Road to America

Rating:
Summary: I Really Wanted To Like This More...
Review: Boy, I really wanted to like to like this book. It's from one the best publishers out there (Drawn & Quarterly) and is about Algeria's struggle for liberation (I lived in Algeria for five years). Unfortunately, the beautiful coloring and wonderful paper and production can't quite rescue a story in which characters are barely developed and the action transitions much too abruptly.

The story begins in 1955, the early days of the Algerian revolution against French colonial rule, where the reader meets young boxer Said. Promoters spot his raw talent and he is propelled to France to become a championship contender. Meanwhile, back home, his brother has joined the revolutionary underground. As Said rises through the ranks, he struggles to stay apolitical, refusing to pay a "tax" to support the revolution and somewhat less successfully refusing to be a poster boy for French rule in Algeria. Indeed, his naive attempt to remain neutral is rather unconvincing as there is no explanation for its grounding, and thus is one of the story's weak points.

Said's tale spans six years and takes only 45 pages, which leads to a certain feeling of truncation. Scenes jump into each other rather awkwardly, and the pacing feels very forced. What's also odd is that despite the title, the hero only spends a page and a half in America, and that trip has almost no plot purpose. Another problem is that a number of characters tend to look the same in Baru's representations. Interestingly, although he has gone for lovely traditional European detail for all his buildings, cars, backgrounds, etc. (like Vittorio Giardino), he retains a stylized cartoonish formation for his people, which can be confusing.

Ultimately, while the art and production are quite beautiful, Baru has tried to force too much into too small a space. Algeria's struggle to free herself from France was a vastly complicated affair, with several factions on both sides operating both in Algeria and France. It's an integral part of modern French history, but I suspect that most American readers won't have enough of a historical context to sort out what's going on with DeGaulle, the OAS, and whatnot. Finally, the conclusion is rather weak in that it has events overtake Said rather than force him to confront his conscience and make a choice as to whose side he's on. It's still worth a look, and the climactic depiction of the riot by Paris police against peaceful protest marchers (which really happened) is quite vivid and horrific.

One final note is that the introductory text has two typos in it. One refers to Algeria's liberation struggle as a civil war, which is rather like calling the American revolution the American civil war. The other is with regard to the number of Algerians killed, which is listed as 150,000. Depending on whose numbers you look at, the real number is from three to ten times that amount (the French government finally admitted to a figure or 350,000 while the Algerian government placed it at 1.5 million).