Graphic novels are expensive. I have often found myself juggling between about four normal novels and one graphic novel while I only just had a certain amount of money to spend- which, considering I am not super rich or financially independent (quite yet), has really been always. The balance has usually been tipped in favour of the four normal books. And so, it was only going to be my second graphic novel when I ordered “Hostage” by Guy Delisle recently. Guy Delisle is a Canadian cartoonist and animator known for his graphic novels, “Hostage”, first published in 2016, being one of them.
I have always somehow been fascinated by stories that deal with confinement and isolation. What initially got me hooked on were shows like “Banged Up Abroad” – a show, still running, that features stories of people who have been arrested while traveling abroad. The whole idea of being locked up in confinement in a different country would really fascinate me. Being locked up in one’s own country, I imagined, was one thing. Being locked up in a country where the people around probably could not even speak your own tongue and did not even look like you, was quite another. It would fascinate and terrify me in equal measures. I remember being so hooked to one episode that I postponed my studies for the exam to be held the following day, but then that episode haunted me so much that I never got to studying after it. (For the curious, I passed.)
That was some six years back. Today, what fascinates me more I believe, is the idea of confinement and isolation itself. The idea of being alone away from the thriving and pulsating life all around you- and for long, maybe even for life. The FOMO of all FOMOs. “Man is, by nature, a social animal,” said Aristotle. Human contact is very much the essence of life. Today, the whole world rests at our fingertips, and so we never really have to look beyond; many of us can hardly go an hour without any interaction and so complete isolation is something we cannot even fathom.
There though, right now, exist people cut off from the entirety of humanity, for one reason or another. They have no one around them but for themselves. “Hostage” too tells one such true story. Christopher André was working for a humanitarian NGO in the Caucasus in 1997, when some events catapulted into him ending up a hostage where he had to deal with long periods of isolation.
I ordered this book right before my exams with some other things that I had to buy. It was to rest on my shelf until I was done with my exams when I was allowed to savour the entire heftiness of it all very slowly. But then, strangely, right the night before my exam, I found it peeking from the side of my bookshelf suddenly flailing for me to pick it up. Now, one is allowed to be cold-hearted sometimes, but never so cold-hearted that one does not listen up to a flailing book wanting one to read it. So, as it was, the book was flailing and there was no escape.
I read the book into the midnight and finished it in the wee hours. And boy, what a book it was. It was, by no means, the most brilliant or life-transforming book I had ever read, it was not, it only felt like it was important and just did something. It is, not a spoiler, not a build-up for something big. It is not “The Shawshank Redemption” or something of the like. For the heftiness of the book, not a lot will happen in its pages- but it’s rather precisely because of this that I think that this book is important to read.
You might not be as invested in the idea of isolation or confinement as I am, and may even find the idea boring, but I think the idea of mundanity is very important here. Mundanity, again, might not be something you are much into, but, I believe, it is a question immensely relevant and significant for our lives today. Where our lives are bombarded with all sorts of things to keep us completely occupied all the time and where we cannot even afford the time to be idle, this book will bring home the truth of our gradually growing discomfort with idleness and mundanity. When you find yourself mentally pleading for something to happen, not because you cannot see Christopher being in confinement, but because you find it hard to see and read the same mundanity, you know that something is wrong.
Where in any other book its repetitiveness might just make you put the book aside, this book will not let you do so only because the whole irony of it would soon hit hard right in the face. That Christopher André went through the whole mundanity (to put aside all the other circumstances) for months where we cannot even go through reading it will make you question certain things. It will make you question the lives we lead today where there are podcasts and audiobooks filling in our time of commute and everyday chores, where there are apps to give us news for when we cannot afford too much time on any one piece and for when we are having a few minutes between some other things, where we feel we are obliged to do something or the other every waking minute and second. This book will be a grim reminder of the paths our lives are slowly being led to. It will put a perspective on a lot of our everyday rituals and if not question them, at least make us be aware of them. It can do all this but just as well, one might race through this book instead. Which, to be honest, is what I did.