Swiss graphic novel creator Zep, born Philippe Chappuis, has now seen two of his graphic novels in English publication through IDW’s EuroComics line. Last year’s English release of “A Story of Men” dwelt on the implied inferiorities of young rock artists whose failed band reunites twenty years later. A similar spirit of those lingering “what if?” questions lurks in “A Strange and Beautiful Sound,” but this time, the questions are posed to a traveling monk, Dom Marcus (aka William), and new friend Méry.
Cover by ZepWritten and Illustrated by Zep
William chose silence 25 years ago when he joined the Carthusian religious order. When an inheritance forces him to leave the monastery for Paris, he must master a whole new world and question certainties forged long ago. He meets Méry, a young woman whose days are numbered due to an incurable illness, and who is resolutely decided on making the most of the time she has left. Now William must face new questions—Where is life’s value? In the struggles, or in the peace?—and complicate his choices in a powerful story that truly addresses the meaning of life.
William the monk must leave his Carthusian monastery after a quarter century of silence and chastity to deal with a dead relative’s inheritance. Heading to Paris, he meets Méry, the soulful Parisian creperie-owner gracing the book’s cover, who is on her own disruptive journey through terminal cancer.
Their inauspicious start is the strange sound of his own voice breaking its silence, uttering, “I think your feet are on my seat.” (I’m curious if that trips off the tongue as goofily in French as in English.) The same way that she inadvertently draws him out of silence, she also meets him as he re-examines the vocation that withdrew him from the world he re-enters.
What follows is a sort of pensively paced jaunt through Paris, as Williams cracks open his memories pre-ascetic-removal-from-the-world, reconnects with his eccentric relatives and receives his eccentric inheritance, and locates Méry for a Before Sunset-style dalliance with ice cream and swimming in the Seine. From there, “A Strange and Beautiful Sound” breezes by its 90 pages and one-day-and-night of events, but somehow finds a way to lend each moment its own magnitude. The book’s brief excursion feels like it unfairly stole more than its share of significance.
Part of the artistic heft of this brief story is the art that shortchanges none of its duties or opportunities. Zep illustrates all this with a meticulous thin-lined cleanness and moody monochromatics that does equal justice to rocky cliffs, dream-hazed Paris-scapes, and the quiet subtleties of the principal characters’ facial deflections. The austere routine of the monastery is rendered with rigidity that makes Dom Marcus’s distaste make sense, but also with a sneaky liveliness that betrays the monk’s sentiment that monastery life seems planned out “by a god with no imagination.”
In fact, without giving away the ending, the book seems designed to urge us to glory in the splendor of the mundane. Comics are often religious, mythic, and spiritual, but in Zep’s hands, they are a rare quality of contemplative. This is no Thomas Merton, but “A Strange and Beautiful Sound” finds enough sublime in city pavements and sensual embraces that its yawning towards transcendence doesn’t feel false, at least not to me. Instead, Zep takes advantage of the way comics can employ our expectations of what a page or spread of pages should accomplish to slow our read, lingering at sights our eyes to drawn to as they draw William’s eye, or flashing back to a memory distinctively colored to serve as the strange intrusion on a page otherwise colored with an entirely different monochromatic palette, to suggest the intrusion of past sediments of experience in the experience of William’s present.
A question I ask of any contemplative writing (or graphic novelism, in this case) is, do the meditations invite you in or shut you out? Your mileage may vary, especially depending on how you take in the wayward monk in the middle of the story. William is more an object of curiosity than of sympathy, often drawn with his hands folded, if not in prayer then in obeisance. He seems trained by his monastic life to wait on things to happen to him, which I imagine can be frustrating for some readers. But he’s refreshingly unmodern, and I can’t help but root for his sojourning heart.
Continued belowMéry and the other characters don’t have much time to achieve many dimensions. But they are primarily foils to William’s bewildered re-engagement with civilization, even Méry with her brave stare into her mortality, contrasting with William’s tepid questioning. William’s relatives, meanwhile, are combustible and flighty, just as they should be. I like these characters; I could have spent more time with them; I know I wasn’t meant to.
Zep has a poetic argument to make. One about Life and Memory and Silence. For some, the strange sound will reverberate like a thud in a vacuous hall of concrete echoes, like the castle walkways William marches through at the book’s start. For others, the beautiful sound might invite a moment of pause, like his Paris meanderings with Méry his worldly companion, to close the comics and enjoy a cool morning on the hills or a mansard roof’s curves or a partner’s raspberry sorbet.
Or just silence.
