>>Nostalgia For Infinity

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“In the circus, acrobatics where one person lies on the floor balancing another are called “Icarian Games”. Considering the fate of Icarus after he flouted his father’s advice and flew so close to the sun his wings melted, perhaps some dark humor is intended.

“In our particular re-enactment of this mythic relationship, it was not me but my father who was to plummet from the sky.”

Fun Home, by Alison Bechdel

So begins Alison Bechdel’s groundbreaking work of memoir and comics, Fun Home. It’s an apposite beginning: at once literary, darkly humorous, and reservedly dramatic. Here, as throughout, Bechdel’s father is centre-stage, for this is a story of the last twenty years of his life, and the first twenty of Alison’s.

Bechdel’s artwork is fantastic; stylised and thorough with a wonderful eye for detail, and often playful. Sometimes she points out her small flourishes of authenticity, like part of a Halloween costume worn well after the event is passed. A fine example of more subtle detail is in a panel that follows several pages discussing the Gothic Revival house Bruce Bechdel has restored and in which the family live;  below the caption “Yet we really were a family, and we really did live in those period rooms” is a scene of the family in their 1860s living room. The children are playing and the parents are watching television whilst sharing a bucket of KFC. The anachronistic nature of the scene speaks for itself.

As any honest work of memoir must be, it is at times brutal in its depiction of events and character. Bruce Bechdel is portrayed as a man of violent tempers, intolerant cruelty towards his children, and central in driving the comic’s author into an obsessive-compulsive disorder. He is also shown as capable of simple acts of kindness and warmth, as a master of period restoration and interior design, and as a highly-cultured, well-educated man. The picture that emerges, overall, is of a man with severe problems, tragic weaknesses and admirable strengths.

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