Your Wish is my Command (Shubeik Lubeik in its original Arabic) is a chunky graphic novel that is chockful of invention and original ideas and delightfully challenging (like a puzzle you open on Christmas morning and spend the day wrestling with).
The book exists in a world where wishes are a form of currency – there are level one wishes (that would allow you to make serious changes to your life), level 2 wishes (which are many times diluted level one wishes that might allow you to change one minor thing) and level 3 wishes (which are frowned upon, as likely to hurt the wisher and grant them what they want).
The book opens and closes with Shokry, an elderly gent who manages a kiosk of the 7/11 variety. His family have had their ups and their downs and – in the midst of a down – he unearths three level 1 wishes gifted to his father many years previously (his father a devout Muslim who refused to use the wishes and Shokry feeling the same way) and decides to sell them at a cut price rate.
Your Wish is My Command then reveals itself to be a graphic novel of the portmanteau variety – and so we follow Aziza, the first of Shokry’s customers to buy a wish, only for her desire to use the wish to be thwarted by local bureaucrats who want the wish for themselves, locking Aziza up in a prison cell (to Shokry’s intense shame).
The second story is that of Nour, and here Mohamed does something that is perhaps the most impressive element of what is a singularly impressive book – she makes you feel sympathy for a well-off kid raised in a good family without any real worries to his name but nevertheless unhappy. What you get in the middle section of the book is a compelling narrative that explores just how difficult it is to explain depression to those around you when you are in its grip.
Finally, the book circles in again on Shokry and we learn more of his story and his father’s story, together with the history of the wishes themselves and also Shokry’s own attempts to offload the last wish upon someone who has been a regular visitor to his kiosk for many years.
But (as with all great books) a lot of the above is massively reductive because there is a lot more than this going on – we are treated to infographics that provide the geo-historical context of the wishes, there are comical and colourful asides and interludes, interspersed between the black and white main drag of the trio of stories themselves and (I can’t believe we’ve waited this long to share this with you) you also have to read the book in the Arabic style, that is, back to front – and that means not only do you start at what Western audiences would say was the back, but, on each page, you are usually reading right to left (in terms of the frames of the page) rather than the more usual left to right.
You’ll be surprised how quickly you snap to the tune the book demands you march to. The book was originally published as a trilogy (like Feuchtenberger and De Vries’ W The Whore, also published this week) and won Best Graphic Novel and the Grand Prize of the Cairo Comix Festival.
Any Cop?: All told, it’s an absolute treat and as far as graphic novels and 2023 is concerned, this book starts the bar out incredibly high.
Bookmunch 