An example: that bearded man sounding off on the TV whom Jack and Patience watch nightly with horrified fascination might seem like a background detail, thrown in for verisimilitude, but you’ll discover his shattering consequences for the story towards the end. I prefer the artwork of Ghost World, with its dominant pastel green, or, even better, the austerely beautiful black-white-and-grey chamber music of David Boring, to the occasionally eye-hurting full-colour extravaganza that is Patience, but this is a Clowes novel, constructed with rigorous narrative and visual intricacy, so you need to pay attention to every single panel. Patience, the virtue, is a simple function of time, and the ramifications of the book’s title – both the name of its heroine and the quality that most marks Jack, who waits out decades and bends and breaks time to do the one right thing in his life at unimaginable cost to himself – are devastating, especially when you reach the final pages.

Jack remains ambivalent throughout about whether he is seeking revenge or looking to make Patience’s life follow a different trajectory, this time a happier one the cloudiness imbues the work with nuance and moral complexity.

In Patience, a love story like many of Clowes’s novels, the incursion of sci-fi is at first delightfully surprising and thereafter modulated so effortlessly that you see behind the irony of that self-consciously purple-prose blurb to the truth it encapsulates. His most complex book, David Boring, places effortless forays into the surreal in the middle of what is essentially a psychosexual Hitchcockian narrative. So much has been withheld from us, and so many new twists now happen, that you’ll have to take these pages in one sitting then reread instantly.Ĭlowes does realism impeccably – think of the pitch-perfect depiction of adolescent ennui in Ghost World, or the psychological and emotional truthfulness of Mister Wonderful – but he is also fond of letting the irruption of the hyperreal or fantastical not so much shift gears as change the entire vehicle.

The final section, set in 2012 again, adds information to the first 2012 section in a way that can only be called cinematic. Illustration: Courtesy of Daniel ClowesĪt certain points, the narrative may remind you of the film Looper, at other times, of that old counterfactual question, “If you could go back in time and kill Hitler’s mother, would you do it?” There is no strand or element in the tight weave that is superfluous or casual, but particularly crucial to the story is Jack’s encounter in 1985 with a suave scientist, Wolfe, who he thinks can manufacture more of the “juice” that is essential to time travel. ‘Clowes does realism impeccably.’: a scene from Patience.

Mister Wonderful by Daniel Clowes