Nil: A Land Beyond Belief
*Starred Review* Impersonal regularity perversely predominates in the visually repetitive black-and-white land of Nil, as it does in the weirdly attractive milieus of classic dystopian novels (Zamiatin'sWe,Huxley'sBrave New World) and films (Lang'sMetropolis). As becomes, or comes easier to, a graphic novel,Nilis, however, very much a comedy, reminiscent in tone and, eventually, incident of Richard Lester's antiwar movie (featuring John Lennon)How I Won the War.It's the adventures in revolution of Proun Nul, engineer on the floating deconstruction shipDerrida,which sallies forth to squelch any ideological meme that dares erupt in Nil, a land that enforces lack of belief with police-state rigidity. When an accident kills the nephew of Hypocripope Nada Dionysius, Nul falls under suspicion of murder. He decides to defect to Optima, with which Nil is at war, and has to pretend to lead a revolutionary cadre to do it. Then he gets hung up at the border, conscripted into the Nilean army, and sent to the front. On that basic plotline Turner hangs a plethora of incidents full of daft, downbeat dialogue and grim, even painful comic action. If, on six-by-seven-inch pages, the copious text ofNil,especially the lines printed in gray, causes eyestrain, in context, that seems appropriate. After all, the citizens of Nil greet each other as "fellow sufferers."Ray OlsonCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved