A New Jerusalem by Benjamin Dickson Review

With Germany’s surrender in May 1945, the war was over for some of the Allied soldiers in Europe who returned home. Like Ralph’s dad, who was physically maimed in a flamethrower attack, but also mentally broken - what we call Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder today and was called shell shock at the time. And though the family unit is restored, the experiences of war have changed Ralph’s dad - forever.

Benjamin Dickson’s A New Jerusalem is a story that must’ve happened to numerous families after the war - of soldiers returning home, being expected to fit right back into civilian life, with no understanding or support for what their experiences had done to them, and the problems that ensued as a result - as well as a snapshot of life in post-war (ish - the Pacific war continued for a few more months after VE Day) Britain.

It’s a bleak story of a profoundly-damaged man totally incapable of fitting back into regular society and inflicting his internal pain outwardly on his wife and son. But with all great art, the compelling content neutralises the tonality so it wasn’t depressing to read - I was drawn in and my attention held for nearly the entire book.

Dickson’s art is a bit too crude at times - I don’t think he portrayed motion effectively so that the scenes of violence looked quite flat, even amateurish, on the page, and I wasn’t sure what the point of the kids playing in the rubble storyline was. Not that it detracted from the book but it just wasn’t as brilliant as the rest of it was.

The locale isn’t named but I recognised quite a few locations in the story, even before seeing the more famous structures like the suspension bridge and Wills Memorial, to know that this is set in Bristol, the city I live in - Dickson too, as it turns out. Bristol was the fourth most bombed city in England during the war, which is probably why Dickson chose it to set his story in, besides it being his hometown.

You also get a sense of the direction the political winds were blowing and a foreshadowing of the country that Britain was going to become. It’s somewhat surprising that Churchill, who had gotten Britain through the war, was immediately voted out of office once the war was over, but the story explains why that was, and that people wanted the 100% employment that the war had given the country to remain, and healthcare to be nationalised like in Germany, whereas Churchill wanted things to go back to how it was before the war began.

It’s also quite shocking to see the laissez-faire attitude the police had towards domestic abuse at the time - telling Ralph’s mother not to make her husband angry enough to hit her counted as sound advice back in the day!

An enthralling story of how war is never over for some and that victory comes with an appalling cost for the survivors, A New Jerusalem is an excellent comic well worth checking out.