' appear againâ¦ Is that really what you call expert, artistic writing?” This really happened, honestly.

I was going to point out the bleeding obvious (as I prefer to do whenever possible, because it takes less effort, but fills up the space anyway)âI was going to say that a decade that began like this ended with man walking on the moon. Things aren't quite that cheerily progressive, though, are they? Because we're not landing men on the moon, or anywhere else in spaceâindeed, we no longer even possess the proper technology. There are plenty of people out there, however, who don't want us reading about wombs and bowels. Just ask Marjane Satrapi.