Farewell, Brindavoine
By Tardi
Translated by Jenna Allen
Fantagraphics, 2021
ISBN: 9781683964339
Pyrotechnic explosions and expressive characters aplenty.
Originally appearing in Pilote, the seminal French comic magazine, in the years 1972 and 1973, these marvellous stories (there are just two, or at a stretch three stories here, though such is Tardi’s prodigious invention that it seems as though there are many more) have a muted, elegiac quality that stays with you long after you’ve closed the covers. As you bid farewell to Brindavoine, Tardi’s polymath adventurer, you mourn as well the passing of the world that made him.
The first, long story is untitled but anyway it opens in Paris in 1914, where a mysterious visitor calls on Brindavoine at his ramshackle residence. He instructs Brindavoine to go at once to Istanbul, as a matter of urgency, there to keep an appointment of the utmost importance. Since the visitor is soon summarily murdered (apparently he had been tracked by an assassin), Brindavoine is left in the dark as to what this meeting might mean or entail. But he decides to take up the challenge at once.
In due course there follow a series of adventures involving (variously) a trek across a desert with an alcoholic-addled Englishman, an attempted bombing by an old-style aeroplane and a frog-march at gunpoint to a monstrous Iron City (the gun being wielded by an elderly Mata Hari). Some days later, nomads on horseback besiege the city, which incidentally has been built by a strange, cyborgic millionaire who is pining for a heir, looking for a successor in all the wrong salons. Brindavoine does his best to defend the city, but he has a hard enough time trying to dodge the millionaire’s amorous attentions.
Each and every conceivable means of escape thwarted, Brindavoine eventually evacuates the Iron City in a dirigible (what else?), but he is then shot down by a Russian warship. It is while recuperating from this ordeal that he learns that there is war in Europe.
At this point the first story comes to an end. There is a pause in the narrative, a kind of intermission (we are on pages 45 and 46), during which a chronicler recounts the whole of Brindavoine’s later life (which ends in Paris in 1933 in banal circumstances). We are then plunged into the horror of World War One in the second story, provisionally entitled ‘Lambs to the Slaughter’.
Here our hero, the gentle pacifist Brindavoine, a dreamer and lone wolf, is ill suited to a life in uniform and soon finds himself AWOL. The anti-war images and rhetoric in this second story recalls some of Tardi’s later work, and there are some stupendous set pieces: a Paolo Uccello inspired cavalry charge, an act of brutal carnage in a church (the killing of an unarmed German soldier) while the Virgin (holding her fallen son) watches on. In one panel there is a statue of Christ holding aloft a shield and sword, looking on in judgement. Amid the venal violence of war, these blessed, dreadful images foreshadow justice. Yet they are for the moment mute, passive, helpless.
I detect an allusion to Blaise Cendrars in the figure of Brindavoine (both men lost an arm in World War One) and can glean a definite echo of Moravagine, Cendrars great fantastical anti-war novel, in the stories presented here. Both involve fabulous adventures, fierce invention and a stern sense of foreboding. The first story (untitled, as I have said) has an epic profusion of invention that you might associate also with Jules Verne, while the second (‘Lambs to the Slaughter’) has an altogether more sombre, intense quality. There’s an inchoate rage against the insanity of war and arbitrary mass murder here, and that is present in Moravagine too.
On perusing this beautifully produced book, its dimensions ample (it is a good 9 by 12 inches and there are a fair few large panels within the covers, as you might imagine), it’s images – whether of pyrotechnic explosions or expressive characters – bold and colourful, you will come away with a renewed appreciation of Tardi as artist, writer and comic book creator.
The publisher’s description of Farewell, Brindavoine can be read here.
Jildy Sauce 