Griffin and Sabine/Morning Star Trilogies
Jun 14th, 2007 by TooHotty
The Griffin & Sabine Trilogy / Nick Bantock
Chronicle Books, 1994 - 0811806960
(contains: Griffin & Sabine, Sabine’s Notebook, The Golden Mean)
The Morning Star Trilogy / Nick Bantock
Chronicle Books, 2004 - 0811845095
(contains: The Gryphon, Alexandria, Morning Star)
This is going to be a difficult review to write for a couple of reasons. 1) My feelings for these two short trilogies span the entire range of emotions with which I am familiar. 2) They were recommended by an important friend who adores them, and my opinion of the second half is not quite so flattering, but I don’t want to have an effect on his opinion because sometimes it’s important to love something unconditionally for personal reasons without having that tainted by peer dissent.
To begin, an overview. The Griffin & Sabine Trilogy and its follow-up The Morning Star Trilogy are really unique. Written as a series of letters and postcards with stunning artwork (the fictional authors of these postcards are, for the most part, artists) the series tries to give the reader the voyeuristic thrill of reading someone else’s mail. (All six dust flaps belabor this point in case you forget.) The effect works, especially when you come to an envelope and are presented with a letter to unfold and a photograph stuffed inside. It’s a novel idea and a lot of fun, but it’s only one aspect of these books. So, to get to the rest, the books tell a story that in the first trilogy is a perplexing, well-crafted and emotional tale but in the second degenerates into a dull and incomprehensible string of pretentious metaphysical drivel. How’s that for a summary?
This is a striking and disappointing progression because The Griffin and Sabine Trilogy had me hooked. The series begins with a postcard from Sabine to Griffin, then strangers, telling him it’s great to finally find him. Since childhood, Sabine has had visions of one man’s drawings as though she were looking through his eyes while he was working. She found through a magazine that this man was Griffin and got in touch with him to share her story. Through their correspondence, the two come to realize they depend on each other and eventually, they fall in love. The rest of this trilogy is about them trying to find each other, which is not an easy task for psychological and metaphysical reasons.
The first book ended with a twist and a jab, and it wrenched my emotions so hard the sensation was physical. I couldn’t get the second book out of the slipcase fast enough. The artwork, as I said, is gorgeous. In fact, the books themselves are gorgeous. They’re printed on glossy, high-quality paper with stitched binding, nice jackets… really lovely. But I digress… where was I? The art. Yes. It not only compliments the strange tone of the work, but contains an archetypal mirror to the plot. Sometimes you have to look for the symbolism, and sometimes it is pointed out by the characters (”I chose this postcard because…”) but it is attractive and unobtrusive, as I believe symbolism should be.
The second two books in the first trilogy (Sabine’s Notebook and The Golden Mean) were less effective than the first because it gets a little confusing what is actually happening with these two. The third introduces an evil character trying to harass Sabine into sharing her correspondence with Griffin so he can study the psychic phenomenon they share, and he’s pretty lame in his lack of depth. Nonetheless, they maintain most of the beauty of the first, and I had no problem sharing my friend’s enthusiasm. I closed the third book and went to sleep to find myself dreaming of Sabine and Griffin. Really excellent, I promise you.
Then I read The Morning Star Trilogy, and wow, what a turnaround! At the end of the previous trilogy, Griffin and Sabine have not been heard from in years. This next trilogy is just about them. In fact, they become secondary to the two new characters introduced: Matthew and Isabella. They are also lovers, though it is a love from mundane origins rather than Griffin and Sabine’s fantastical ones. They live apart at present and must also communicate with letters and postcards because for some reason, Isabella doesn’t have e-mail. What she does have is visions, and what visions they are! Vague and filled with so much useless symbolism, I imagine they were sent by a bored Power-That-Be (Is?) having fun with a dream dictionary. And that was the problem with this second trilogy. It lost itself in “deep meaning.”
Sabine and Griffin return and correspond with Matthew and Isabella, but they have been stripped of their humanity and talk in a language that resembles English but is only spoken by hippies and ceremonial magicians. Griffin’s handwriting has changed to match Sabine’s (I suppose this is supposed to be meaningful), and they act as sort of other-worldly mentors to guide Matthew and Isabella through a spiritual quest that’s never quite made clear. Matthew, an archaeologist, is looking for something relating to Hermes Trismegistus and trying to learn how to love Isabella more openly, I guess. They do things now because they have visions and “just know how important it is”, it’s somehow really important to the fate of the world that the two love each other fully, and the whole thing reads as a real crock. The symbolism is so thick that the story leaves you with nothing familiar to latch onto, it’s impossible to understand what’s going on, and the words become meaningless. Gryphon this, baboon that, animal life force Gaia spirit I don’t even remember any of it. By the middle of the second book, I was skimming, dreading every envelope with a two-page letter inside, and telling myself “You have to finish this. You told Brian you would, and if you’re gonna put it on your website, it’s only fair you get to the end.”
Oh, and the villain from the first trilogy came back. It’s never made clear why he’s so interested in thwarting Matthew and Isabella, and his “evil” is so one-dimensional and caricatured that I was afraid he’d tie Sabine to the train tracks and start twirling his waxed moustache.
So I don’t know what happened. First trilogy: So good it’s magical; I recommend it to everyone. Second trilogy: Wow, no. I mean it. No.
More info:
- Griffin and Sabine at the author’s website
- Nick Bantock’s Illuminations of love (cnn.com)
- Griffin and Sabine at MiddleMoon
Other reviews:
Wow! I’ve never heard of these…Just found them on Amazon after your review and the first trilogy is on my wishlist now
They look amazing. Sucks that the second trilogy was so bad. Sounds like the author knew he created something good and got a little too pretentious.
Your description of the setup of the first trilogy reminds me a bit of Sophie’s World, which I highly recommend as metaphysical introduction to classic philosophy.
It also sounds like the trilogy evokes the romanticism of letter writing in the tradition of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning. I think letter writing is enjoying a retro shiek comeback, in the technological world, where an email is an everyday correspondence, but a beautiful handwritten card is almost a gift.
I don’t know that I’d buy this, but I’ll certainly be looking for out for it during my Barnes and Noble salivation fest.
Yeah, Chris and Kim, these are definitely worth checking out for the book enthusiast/collector.
The romanticism of letter writing is indeed a huge appeal of this book. The day after I read the first trilogy, I found myself online browsing one of my favorite paper/stationary stores (Kate’s Paperie if anyone’s ever in New York) and picking things out before realizing I have nobody to write to. And know nobody’s address. And have crappy handwriting…..
That is really disappointing. These are books that have been on my radar for a long time mostly because I love the concept of them. To find out how much it all goes downhill is interesting and sad. I would be really curious to now hear Brian’s review of the books to compare them, since they obviously meant somethng to him.
On another note, Nick Bantock has a collage book called Urgent: Second Class that is really enjoyable, if you are into found art/collage art.
Sadly, Brian doesn’t have a blog because he’s OLD AND CAN’T SET THE CLOCK ON HIS VCR LET ALONE WORK ONE OF THESE GLOWING TYPEWRITERS but maybe I’ll force him to write up a little comment or give him the honor of being my first guest poster on this illustrious new blog.
Urgent is something I might put on my list. I really like his visual style, and I used to be obsessed with found objects/art. Very cool.
I’ve only read the first trilogy but it really reminded me (in a weird way) of the japanese novel Calling You by Otsu-ichi. Also, it’s absolutely awesome (Griffin and Sabine Trilogy). And the art is… there’s something special about it. Someone said that real art is supposed to show you what the artist is, or how he sees the world. This does that brilliantly, and through the artist shows us a vision of the world as it could be - a portal just like the Alexandria of the trilogy - an overlap and hole in two versions of reality, both of which are autonomously real and collectively unstable and imaginary. I have found for some time now the creation (through any medium) of any world, mundane or magical, that has a particular flavor and continuity absolutely fascinating. For these reasons, and because I’m a sucker for a love story, I strongly recommend The Griffin and Sabine Trilogy!!
I happened upon the first two books of the Griffin and Sabine trilogy in a box of books being given away. I sat down and read them in under an hour. I was both frustrated with, and drawn to them. Something about the writing reminded me of my own epistolary friendships. I’m afraid I looked on the internet to find out what happens in the third. Maybe someday I will read it. Then I discovered that the author lived where I had grown up. (I often passed the second-hand bookstore named Griffin and Sabine’s although I believe it has now been renamed).
I feel the circumstances of my discovery of the books is appropriate given their nature.