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Walter Moers with illustrations by Gustave Doré
Wilde Reise durch die Nacht
(Wild Journey Through the Night)
Eichborn, September 2001. 206pp. This fantastical novel is loosely based on twenty-one drawings by Gustave Doré, the famous nineteenth-century artist. Although these drawings and etchings were originally made to illustrate the works of such writers as Milton, Cervantes, Coleridge and Poe, Moers has interwoven each of them seamlessly into his story. This imagines Doré as he might have been as a boy, and takes the reader on a wild journey through his twelve-year-old dreams. Gustave is the only one aboard his ship to survive the storm whipped up by a ferocious pair of Siamese twin tornadoes. Death, accompanied by his sister, Dementia, visits the stricken vessel, and a deal is struck whereby Gustave's life will be spared if he can complete six impossible tasks - but he has only one night in which to do so. Along the way he meets helpless virgins and fire-spewing dragons, a dream princess, griffins and strange giants, a crocodile and a flying pig, and - eventually - he encounters himself. The adventures spill over into one another in a hallucinatory way as he, a knight in shining armour, and his trusty steed, Pancho Sansa, travel about the earth, through time tunnels, to the ends of the universe, and to the moon. And as if this were not enough, he also learns about the meaning of life, souls, magic and death, and discovers how time, past, present and future, is a concept on Earth but not in the distant universe.
Although on one level this is a novel written for children, to confine it to that would be to miss its point. Here is a potential classic for adult readers as well. Moers has the ability, rare among modern authors, to bring an old formula to life in a modern context. The ingredients of myth and fairy-tale are here brewed into something new, written in tongue-in-cheek homage to the German tradition. Doré's sometimes frightening drawings simply add to the richness and uniqueness of this wonderful novel. If only all our dreams were as vivid and enlightening as those imagined here.
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