The sounds of the natural world mean more in Kingdom than articulated language. Words are deployed more as a kind of visual phenomena of space-labels, brands, signs, placards, advertising copy, and graffiti adorn panel after panel, their meaning and context crowded and blurred away into a blanket of non-signification. Language in Kingdom is etiolated the dialogue is spare, and characters rarely seem to listen to each other. It is one of the only moments where articulated speech actually achieves its goal of communication. The first dialogue of the novel is an economic exchange at a Burger King in a travel plaza. When characters do communicate through speech, it is usually for trite, commercial purposes. In Kingdom, McNaught frequently uses the sounds of the natural world-here, ice clinking in a cup-to eclipse verbal, spoken communication.
When his mother tries to tell them about Kingdom Fields - "It was my favourite place in the world when I was your age" - he tunes her out. His teenage angst percolates in a restless, vaguely-mean boredom. Her sullen son Andrew wants none of it though.
She yearns to replicate the holiday visits she enjoyed decades ago, when she and her younger brother were the same age as her own children are now. The unnamed mother in Kingdom takes her children to Kingdom Fields so that they can connect to the natural world. The narrator of John Berryman's fourteenth Dream Song understood the transcendental promise of nature's majesty, yet also understood that "the mountain or sea or sky" alone are not enough for humans-that we are of nature and yet apart from it. It's all very gorgeous, and the trio of main characters spend quite a bit of the novel ignoring it. In Kingdom Fields, waves crash in gorgeous dark blues, the sun rises in golden pinks, rain teems down in violet swirls, and the wind breezes through meadows of grass. "Life, friends, is boring," the poet John Berryman wrote in his fourteenth Dream Song, before quickly appending, "We must not say so / After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns." In Kingdom, McNaught creates a world of flashing sky and yearning sea, natural splendor populated by birds and bats, mice and moths. Not much happens in Kingdom, but what does happen feels vital and real.
#BIT SLICER KINGDOM SERIES#
And yet it's clear that the holiday in Kingdom Fields will remain forever with the children, embedded into their consciousness as a series of strange aesthetic impressions.
#BIT SLICER KINGDOM TRIAL#
There is no climactic event, no terrible trial to endure. There, they watch television, go to a run-down museum, play on the beach, walk the hills, and visit an old aunt. Not much happens in Jon McNaught's latest graphic novel Kingdom. A mother takes her son and daughter to Kingdom Fields Holiday Park, a vacation lodge on the British coast.
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