It's like a fabulous jewellery box and you will want to raid it again and again.Not our first venture into the world of Craig Thompson, but definitely a huge step outside of an autobiographical piece. For, hidden inside it are a thousand other stories. It's a wonderful, compelling tale, but also, in the scant space I have here, an indescribable one. They are separated and reunited and separated again. Terrible things happen and good things, too. Thompson moves this pair through time and an epic landscape with expert precision. Dodola is a brilliant storyteller Zam is her loyal younger brother-cum-child, whose happiness is shattered when he discovers just how it is that she puts food on their table. Our heroes are Dodola and Zam, child slaves bound to each other by chance rather than blood. There is a desert, on one of whose dunes is mysteriously stranded a boat, and there is a river, full to the brim with plastic bottles and old tyres. Wanatolia, where the story is set, is a strange, timeless place: as voracious when it comes to water as any Gulf state, but presided over by a sultan who seems to belong to a more dusty time (his harem is guarded by eunuchs). It is, then, a book of bridges and connections and long-buried memories: a carefully researched edifice that often teeters but somehow never falls to the ground. What he seems to be saying – sometimes gently and sometimes with an edge of satire – is that the various people of the Book were once nourished by the same stories (and, in some quarters, still are). He has also, having clearly spent some time studying them, made magnificent use of Arabic calligraphy and Islamic geometry. Into Habibi, Thompson has merrily thrown stories from the Bible and the Qur'an, elements of the Arabian Nights and the poems of Rumi and Badr Shakir al-Sayyab, the great Iraqi writer. It's his ambition that really amazes, the sheer chutzpah of it. It's not only that it has at its heart a sweet and touching love story, nor is it that Thompson's drawings are as fluid and as acute as ever.
Habibi is another big book and I think its effect on readers will be just as powerful.
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