Signal to Noise

This is early work for both Gaiman and McKean, but it's as good as anything else I've seen them do. The text and art combine seamlessly to illustrate the theme - meaningful signal, contrasted with meaningless noise - in the story of a film director dying. Although it has no supernatural elements at all, in some ways this story comes across as an earlier and starker version of 'The Sound Of Her Wings'.

This is a book that stays with me in the places we don't talk about in polite company. This is the book I'd kill to be able to bring into my classroom. The introduction has it right: this book is painfull. The tearing apart of life and our purpose in it bores into me every time I've read it...which adds up to alot of digging. I cannot emphasize enough how good this is. If you turn down the noise and listen, you'll see things in a different light.

The phrase "signal to noise ratio" is often used in discussion groups to refer to the amount of real content (signal) amidst the "noise". The book itself is an amazing piece of signal in a very noisy world. It's a shame that it's so hard to find; honestly I think it should be required reading for everyone right now, given the millenial hysteria at hand. The filmmaker's story at the heart is beautiful and sad, but no less important are the ruminations on change and mortality, which may or may not be the same thing. "I don't believe in apocalypses. I believe in apocatastases." "We are always living in the final days. How long have you got? A hundred years, or much, much less, until the end of your world."

I had read and enjoyed the Sandman, but most of Gaiman's stuff left me wanting. Until this. It is a brilliant and melancholy look at the last moments of life left to a dying director taken from his fantasies and bits of conversations with good freinds. One man examines his own mortality and finds himself in his final film. I first borrowed this book from a freind and I haven't found a copy of it for myself, but when I do, I plan to treasure it always. Five stars don't fill the night that this book paints. Gaiman's writing is beautiful and harrowing. McKean's art suits the feel of the material perfectly. I highly recomend this book.