Beautiful Darkness

Fascinating story about a pixie klatsch living around the dead body of a little girl. What makes it interesting is that these creatures have the primary wants and needs of storybook forest fairies but the ethics of humans, which makes it surprisingly disturbing. It's like Animal Farm meets the Smurfs. Whereas storybook pixies tend to be faultless the pixies here are stupid, heartless, cruel, foolish, self-consumed, lazy, bored, and petty. In ways that are not cute at all.They think nothing of exploiting Aurora's naive industriousness or bowing down to the heartless Zelie because she's so beautiful and to do otherwise would bring their lives misery. Hector, the so-called Prince, is a navel-gazing moron and Plim, the capable right-hand man, is a bully as well as a toady.The pixies, if I interpret correctly, are all archetypes that scampered out of the girl (the original Aurora) after she was murdered and are gradually subsumed by the pixie Aurora. Fascinating and haunting.All of this is nothing new to humans. It's the art that makes this unique. It really is beautiful.

Beautiful Darkness begins with a bunch of adorable fairy-like creatures crawling out of the corpse of a young girl, which is lying on a forest floor. We don’t know what happened to the girl – murder? Freak accident? Heart attack? – but it doesn’t matter, because the girl’s corpse is just part the setting; the story belongs to the fairies, who are woefully unprepared for surviving in the material world.Most of the little fairies don’t seem to have much personality or emotional depth, to the point that they seem indifferent to each other’s deaths (and those deaths happen frequently). In most books that would be a flaw, but in Beautiful Darkness it seems intentional. My interpretation – and this is only my interpretation, the book would easily support other readings – the fairies are the characters from the stories the dead girl made up to tell herself, somehow able to escape into the real world upon the girl’s death. A few of the characters were major protagonists or villains, and those characters have more personality; in particular, the main character, Aurora, goes through amazing development and changes as the story goes on. Most of the other fairies were just simple background characters, and act like it.beautiful_pg28(About that name, “Aurora”: Early in the book, we see that the dead girl had a notebook with “Aurora” handwritten on the cover; I interpret this as meaning that this was the book the girl wrote stories about Aurora in, but I’ve seen other people suggest that the girl’s name was Aurora, and that the fairy Aurora is named that because represents the girls idealized self-image. Another possibility is that Aurora the fairy just named herself after the notebook.)This book is brutal, ambiguous, incredibly original, and stuck with me a long time after reading it.The artwork is excellent; Kerascoet (a pen name for a married pair of cartoonists, Marie Pommepuy and Sebastien Cosset) switches between a loose, airy cartoon style for the fairy-like creatures and impressive fully-painted realism for the big humans. (I’d find that sort of fully-painted realism heavy-handed and oppressive for a full comic, but here – used in brief passages interspersed throughout the book – it’s very effective at making the humans seem alien and often a bit threatening, and also quite beautiful to look at).

This book plays with the lines between innocence, ignorance and evil. In the opening pages, we see what is pretty clearly the lifeless body of a girl in the woods. Then the scene seems to shift to a cozy environment in which a fairy girl is entertaining her guest, Prince Hector. Her devoted servant Plim pours the tea, but before Hector can drink it, a drop of something nasty plops into it. Then more drops fall and pretty soon the homey façade melts away – the fairies are running for their lives – dozens of them frantically emerging from the dead girl’s mouth, nostrils and ears. We quickly figure out, if we hadn’t already made the connection, that these sweet, innocent fairies were actually living in the girl’s dead body. And apparently for long enough that none of them have ever known any differently.As the fairies emerge, bewildered, into their new world, we soon understand the aptness of their having lived in a putrefying corpse. These adorable fairies are not the sweet little things of our imaginations. They are, in their own way, innocent, but a dangerous kind of innocent – innocent of the knowledge of good and evil, innocent of any concept of “society” or a “greater good”.Left to fend for themselves, each fairy adapts in his or her own way. Many take to emptying the contents of the girl’s purse for their personal use (in the process of which we learn that both she and our main character are (were) named Aurora). Others forage for food. Still others forage for others’ food or otherwise resort to deception and deviousness. One just eats maggots.Aurora alone seems to be trying to hold things together while the rest go full-tilt Lord of the Flies. She tries to make sure the food is evenly distributed. She builds houses for others, comforts others, tries to make sure others’ needs are met. She even makes overtures to the animals in an attempt to work together.But animals are animals, fairies are fairies and neither can change their spots. We witness countless acts of both thoughtless and thoughtful cruelty – humiliation, maiming, murder and cannibalism. Every fairy turns against every other, or gets turned against. Even Hector. Even Plim. Even Aurora herself. And they don’t call it a graphic novel for nothing – when I say “witness”, I mean graphically. If the decaying hand on the front cover is not already enough of a clue, this is not a children’s book, no matter how cute the fairies are. But we needn’t feel sorry for our heroine (using that term lightly) for long. She is, of course, a fairy herself and all’s fair in love and war.I find it quite difficult to rate this book. I most certainly did not love or even like this book. In fact, I pretty much hated it, which, by Amazon’s system should mean a one-star rating. But hating the book is rather the point. One would certainly hope that you would be disturbed and offended and grossed out by this book. But the gruesomeness and cruelty are not gratuitous. This book isn’t, in fact, about fairies. It’s about us and our rotting “survival of the fittest”, dog-eat-dog competitive, every man for himself “society”. Or, as Margaret Thatcher famously said, “There is no society.” Our survival as a species in any meaningful way depends on the type of mutual cooperation and collective interest that Aurora tried to build. But none of the fairies, even ultimately, Aurora herself, could overcome self-interest, so the only “survival”, such as it is, is on cold, brutal, individual terms. Are we humans any better? Can we be?