Gunnerkrigg Court Vol. 5: Refine (Gunnerkrigg Court #5)

I'm reading this online.

This is a 72-year-old man who has read most of the stand-out books in the Western Canon, from Homer to Marguerite Duras, as well as a heap of genre novels - sci-fi, roman noir, horror - while also reading across the social sciences and humanities, middle-brow science, philosophy and so on - who is now reading a web-comic for thirteen-year-olds.

When I retired, I thought I'd pretty much go on reading as before, but that didn't happen. I blame Neil Gaiman: after picking up 'American Gods', I followed through with the whole Sandman series, then on to Mike Carey's 'Lucifer' ... and now here I am.

This must be a pretty good comic for adolescents - particularly those who have been immersed in a boarding school, ripped untimely from the bosom of the family and having to work out how to deal with strangers of one's own age, blundering from one faux pas to another with little intervention from adults. The main protagonist is a little girl whose mother has just died, and whose father - an appalling Dickensian monster - has just disappeared, leaving his bereaved daughter with no inkling of his whereabouts for a couple of years. She makes friends with three mythical creatures - Renard and Ysengrin from the Roman de Renart and Coyote, from the stories of the North American peoples - who induct her into the ether, a realm of magic where she converses with fairies, with the dead, and with animals.

This is one point where I have difficulties. Neither Renard nor Ysengrin are much like their early models - why did the author need to make the reference at all? Ysengrin in particular is so widely different from the butt of Renard's pranks in the Roman that it's difficult to recognize him. Coyote cleaves more closely to his prototype, but what is he doing in 21st Century England? There's a long British tradition of walking off with other people's cultural emblems ; Kipling's Old Man Kangaroo and Yellow Dog Dingo come to mind, but in these times of decolonialization, it does seem somewhat graceless to thus appropriate a central cosmological figure of those who have been dispossessed of the very lands upon which Coyote thrives.

Antinomy - or 'Little Orphan Annie' - spending much of her time in this other world, finds it difficult to get on with the other children, although she does have a Best Friend who offers both emotional and technical support (she's a super-scientist who's working on producing the most advanced robots the world has ever seen). We follow here attempts to get to grips with life over several years. But while the other youngsters form couples, she remains off to the side, her emotions in abeyance as she searches for the father that she never had.

All this is well conveyed - although I found the romancing somewhat tedious, as it might be expected that an old man would. The fantasy story is quite gripping, as the school - science - and the forest - magic - plot and counter-plot, while Antinomy finds it increasingly difficult to know whose side she's on. I imagine that I'll be looking forward to finding out how it all comes out.