A depressed building inspector starts receiving phone calls from his daughter in the middle of the night. But… she died over ten years ago! Could he be having a mental breakdown or did his puzzle-loving kid somehow not die and wind up inside a maze-type world?! I mean, obviously the former. But we gotta pretend there’s some question over these things for, y’know, there to be a book.
Mazebook is Jeff Lemire’s shortened retelling of his boring Image series, Royal City, where a relative seems to be dead but is somehow communicating with the living, and it’s no better - though it’s at least only one book long instead of three.
It’s not a particularly interesting story - Will, our protagonist, wanders about in a gloomy fugue most of the time, behaving exactly how you’d expect a man whose life was shattered after the death of his child, so it’s hardly a brilliant look at what trauma does to a person. Nor is it well-constructed. His journey takes him to his ex-wife’s house where he finds a puzzle book where one maze just happened to have been left incomplete - why?? And it just happens to be the one maze that unlocks everything. Gosh, that’s awfully convenient.
He somehow enters the Mazeworld early on in a dream (pretty big hint right there) where he has a maze tattoo on his arm - so why does he feel the need to get the maze tattooed onto his arm in real life for when he tries to enter the Mazeworld again? It’s there anyway, apparently. The path into the Mazeworld isn’t very clever - it’s just going from one manhole via sewer into another - and the map itself turns out to be irrelevant as he just needs to follow the red thread which is clearly visible when he’s in the Mazeworld.
Lisa is a really obvious love interest - eye-rollingly so. Duh, I wonder if they’ll get together and Will will start putting his life back together with her? Speaking of obvious, what do you expect to see in a story about a maze/labyrinth? Think of the most famous story involving a labyrinth. Exactly. I suppose it is a visually striking image but the Minotaur is a pointless addition, and silly given what it turns out to really be.
Also, this might just be a printing error but Wendy calls Will at 3.15am twice early in the story - we see the time on the phone clearly - but shortly afterwards Will insists that she called at exactly 3.12am.
The sloppiness is explained in Lemire’s afterword where he talks about how loosely plotted the book was and how he just made it up as he went along - and it shows! He also mentions that he, quite surprisingly, only just discovered the work of Haruki Murakami in the last few years and that he was going for a kind of Murakami-pastiche, which probably explains the Minotaur and Vern the talking dog.
Lemire’s art is fine - most readers of Lemire’s books that he illustrates himself know by now whether it’s to their taste or not, and I’ve never found it that bad. It is remarkable though how little his art has advanced over the years. It’s exactly as it was on Essex County, nearly 15 years ago, whereas most artists’ styles tend to develop over a similar length of time. The small gaps between the panels showing you the reading order, as if the panels themselves are a maze, was a cute touch I liked.
The pieces that make up Mazebook are intriguing in themselves, as is the idea of the dark mirror land that is the Mazeworld, but Lemire’s execution is lacking so these pieces aren’t assembled in a satisfying or clever way. The end result is another dreamlike story of loss and grief that we’ve seen from Lemire before (Royal City, Frogcatchers, Lost Dogs, et al.) but rendered in a less compelling way that’s wrapped up too neatly to be the least bit memorable or profound. A far from a-mazing effort, Jeff Lemire continues his no-hitter streak with Mazebook.
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