Craig Thompson’s Habibi is a sprawling tale (that’s 672 pages of sprawling) that relates the adventures of two lostlings, the girl verging on womanhood Dodola, and the much younger Zam, a boy who she finds lost in the desert. They stumble across a ship that somehow has found its way to the desert (whether abandoned before or after it arrived there is anyone’s guess) and there make a life until through one circumstance and another each independently leaves — or is taken away.
I’m not going to discuss the plot, except to describe certain episodes, because there really isn’t much of a plot. It’s a meander, in some ways a Bildungsroman focused on Dodola and Zam, bringing in elements of Islam — the setting is a quasi-Orientalist pastiche, moving from desert to caravan to sultan’s palace — and Judaism — there’s a digression that draws parallels (or attempts to) between the Fatima, the fifth child of the Prophet, and the story of Miriam, Moses’ older sister. (There is even a reference to Hinduism.) There are also commentaries on environmentalism, slavery, rape — the book has a major sexual component — and just about everything else you can think of. There is even a section that plays on the Thousand Nights and a Night, which may serve to give some idea of the scope of the book: what is a book in itself is relegated to a chapter.
And that, to me, is one of the weaknesses of Habibi. It wanders — that’s the only word I can think of that fits — from subsidiary story to subsidiary story, and while there is an overarching narrative — the love between Dodola and Zam — it gets lost in the details.
Add in that there are dream sequences and fantastic myths and legends thrown in from time to time, with little or no grounding or preparation, and it’s no wonder that engagement becomes increasingly difficult.
The graphic elements are another problematic area. Thompson has made extensive use of Arabic calligraphy, both as a foundation for the drawing style (at least it seems that way — I’ve not seen any of his other works) and as an element in itself. The end result is that the page is flat, which is not something that I consider a virtue. I freely grant that this is a subjective reaction. Others have found the wealth of detail and the intricacy of the rendering to be appealing; I find the visual elements to be crowded, almost claustrophobic, overly detailed, and sometimes all but illegible. I think he might have drawn on some other traditions — Persian miniatures seem a likely candidate, with their relative openness and spareness — to some benefit.
My overall impression is that Habibi is overly ambitious and poses itself some problems that were not all that well resolved. As for the various themes and supposed commentaries, all too often Thompson’s treatment veers more toward caricature — and well-worn caricatures at that — than elucidation.
(Pantheon, 2011)
