Book Review: 'Tongues,' by Anders Nilsen
I've been getting TONGUES (Pantheon, 368 pp., $35), a retelling of the Greek myth of Prometheus, in the mail for years now. The artist Anders Nilsen serializes it and self-publishes each chapter, which arrive in big envelopes that often include little zines of Nilsen's sketches and notes that illustrate his process, like prizes in a box of Cracker Jack. As fun as that is, it's a relief to have the story so far available in a single codex so that I can give my poor back issues a breather.
I find that the story's least familiar moments are the ones I wish I could fold up and carry with me in my pocket. Nilsen works hard to ground his story in our seemingly endless war-torn historical moment — and how could you restage stories from Greek myth and not write about war? — but his most vivid images are those I've never seen depicted in any medium. They emerge unexpectedly, in much the same way a giant, beautiful seedpod emerges from the ruined throat of a dead soldier while his comrades bicker about what to do with his corpse.
It's in contrasts like this one that Nilsen guides us into truly uncharted territory, somewhere between the simultaneous boredom and tension of all-too-familiar life during war and the sudden awesome appearance of Gyges, one of the Hechitonchiraes (literally 'the hundred-handed ones').
The hapless mortals in 'Tongues' are shunted into and out of danger by a scheming, shapeshifting god called Z and his minions, while Z's uncle, called the Prisoner, looks down at them from the mountaintop where he lies chained and tries to comprehend the intricacies of contemporary life. In this, he has the help of his dearest friend, the eagle who eats his liver every day.
The names have been tinkered with slightly, but the dramatis personae are obviously the Greek pantheon, with much of their pettiness and vanity intact in Nilsen's new setting, an anonymous West Asian country. There, Z is amassing a cult of his own militant worshipers for mysterious and almost certainly nefarious purposes. Z fears only one thing: an assassin employed by Athena. She turns out to be a little girl named Astrid, who is kidnapped by cultists during a terrorist attack and then recruited by the gods.
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