Review - Cairo by G. Willow Wilson and M.K. Perker
In her debut graphic novel, G. Willow Wilson is taking her experiences as a reporter in Cairo and mixing them up with Arabian mythology to create a story that is part hardboiled crime thriller, part fantasy adventure.
Wilson, a Muslim convert, was a writer for Cairo Magazine and a contributor to such publications as the Atlantic Monthly and the New York Times Magazine. Her collaborator, illustrator M.K. Perker, is a native of Istanbul, where he became a political cartoonist, now living in New York as a successful artist. Together, they bring something different to the table — an insider’s take on a world that is admittedly still very alien to Americans, making use of that the exoticism while still bringing it all down to earth amidst the magical creatures.
“Cairo” throws several characters together — a drug dealer, a crusading reporter, a displaced Israeli soldier, a wandering American do-gooder, and a potential suicide bomber — and spins them around in a mystery adventure that is destined to give their life some meaning. At the center of the intrigue is a magical hookah and genie — or djinn — who acts as a guide to the mystical world that exists just on the cusp of reality and is becoming more apparent to mortals thanks to a quest for a box containing the concept of east.
What makes the book interesting is its evocation of Islam and Arabic mythology as a backdrop for the adventure. Djinns are in the Koran as a creatures who were made from fire by God who are invisible in humans, though sometimes interact with them, and Wilson’s evocation of them is merely the tip of the iceberg, delving into the legends in a way that is neither intrusive nor offensive as gratuitous spice. She wields her facts in expert fashion and mixes them up into modern fairy tale form.
Unfortunatley, these are Wilson’s only real strengths and in regard to the more important demands of storytelling, there are some failures here. One is that while Wilson is an original writer as far as plot goes, the way I listed her characters — as types rather than actual people — gives you about as much depth as the actual characters in the book do. The shallowness is frustrating — in a reporter’s job, you need to get to know people in order to function effectively, since they are your sources of information. In “Cairo,” it feels as though as much as Wilson is insightful about the culture in general, she is far less so on a personal level. This gives the impression that she is either someone who didn’t delve into the actual people in Cairo or just isn’t very good at taking the reality she was in and translating it with a representative depth to a story. It’s a major downfall of a good story that could have been a far greater one.
Not helping one bit is Perker’s artwork, which shows enormous technical skill with little there to draw you into the story — at best, it’s workman-like. This lies in contrast to his illustration work which is highly stylized and would have added a skewed quality that could have benefited a book. As it stands, Perker’s work moves the story along, but neither lends the atmosphere nor personality that might have filled in some of the gaps lacking in the written characterizations.
As such, it’s incredibly hard to recommend to someone who has no fondness for comic books — which is to say, it stands out in a crowd of genre comics in a specialty store, but as a graphic novel in a book store, it barely registers.
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