Review – Castle Waiting by Linda Medley

It’s the first comic I’ve read by a woman, which was something I didn’t give any mind to until I was already deep within the story, looking around and realised how different it was to all the others.

Of course, the heavy hardcover edition stamped attractively with a faraway tree/ nursery rhyme illustration on the front cover would be more at home in a 1950’s children’s library than on a sweaty Forbidden Planet store shelf – but it’s not just this distinction from the dark and muscle of most graphic novels that sets it apart.

Neither is a story told in the visual language and setting of a child’s world but injected with adult themes a particularly novel concept. Rather the feminine bias of these themes – wife-abuse, unwanted pregnancy, subjugation, misogyny – and the way that the story somehow retains enough innocence and sparkly-eyed hope so as not to disappear into base and ugly Frank Miller territory – marks this as a different breed of comic.

The story (or, more accurately, stories – this is a most meandering series of partially linked tales) starts by borrowing Sleeping Beauty’s castle as a backdrop and her story as a scene setting. Then Medley races at breakneck speed through that well-worn classic narrative (albeit adding her own distractions) in just a handful of pages. Sleeping Beauty is quickly aged from cursed babe to irritatingly uppity teenager to sleeping beauty and lastly, past 100 years in a pane, to revived heroine by the kiss of a tender but brave prince. The couple scurry off into new life leaving an empty castle awaiting new heroines, antagonists and stories to fill its otherwise cold walls.

And from there on not all that much really happens. The story works more like a gentle soap opera, taking time to explore characters and back-story after back-story so you sometimes have to check which layer you’re currently in at any given point in the Russian-Doll of narratives. There’s no particularly shadowy looming point being made over the story arc either and this loose structure is a little unsettling at first. Indeed, at the end of the book you’re left with your expectations of a Grimm-like ending (all threads tied up and morals laid out neatly in the sun) mostly confounded.

I know lots of people that would probably hate this. In the light of say Alan Moore’s Smax, which similarly draws heavily upon the fairytale canon and convention to delightful effect, Castle Waiting seems remarkably tame in its parody. Also, there just aren’t enough really clever moments of story-craft to surprise you and, probably worse, characters are almost all too black and white to ever be deeply interesting (bar perhaps the little demon terrorist).

So in attempting to apply mature themes to an immature landscape Medley falters a little. That said, in its favour this is an extremely cute and lesiurely ride, nearly always quietly inventive and it’s certainly a tale I’d like to read to my kid when the time is right. Indeed, the mutinous creativity and lightweight rebellion would probably blow an Enid Blyton-reading child’s mind and ensures the book should become a favourite in any gently-subversive pre-teen home.

For adults, it’s the normality and believability of the lives told here, all superimposed on a fantastical, exuberant fantasy-land backdrop, that’s of real interest – not necessarily brilliant – but nevertheless always interesting and mostly entertaining.