In lieu of not having weekly reviews on Thursday this week, I figure it wouldn’t hurt to get up at least one review anyway! Recently, I did a little hunting in order to find something by Bryan Lee O’ Malley. As I traveled from store to store I had to repeatedly say that no, it wasn’t Scott Pilgim I’m looking for. Yes, I’m sure. Most people hadn’t actually heard of this title, and the few that had were convinced that you couldn’t even buy it anymore because it was out of print. Well, lo and behold, this was of course false. Oni recently (I assume recently) republished a new edition of Malley’s less reknowned book, Lost At Sea. And after a good couple weeks asking around for it, I finally got my hands on it.
Important Note: In this review, I will be mentioning some spoilers. They will be towards the end (and will hopefully prompt some discussion?) and I will mark when and where they begin. Just be forewarned.
(Extra note: The above image is not actually in the graphic novel I bought. But when Google image searching for useful pictures, I found that and thought it made for a good header! The comic itself is black and white as shown in the images after the cut.)
Well, right off the bat the premise intrigued me. The story is about an 18-year-old pre-college girl traveling with a group of friends from California home to Canada. Of course, as we quickly learn, these people aren’t so much her friends as they are a group of people she knows. Our narrator, Raleigh, is quite the introverted young lady. “Something” has happened to her that has left her incredibly distraught, but she doesn’t want to reveal it right away. But that’s not what really brought me in to the book. See, Raleigh has a problem: she doesn’t have a soul. She doesn’t know exactly when she lost it, and she knew she had it, but she also knows that now it’s gone forever. And who took her soul? Wait for it… cats! Cats stole her soul and disappeared. And now she is haunted by cats. They follow her, they roam near her, they invade her dream. So needless to say? This book had me.
Now, in a similar fashion to Scott Pilgrim, Malley is taking all of the writing and art duties. The artwork is obviously very similar and still in his particular anime/manga fashion. For all intents and purposes, one could probably call this a manga. It doesn’t hold to any of the preconceived notions that any given manga might have, though. It’s really an out of sync road story in which Raleigh travels up the coast while day dreaming about her past in a non-coherent order as she tries to put the pieces of her life together. Malley does an excellent job of capturing the voices of these youths, and the dialogue is very fresh. If nothing else, Malley is amazing at maintaining that “18 forever” belief, and he manages to write his heroine and her friends in beautiful form. Plus, the scene near the end where Raleigh, determined to get her soul back, goes cat hunting is hilarious. While this book is nothing like the Scott Pilgrim books, the humor is still very prevalent in the background, and unless my eyes confuse me there are still a fair share of Pilgrim references.
Psst. This is where the spoilers start. You’ve been warned. Again.
However, by the end of the book I was pretty disappointed. Why? Well, Raleigh’s reason for being upset this whole time seemed incredibly … lame. I remember what it’s like to be 18, sure, but to me it feels like I just sat through a whole movie just to find out that the thing everyone’s been wondering about for 2 hours is just a sled (no offense, film buffs). The revelation is entirely underwhelming.
So let’s get it straight – our main character Raleigh is upset from the very beginning. The reason for this, partly, is due to her parent’s divorce and the losing of her best friend to a move when she was little. Ok. Understandable. But the reason she is upset from the course of the beginning of the book? She met a boy in an online forum, and after talking for about a year, they meet. So far, so good. They have an amazing weekend together and are so in love it hurts. Alright. Cool. But then, as she is going to go home on the train, she finds a letter in her bag. …and that’s it. She didn’t even read it. In fact, the direct quote from her in the book is:
(In this scene, Raleigh is explaining to another character what happened in a hypothetical sense) “So what if she went to California and met him and everything went beautifully and she left to go home at the predetermined time, with her predetermined return ticket for the train, and he left her at the train station because he had to work, and she found this letter in her bag and she started crying like a baby because she just couldn’t help it. And she missed her train. What if that?”
“What did the letter say?”
“I – she – I – we didn’t open it. I couldn’t open it. It was too much. It’s unopened.”
I’m sorry, but I just don’t buy that. She breaks down and starts having a fit and misses her train and ends up going through the motions of the rest of the story because she didn’t read a letter? I can’t take this as logical. If she had actually read the letter, or perhaps if she had talked to this boy she went to see and he told her it wouldn’t work then fine. She just spent all this time in her life only to have it all ruined in one little moment for reasons she can’t understand. I get that. I’ll accept that. But who knows what was in the letter? Perhaps this letter was filled with a beautiful poem expressing how much the boy loved her? Without the knowledge of what the letter really said, I just can’t take the story seriously, and every point that I could find relatable with the main character before disappears.
Perhaps I’m looking at this wrong. Perhaps I need to be more in the mind set of the main character. But even as I look back on what I was like when I was eighteen, I know for a fact that nothing could have kept me from at least reading the letter. Heck, I can fully remember being given a break-up letter when I was eighteen. The thing about that was I didn’t know what it said until I sat down and read it. How could I? I hadn’t read it! In fact, I know people who are going through something similar to this right now. Break ups and letters happen every day. And while I’d like to believe in the innocence and naivety of adolescence, I just can’t buy it in this book. It simply does not make any sense to me whatsoever, and the whole book loses it’s appeal to me due to the ending. It basically built up slowly towards the supposed reveal of something traumatic, and all we got was an unopened letter.
So while I’m still a huge fan of O’ Malley’s work, I just can’t recommend Lost at Sea. I can take a lot in regards to the suspension of disbelief, but this was just too much for me I’m afraid. I felt pretty ripped off by the ending, and it just killed it for me. So I’m afraid to say that if you want to read more O’ Malley, you’re just going to have to look elsewhere. Or re-read Scott Pilgrim. Those never go bad.
For those who have read Lost At Sea – do you agree? How do you feel about the ending? Let me/us know in the comments. I’m interested to know if I’m the only one who didn’t enjoy this.
