My Weekly Book

The Sandman: Dream Country – Neil Gaiman

Book three in Neil Gaiman’s epic Sandman saga marks the point where, according to the annotated script that accompanies this volume, the author was “written out” by the need to complete the demanding storyline of The Doll’s House. This may be one reason why this instalment of arguably the most critically-acclaimed comic series ever written consists of just four issues and takes a detour away from the main arc of the series. Instead of concentrating on the overarching narrative, Gaiman writes four short stories that appear to work as a creative tonic, allow him to clear his head of ideas that, while not entirely fitting into the big picture, are still demanding to be written, and which expand on the themes and characters of the work as a whole.

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And, at first glance, they appear a disparate bunch. Calliope, the first in the series, tells the tale of one of the nine Muses of ancient Greece, captured then held prisoner and abused by a writer who needs to get his creative juices going. She is passed on to a second, even more unpleasant character, with promises of her freedom laughed off. Her new captor has, however, reckoned without having to deal with her ex - one Oneiros, better known to us as Morpheus, and newly-freed from imprisonment himself. This story has an important role to play in the comic’s universe - underscoring the hero’s journey from unfeeling bastard to anthromorphic personification who can at least acknowledge the effects of his actions on those around him. It also lays down fundamental plot and thematic points for the author to develop in the future. On the subject of creative juices, and while attempting to draw no parallels whatsoever between the fictional authors portrayed and Gaiman himself, I shall quote a bit of the scene-setting paragraph that artist Kelley Jones received in the post, and which resonates strongly with this storyline:

Welcome to the weird world of Sandman. What we’re doing is a series of short stories for four or five issues here; I’ve finished the Doll’s House storyline, and there was a while towards the end of the storyline when I just couldn’t take it any more - partly because I’d keep getting new ideas for stories and be unable to get them in, and also because I wanted to do a few totally self-contained stories that I could get over with in 24 pages: the worry that I didn’t have a clue how Doll’s House was going to end (which I didn’t, until I got through Sandman 15) was getting pretty nerve-wracking. This is the first of them…

Next up is A Dream of a Thousand Cats; Gaiman himself is a confirmed cat-lover (see his journal for tales of Fred the Unlucky Black Cat). My personal reaction is that this is the weakest of the four tales in the collection, although comic-reading Cat People around the world are sure to disagree with me (and that doesn’t mean I don’t think it’s a good story). It tells of cats envisaging the end of a world where they are enslaved by humans and where, as some of our oldest myths and legends suggest, they are gods and goddesses again. Their method of doing this is through dream, thus tapping in to one of the most fundamental themes of the whole series. Maybe it makes me a bad, cynical person that, on re-reading this, I thought: “Aha! So that’s where Russell T Davies got his big season finale idea from this time around!”

The third story is masterful and the one that has made this collection famous. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a reworking of Shakespeare’s play that manages to explain where he got his inspiration and how his stories still manage to resonate with readers 400 years after they were written, as well as hinting at the fate of his son Hamnet, who died in 1596 aged 11. It is famous for winning a World Fantasy Award for Short Fiction only to see the rules changed so no other comic book or graphic novel could follow in its footsteps. This is an amazing piece of work for the ease in which it manages to incorporate so many strands of myth, fantasy, folklore, humour and narrative into a few short comic pages. Also for the sense it gives you that this is somehow the right explanation for the genesis of the play. In fact the hobgoblin Robin Goodfellow (”Merry wanderer of the night? I am that giggling, dangerous, totally bloody psychotic menace to life and limb, more like it”) says: “This is magnificent, and it is true! It never happened; yet it is still true. What magic art is this?” I couldn’t put it better myself.

The last story is yet another departure - I believe it is the first issue of the comic not to feature Dream himself. It has, however, got his big sister Death as a central character and we’ve all discovered by now how she’s far better company than her gloomy brother. In what may be considered a slightly retrograde step Gaiman returns to one of the discarded techniques of Preludes and Nocturnes. He takes a forgotten superhero from the DC universe and works her into the Sandman mythos. This wasn’t necessarily a very effective step when applied to John Constantine, but here the tale of Element Girl who is alone, disregarded and living on a disability pension with the horrible aftermath of her transformation is affecting and tragic. Especially when everyone’s famous optimistic Goth girl pops along with a few words of advice on remedying her situation. When those words of advice include the offer of a Kleenex, you know you are in the presence of one of the best characters that Gaiman has ever created.

Dream Country was the first Sandman volume that I read - for the simple reason that it was sitting on the library shelf and I was curious. I came away having liked but not really understood it. Now that I return and read it in context it seems an infinitely richer and more cohesive collection. I would therefore recommend reading it in its proper place in the series.

Some links:

• NeilGaiman.com: Dream Country credits
• Wikipedia: Dream Country
• Gaiman talks about the plot of Calliope
• ComicReaders.com: Four Easy Pieces
• Wikipedia: Element Girl

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This entry was posted on Friday, July 13th, 2007 at 12:31 pm and is filed under 2007 reading challenge. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.