My Weekly Book

The Sandman: The Doll’s House - Neil Gaiman et al

I’ve just read the second volume in the amazing Sandman graphic novel series and I guess that what impressed me most was the incredible sense of cohesiveness and authorial confidence that it already has about it. Since this book collects issues 9-16 of the 75-issue run, it is fair to say that we are still pretty early on in the scheme of things. Nevertheless the overarching story arcs are in place, the art has settled down and there’s a feeling of a big, powerful engine pushing things forwards. The whole contraption does pull to the side of the road once or twice (to extend the metaphor, perhaps unwisely) to take an excursion into African tribal myth and to an Elizabethan theatrical drinking den. But apart from that, it’s action all the way.

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Having got the pieces on the board in Preludes and Nocturnes (including identifying the right creative team to work with him on this project) Gaiman is now free to press ahead with his extremely sure-handed story. Dream has now regained his stolen powers and returned to his realm to take responsibility once more and to sort out the problems caused by his absence. He discovers several troubling things - four archetypal dream-creatures are missing, for starters, loose in what we humans think of as reality. From the truly terrifying to the venal and cunning, they must be located before they can tear the fabric of the Dreaming even further asunder. Perhaps more troubling still is the absence of part of the realm itself - a place called Fiddler’s Green, described by the Dream Lord as “the heart of The Dreaming”.

But, however much Dream would like to dwell on these problems, worse is in store. We learn, through a conversation with his faithful servant Lucien, how he has encountered a vortex within his realm - a human who crops up once in an era with the power to destroy the barriers between dreaming minds, and thus The Dreaming itself. Dream is empowered to protect his realm by killing the vortex that each era throws up - the only time, we are told, that he is permitted to take human life. The identity of the vortex and how that was established, Dream’s method for dealing with it and how it affects relationships within his family, The Endless, is the major story in this volume.

And it’s an enthralling, complex and thought-provoking story, just as we would hope. While it may sound somewhat abstract and unengaging when described above, it is brought to life through the characterisations within it. Chief among these are Rose Walker, a girl recently and unexpectedly reunited with a family she never knew she had, on a quest to find her lost brother. The people that she encounters, and who help her on her way, are a motley crew - including a windowsill-dwelling raven who goes by the name of Matthew, a self-effacing landlord who doubles as a flamboyant drag queen, a pair of silent arachnophiles who dress only in white, the infamous Barbie and Ken (yes, you probably have encountered them already) and the kindly Gilbert, a large, fatherly attic-dweller who soon assumes responsibility for Rose’s welfare.

Important future plot dynamics are introduced in the person of Lyta Hall, and we also see the episode which has made this particular volume of Sandman stories notorious - the serial killers’ convention, a narrative that’s every bit as disturbing as 24 Hours in the first volume. It has been said that Dream’s story in itself is not that compelling, being a fairly basic quest narrative, but that Gaiman’s execution is remarkable - and I wouldn’t see much to argue with in that. After myriad complaints that the art wasn’t doing its job in the first volume, we come across some truly stunning panels here. For personal preference, I would like to see the image of Dream in his realm that appears on pages 50 and 51 of my Titan Books collected edition blown up to four times its actual size, hung on the wall and framed.

Next up: Dream Country, which I have actually read before out of sequence, to my great confusion. It will be interesting to see what it looks like in context.

My Weekly Book on Preludes and Nocturnes

Some other links:

• The Annotated Sandman: The Doll’s House
• Rambles: The Doll’s House
• The Doll’s House on LibraryThing
• Vertigo: The Doll’s House (contains four-page downloadable preview)
• h2g2: The Sandman
• TV Tropes: The Sandman
• Outside of a Dog: Sandman overview
• Captain Comics forum: Sandman discussion
• Bob’s Comics Reviews: The Sandman
• Time to meet the family: Endless picture gallery
• Wild River Review: Myth, Magic and the Mind of Neil Gaiman
• British Fantasy Society: Interview with Neil Gaiman

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 5th, 2007 at 7:23 pm and is filed under 2007 reading challenge, Reads I recommend. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.