The Lambton Worm

My notes for the book club meeting, where I talked about this book.

Alice in Sunderland: An Entertainment 
by Bryan Talbot

The Guardian reviewer of this book described Bryan Talbot as “almost a grand old man of British comics”. He began with Brainstorm, published in the mid-1970s. The Adventures of Luther Arkwright, his sci-fi epic, was the first graphic novel from Britain. Before this book his most recent work was The Tale of One Bad Rat, “a thoughtful, tenderly drawn story about a homeless child-abuse victim”. 

It took Talbot four years to produce Alice in Sunderland. The Guardian reviewer believed that it was “meant to be his magnum opus”. It is certainly a tour-de-force. The conception is grand, and he incorporates history, myth, gossip, and some autobiography. He uses many different visual styles including: “Victorian engraving, watercolours, Prince Valiant pastiche, superhero dynamism, Photoshop psychedelia, indie cartooning, fumetti, homages to Hergé ... it's all here, and more”.

This is classified as a graphic novel, although I couldn’t really see how the word novel fits.  Indeed, it is not even a coherent story, and is not fiction. At an early point he gives the narrator (himself) the following words:
Stories. We’ve already had a few and there are many more to come. And all of them are true... apart from one. One is a total falsehood... a complete whopper... and it’s up to you, [the readers], to guess which one. Some of the stories are folklore; but are they authentic or invented? One is the story of a city, a history of England in a microcosm... and one is the tale of a singular genius and his muse who give the world one of the most famous characters in fiction.

The city is Sunderland (Talbot's adopted home), and much of the book is its history. Talbot intersperses material from Michael Bute's A Town Like Alice's, the thesis of which is that the immortal Alice books were inspired by Lewis Carroll's regular visits to the northeast. Official biographies of Carroll assert that Carroll wrote the books while in Oxford and that he did not travel to the Durham area. 

Talbot emphasises the way that Sunderland had been “mistreated” by outsiders such as the Vikings, the Saxons and then the Normans. Also, a number of inventions which are claimed by others (the electric light bulb, the miners’ safety lamp) were first invented by a Sunderlander, although Edison and Davy produced markedly superior designs. 

The Guardian called this a “sumptuous tome”, with which I must agree. The setting of the “story” is the Sunderland Empire theatre, and he depicts himself performing a show (the whole graphic novel) to an audience of one. In 1970 a “hugely expensive multimedia Alice extravaganza” was a complete flop. I do not know if this book was successful or a flop.

The book presents a history of Britain by way of a focus on Sunderland. In particular he presents war as ubiquitous in the history of Sunderland (and Britain), and shows the devastating long term effects of such uniquely human behaviour. There is much to think on and many times I sought the assistance of the internet to determine the veracity of the stories he tells.

According to the Guardian reviewer, “the book's structure has a Carrollesque illogic”, and many times the flow was jarred by what seems to have no connection with what went before or follows after. Those jarring moments lead to reflection, and discovering (perhaps) one of the messages he is presenting to the reader. He makes the point that he writes always in the present tense, because the past, present and future co-exist. That is made more obvious by sudden shifts into the distant or not so distant past.

After THE END, there are another 19 pages. An encore using his newly born grand daughter as a focus for optimism about the future, and renewal and regeneration. 


I thoroughly enjoyed this book, I learned a lot, and I was struck by his passion for justice and fairness which surface frequently.