Superheroes have often been an allegory for American power in the world. The heroic acts of supermen and women who used their amazing powers to save and redeem the world mirrored the exceptional role that the U.S. was destined to fulfill as the defender of democracy and freedom. Amidst all the bang and bluster of the seemingly endless stream of recent superhero movies - whose tone often seems to celebrate the (assumed) moral simplicities of the Cold War, a tone that is increasingly discordant in the post-9/11 world - Tom King's book offers one of the most sophisticated and original interpretations of this allegory since The Watchmen and in the process, offers a thought-provoking mediation on the role of American power in the world.
King's book, both thematically and aesthetically, is deeply steeped in the tradition of superhero comics. There are issue numbers rather than chapters, pages of illustrated panels interspersed with the prose, and sections written as if someone were narrating the story of a comic book without the drawings. He consciously plays with common tropes of the genre - the seemingly endless supply of heroes and villains that confront each other week after week, the spectacular and often ridiculous technologies and powers that are on display, the unwritten rules of superhero side-kicks and partners - with intelligence and wit. He humorously gestures towards some of the more absurd and ridiculous elements of superhero mythology (one anecdote tells of a helicopter implanted with a detective's brain whose crime-solving powers are frustrated by the fact that he simply can't enter buildings to conduct interviews) while seriously engaging the often profound themes that it seeks to tackle. The story is gripping, complex and well paced. As a stand-alone superhero narrative, it is well crafted and innovative, playing with tropes and themes in ways that make for an emotionally affecting and surprising plot.
As an allegorical meditation on American superpower, the novel is particularly rich and rewarding. The superheroes of the story must abandon their traditional game of struggling with implacable villains and give up their powers to save the world, yet we learn that behind this seemingly noble sacrifice lies a complex web of violence, betrayal and - for at least one hero - love. And this sacrifice fails to redeem the world as a new, menacing threat emerges, wreaking indiscriminate violence for unknown reasons. The parallels between American power in the post-9/11 world and King's story are many. In this new world, power is as much about exercising restraint as it is about demonstrating the capacity for destruction, new forms of violence exceed the easy categories of good and evil, rendering the use and experience of power increasingly meaningless, and enemies and friends are more difficult to recognize and appreciate.
Ultimately, "A Once Crowded Sky" is a call to reconsider the purpose of American power in the world, to construct new meanings that can guide the responsible use of superpower(s) in a world of often senseless violence, and suggests that comic books (and literature more broadly) may have a particularly important role to play in this reconstruction. As one character reflects in the book: "Without your stories, without your heroes and their awesome powers, how could you explain this, this here, this incomprehensible real that ever refuses to embrace any rule, any cliché besides the intransigent, pathetic truth that we all end, that no one comes back."
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- Reviewed in the United States on September 18, 2012
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Top reviews from other countries
- Honest JoeReviewed in the United Kingdom on September 15, 2014
The plot is good enough and it held my interest to the end ...
