| April 2008
|
As a professional reader
and a full-time skeptic, it is rare that books move me
deeply, and rarer still that they move me to tears. Reading
too much and too often (and too much that is cynical,
poorly crafted, or contemptible) I sometimes feel like the
heartless giant the father becomes in Three
Shadows. But like the father,
this story has melted me and moved me to tears and, dare I
say it, to tears of gratitude. I feel prepared as a result
of this book to be not only a better reader, more open to
the possibilities of every text I read, but a better
father. (I can’t believe I just wrote that— there
goes all
my street
cred.)
Three
Shadows is an allegorical tale of
the impossible loss of a young child and the price his
parents might pay to try and keep him. There is no more
painful subject, and for the most part—and in most hands—it
is nothing but a desperate attempt to pull a person’s
heartstrings so hard that you shake free their wallet. In
fact, as an unbearably doting parent myself, I make it a
rule to avoid any film and most books where children die.
(And that last sentence should dispense with whatever might
be left of my street cred after my first paragraph). But
Pedrosa handles the story—inspired by his own experiences
watching his friends’ son die—with a gentle, loving touch
that is as respectful of the readers’ heartstrings as it is
of the very real loss of his friends, which radiates
movingly from the core of this book. And the remarkable
energy and vitality of his lines, honed from years working
in mainstream animation, makes even the tragedy that is
inevitable speak more to the power of life than the
finality of death.
In truth, the earlier work by Pedrosa I had seen (none of
it yet translated from the original French) radiated the
influence of Disney in ways that felt more derivative than
alive. But here, the quality of the drawing is both
breathlessly effortless and brilliantly spot-on at every
turn. Pedrosa moves impercibly from a delicate fine-line
style, to a shadowy charcoal, to flat and heavy
black-and-white compositions, and always in the service of
the story, as it shifts gently across different registers
of fable, myth, personal memoir, and tribute. And the
tribute here is not only to the loss at the core of his
story, but also to the life of French comics: one sees the
gentle homages throughout to Dupuy & Berberian,
Trondheim, David B., and others.
I write all this knowing that the book will not move all
equally. Some very smart readers, Charles Hatfield and
Craig Fisher, at their review-blog Thought
Balloonists, both found the book
somewhat cold at its heart, a critique that of course
baffled me given the gelatinous mess this book left me.
And Tom Spurgeon (another smart guy)
expressed another fairly popular sentiment: that the
book’s subplots and digressions ultimately suggest a
somewhat haphazardly edited book more about “love” than
about narrative unity. As I read their reviews, I could
see the logic of their responses, and this only made me
more intrigued by the seeming illogic of my own. But I
have no regrets and make no apologies: this beautiful
book worked for me beyond reason, which of course must
serve as a call to seek out those reasons as best I can.
In order to get a clearer sense as to why this story worked
so well for me, I compared it to other books in my library
that featured similar stories that left me cold. There were
many, and rereading them did little to warm up my normally
stony heart. But they did help me see some of what worked
so well for me in Three
Shadows. For one thing,
Three
Shadows is about so much more than
the death of a child, and it is here that the subplots and
digressions do their magic work, I believe. While the
central story involves the Shadows’ arrival for the son and
the very different responses of the mother and the father
to this horrible realization, from early on in the book a
series of seemingly minor character intrude on the private
grief of the family. First, an old woman, a spiritual
advisor to the town, heads off for her own much-delayed
encounter with the Shadows, even as the father begins his
desperate attempt to steal his son away to freedom on the
other side of the river. The significance of the scars she
bears from her youthful encounter with those same Shadows
and her decision now to embrace them only makes sense at
the book’s end, when an old man who cheated the father of
his heart in exchange for power to hold the Shadows at bay
is forced to pay the price for his selfish choices.
Perhaps most baffling on first read, however, is the long
subplot of the ferryboat ride across the seemingly endless
river. Here father and son encounter an old couple who both
extend and require sympathy; even in the midst of his
desperation, the father is able to leave his son to reach
out for others as he confronts the captain in search of
care for the old man. In the captain’s quarters, he
encounters a slave trader and his victim, a young woman
being sold to serve at the pleasure of cruel and sadistic
masters, and here the father’s willingness to risk all in
the service of others comes up short. Staring into the
slave’s eyes, he can only walk away despite his deep horror
at the face of this inhuman trade. We know the father is a
good man, a very good man, and yet even faced with an
injustice that shakes him to his very foundations, he must
put his son’s safety first.
Of course, he cannot ultimately protect his son, and part
of what the book measures here is the cost of this devotion
to the father’s soul, a cost represented ultimately by the
heartless giant he becomes, so big and powerful and
unfeeling that he cannot feel the pain he is bringing to
the very child he so desperately wants to protect. But this
book does not condemn the father’s choices here, but mourns
with him, nods sadly to the shifting ethical lines that
parenthood brings to one’s life, and the cost of that
shifting for one’s sense of self and potential as a parent.
In the end, father and son must trade places, the father
saved by the son who restores to him his own heart and who
bravely confronts the fate the father could not face. In
the end, despite the grief, this is a book about the second
chances that life, if embraced properly and fully, always
make available. And that is why this is a book most worthy
not only of one read, but of a second.
