Stanley Donwood is probably best known as the artist responsible for the artwork that has appeared on all of Radiohead’s albums and promotional materials since 1994, but he’s also a writer and artist in his own right whose recent work includes There Will Be No Quiet, Slowly Downward and Household Worms. His latest book, Bad Island, is a wordless flow of sequential linotypes that tell the story of a land over a vast period of time. As you might expect from his choice of collaborators, a work that could be soundtracked by Katrina and the Waves this is not.
We open on a largely black page with a tiny circle cut out – as if we are viewing an island through the wrong end of a telescope. We draw closer (the sea is in turmoil), and closer (boy, those clouds look foreboding) until we are submerged in sea. Sea and cloud in revolt with one another. In time, each calm; we draw close to land. There are trees. Relish their beauty (momentarily) because there are snakes here, and dinosaurs, and winged beasts. But there are also flowers and Donwood seems to use the flowers at various points in the narrative to suggest that life goes on. And it does. Sometimes. We glimpse a primitive man, from behind (or possibly an alien) and then we see no humanoid figures for a long, long time. There are many pages of chaos and calamity. Volcanoes, thunderstorms, floods, fires. When things calm down again, as they do, we see a world in which man has started to stake a claim, a world in which beasts are hunted and left for dead, in which trees are logged, in which homes are built, in which industry spews out black smoke into the night. We see bombs rain from the sky, fires raging, planes overhead. We see wreckage and then growth and then mega growth. Men appear again, dark shadowy figures with white eyes. And then, of course, we see the end – the end several times over. And we withdraw.
It’s a wordless fable, then, of sorts. A rather moving clarion call. A worrying remnant to be left for a future who can see what we did. There’s even the implicit sense that (as the UK was the place where the burning of fossil fuels began some mere 200 years ago) that the bad island in question is our own, that the bad island is the one that started a lot of the trouble. All of the trouble possibly. The place where trouble continues to ferment. All told it’s a troubling, resonant book, a book that was passed around the place I call home, from hand to hand, as everyone in the house took turns silently turning its pages. Everyone liked it even as everyone was troubled by it. It has that effect. It’s a work of art but it’s not here to reassure you.
Any Cop?: Heartily recommended. Just know that when you’ve dabbled with this you’ll want to read everything else he’s done too.
Bookmunch 