By Naoki Urasawa
Publisher: Viz
ISBN: 978-1-59116-641-2
For once I'm not going to review a single book but an entire series. Naoki Urasawa's Monster is a manga title presented in those paperback-sized books that seem to now dominate the graphic novel section of bookstores. Each book runs to around 250 pages, and there are 18 volumes in all, so it's quite a read. I'm still rather dismissive of a lot of manga, finding much to be impenetrable, but I'd read on a number of occasions how superb this series was supposed to be so I bit the bullet and bought the first book. Based on the title alone, I was expecting some sort of supernatural horror, but what I ended up with was something entirely different.
Monster opens by following a young Japanese brain surgeon, Dr Tenma, working in Germany in the late 1980s. He's brilliant at what he does and that brilliance buys him the attention of the hospital director's daughter and the approval of the domineering director himself. Despite Tenma's brilliance the director is seeking more power and endeavours to take advantage of Tenma's brilliance while at the same time making decisions that put the more disadvantaged patients at a lower priority when it suits his political purposes. When Tenma is ordered away from operating on a small boy who has been shot in the head to instead work on a different emergency that better suits the director's ambitions, Tenma refuses. He saves the boy, the other patient dies, the director is furious, and Tenma's privileged status is severely reduced, including the rejection of the director's daughter. But these are nothing to the horrors that await him. Unwittingly, Tenma's decision to operate on the boy have severe repercussions almost immediately when the hospital director is found poisoned and the boy (and his traumatised twin sister, also in the hospital) disappear.
A decade later and the shadow of those events still hang over Tenma's life. Events begin to repeat themselves and suspicion falls on Tenma who has both the motive and the opportunity, and yet Tenma knows he's innocent and his determination to find out exactly what is going on leads him to a harrowing and bewildering discovery. This discovery reaches far back into Germany's past, involving the sinister indoctrination of children, twisted psychological experiments and murder. Tenma is forced to go on the run and must reveal the dark conspiracy to save himself and protect so many others.
Monster is a masterpiece – a finely interwoven thriller, a complex but brilliant story, a fine array of well developed characters, and some of the most glorious artwork I've seen in a graphic novel in a long time. It's black and white throughout, but illustrated with such detail and precision, and with a movie director's eye for setting the scene and carrying the story forward, that it brings an enormous sense of realism and drama to the proceedings. If you've ever read Cerebus by Dave Sim with those amazingly beautiful finely-lined backgrounds by Gerhard then you'll know exactly what I mean.
This is a mammoth read, but it's absolutely well worth it. An instant classic for its scope, its scale and its consistency, it has picked up a hoard of awards and been praised around the world. A rare and engrossing read indeed.
And if you liked that: Urasawa is already and good way through his next epic, 20th Century Boys
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