Lizzy Stewart’s first full-length graphic novel reminds me both of the kind of novels I read when I was young (think early Margaret Drabble and Edna O’Brien) as well as some I’ve loved more recently (it has echoes of Tessa Hadley’s Clever Girl). It will also appeal to those who were stirred by Self-Portrait, Celia Paul’s memoir of her early life as an artist and of her relationship with Lucian Freud. But there is, of course, one crucial difference: Stewart uses pictures as well as words to tell her story, a tale that is as old as the hills, and somehow this makes it new. It is in her power to encapsulate huge amounts of information, literal and emotional, in a single image and, thanks to this, her narrative, like certain kinds of poetry, is fleet of foot even when its mood is grave, her heroine silent and stuck.
The Alison of the title is Alison Porter and she narrates, an older woman looking back on her life, seemingly still slightly amazed by what she has made of it (she is now a painter of great renown). When the book begins, it is the mid-1970s and she is an 18-year-old newlywed, her husband, Andrew – a good man, but also rather a dull one – having helped make reality her dreams of an ordinary, grownup life just like the one her parents had before her. But there is a problem. Trapped in their cottage on the Dorset coast, with no one to speak to and nothing much to do while Andrew is at work, Alison is bored and lonely. It’s this that pushes her to sign up for a class taught by Patrick Kerr, a distinguished portraitist (his work hangs in the Tate) almost 30 years her senior.
