Matt Fraction and French illustrator Elsa Charretier have begun an intriguing and bleak noir story in November Vol. 1: The Girl on the Roof. Three narratives interconnect, centering on the unhappy loner Dee, hired (by a literal heavy stranger) to daily decipher a newspaper-published puzzle and then engage in a small act of spy craft on a roof.
She doesn't know what it all means and neither do we. Further chapters widen to include goings-on in the city police station and some acts of what appear to be terrorism. The tone of the work is unrelentingly grim.
The dissection and reconstruction of time and places require the reader's strict attention, but because the book is so thin, the attention is not all rewarded. At only 76 pages in, it's not really the novella described on the back cover, but merely the first third of a graphic novel. (Novellas tend to be self-contained and have endings, whereas sections of novels are chapters.) It's best read, and perhaps best packaged, as one whole work.
The artwork by Charretier, in the aesthetic tradition of Alex Toth, Darwin Cooke and David Mazzuchelli. is beautiful to engage with, though. The look and feel of the work is also greatly enhanced by Kurt Ankeny's various and appropriate lettering styles and Matt Hollingsworth's atmospheric brown, blue and gray palettes.
It's too early to adequately appraise November, but I'm very much looking forward to the next chapters.
