Sneha Jaiswal (Twitter | Instagram)
For a graphic novel that’s just a little over 120 pages, “The Many Lives of Charlie” (original title – Les Vies de Charlie) sure packs in a lot of little twists and turns, keeping your head reeling as you navigate its whimsical world.
Created by Kid Toussaint and illustrated by Guarino Aurélie, the story introduces Charlie, an upbeat and cheery young man who works at ‘Eternal Recycle,’ a place that helps people deal with the remains of their loved ones in creative ways instead of boring old funerals. Whether you want them turned into a tree, toy, chessboard pieces, bag, or wallet, Charlie will assist you in deciding how best to commemorate the last vestiges of your beloved. Charlie is the top employee of his company and his colleagues are always passing on their ‘difficult cases’ to him, but even the best of the best are sometimes stumped by quirky customers. So, Charlie finds himself completely ruffled when a young boy demands to know where his mother’s soul went. The good employee that he is, Charlie goes above and beyond to get answers, only to find himself thrown into a crazy adventures involving the afterlife and his past lives!
I have very mixed feelings about the artwork, especially because it was a bit of an inky blur in the first few pages, so the immediate experience of reading the graphic novel isn’t impressive. However, as the plot progresses, the illustrations are nostalgically cartoon-y in several pages and entertaining to look at. Charlie’s character design feels like a spirited older human version of Pinocchio, with a pointy nose and curious eyes. And then there’s his kindness, he is ridiculously friendly, nice, and helpful, to the point that many take advantage of his amenable nature.
‘The Many Lives of Charlie’ starts off as a simple look at an office worker’s life at a unique company but soon morphs into a crazy, chaotic story about the afterlife and what happens to humans when they die. The story becomes absurd and even existential in nature, echoing elements of literary writers like Albert Camus and Samuel Beckett, while the fantasy-like plot about the afterlife reminded me of the 2022 Booker Prize Winner “The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida,” where author Shehan Karunatilaka builds a boring bureaucratic afterlife. However, author Kid Toussaint has an interesting take on the afterlife, which does involve a bureaucratic office as a gateway, but the ‘hell’ and ‘heaven’ versions in this graphic novel look more like a hedonistic party scene from an F. Scott Fitzgerald story set in the Jazz Age.
Charlie’s quest to find what happens to the human soul leads to a dizzying second-half in the novel, which gets both surprisingly romance and dark. Charlie meets someone he has been in love with in several of his past lives, but a happy ending keeps eluding the two. Deaths, despair, and disappointment plagues the last section of ‘The Many Lives of Charlie’, however, it closes on a happy note.
Rating: 3.5 on 5.
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