This review contains minor spoilers.
Earlier this year, Matthew Dooley’s debut graphic novel “Flake” became the first comic book to win the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize, the UK’s only literary award for comedy literature. It is, indeed, a very funny book, but it’s also a somber reflection on the mundanity of working class life in the north of England.
Created by Matthew DooleyCover by Matthew DooleyIn the small seaside town of Dobbiston, Howard sells ice creams from his van, just like his father before him. But when he notices a downturn in trade, he soon realises its cause: Tony Augustus, Howard’s half-brother, whose ice-cream empire is expanding all over the North-West…
Flake, Matthew Dooley’s debut graphic novel, tells of how this epic battle turns out, and how Howard – helped by the Dobbiston Mountain Rescue team – overcomes every obstacle and triumphs in the end.
It might seem strange, but the comic book “Flake” most resembles is “Watchmen” — it may not be a gritty, deconstructionist superhero story, but it has the same crystalline appearance, with 12 x 12 grid layouts (as opposed to 9 x 9 ones), which allows you to see characters gliding across backgrounds you realize are parts of a whole. Dooley seems to love drawing angles, whether it’s roads, mini golf courses, ice cream vans, or the popsicles themselves: at one point, Howard’s van even resembles a popsicle.
The colors are desaturated, veering towards gray tones, and the large amount of panels greatly reduces the pacing, building the sense of stillness (and perhaps loneliness) one may experience up north. The unhurried pacing lends the narration the sense of a documentary speaker, slowly remarking on the quirky stories of the inhabitants of Dobbiston, which gives every unexpected gag time to land. (You can almost imagine Emma Thompson or Stephen Fry doing the audiobook version, since the script has that quietly bemused tone.)
The book is full of round faces, with small, round eyes, noses, and chins: however, this cartoonishness actually enhances the realism of the book — you feel like you’re seeing the faces of every middle-aged and old person in England (and some young ones, I’ll admit), and can easily imagine their local accents, even though they’re not indicated in the lettering. Dooley does so much with so little, and it makes the dramatic moments more surprising and emotional than if the characters were as detailed as the settings.
Much of the humor is found in how people are clearly trying to find a way to break the boredom in this small town: Howard’s sole friend, Jasper, has loads of obscure interests, and as head of the Dobbiston Mountain Rescue Service, is doing his utmost to undo the local peak getting recategorized as a hill. There’s elaborate digressions on the accidental founding of Dobbiston, and a man who fooled the townsfolk into believing he’d been to the South Pole: Dooley seems to be having his ice cream cake and eating it too, simultaneously sending up the region, while crafting this elaborate love letter to it.
The whole premise of an ice cream man finding himself confronted by another one, who essentially behaves like a racketeer, seems rooted in the desire to have something actually interesting happen in a small northern town. That, coupled with the faded coloring, makes a moment when Howard confronts Tony (and his cronies) in the pub, all the more amusing: the book’s signature color, pink, turns incredibly vivid, and the panels resemble the close-ups from a Leone Western — it’s like a scene from a lurid ’70s crime thriller.
Thematically, it gels together well too: Howard and Tony’s rivalry is fueled in no small part by the fact Tony only exists because Howard’s father was bored by his life. The book seems to be telling us, when you live in a town where there’s barely anything to do, it can feel like you have nothing to lose, and be easy to overlook who you have in your life. The shadow of Howard’s dad, and everything wrong he represented with working class fathers of that era, looms large in the protagonist’s life.
Which era? One of the smartest parts of the writing is that Dooley doesn’t spell out when it’s set: it already feels timeless, and could be set now were it not for the telltale absence of mobile phones. A couple of clues lets us work out it’s the late ’90s or early 2000s, during the optimism of the Blair years, when the grim ’70s and ’80s were well behind the UK — it seems Dooley is asking, if life seemed a little bleak back then, imagine how Howard must be feeling now after a decade of David Cameron et al.? Still, as the book’s outcome seems to suggest, he’s hopefully getting by with a little help from his friends.
The ending is rather brisk compared to the rest of the book, and consequently feels slightly abrupt, but by that point it has managed to satisfyingly wrap up most of its storylines, and all while bucking what would’ve been the conventional outcome of Howard and Tony’s story. Ultimately, “Flake” is a gentle and hilarious comedy drama, and a beautifully constructed piece of graphic storytelling, a truly worthy winner of the Wodehouse Prize — hopefully Dooley is already working on something else as sweet and salty.
