posted on 27 Nov 2016

The Night Bookmobile by Audrey Niffenegger

This idiosyncratic and unsettling graphic novel first appeared in a serialised form in The Guardian newspaper and was published in book form in 2010. In a note written by the author at the end of story she reveals that this was planned as the first book in a cycle of similar stories but I’m not sure others in that projected series have yet appeared.

Niffenegger is perhaps best known as a novelist and she had a major hit with The Time Traveller’s Wife but she has always been interested in the modern adult fairy story and her art has been integral to much of her work. She’s also a self-confessed bibliophile and The Night Bookmobile comes out of this love of books and, I suspect, other bibliophiles will immediately understand the tale she tells.

One night a young woman has an argument with her live-in boyfriend and storms out of the apartment to walk the streets until the early morning. By pure chance she stumbles on a Winnebago playing loud music that she likes and which has an oddly suave middle-aged driver who offers her a visit to see ‘the collection’. Going inside she finds that just like Dr Who’s Tardis its bigger on the inside than the outside. Further exploration shows her that it’s a huge library filled with books and written ephemera  – but not just any books because all these are the ones she has read or partly read throughout her whole life to date. She’s astonished but oddly invigorated by this and when the Winnebago leaves as the sun rises she is left feeling the need to both revisit the library and also to read more to see if it gets added to the collection.

Night after night she tries to find the Bookmobile and its mysterious driver but years pass before it reappears to her. This time she doesn’t want to leave and asks if she can have a job with the library but is told that this is impossible – but, the librarian / curator tells her, there’s nothing to stop her training to be a librarian in the real world.

She takes his advice and the years pass again until the library reappears. The woman is now a successful librarian but her personal life hasn’t really worked out for her. The world of her books and reading are what’s really important to her and when one night she commits suicide she finds that she is finally able to take up her post in the great library service of the afterlife – she will now be a lifetime reading librarian to someone else.

Jorge Louis Borges, the great Argentinean scholar, philosopher, writer and bibliophile was also a lifelong librarian and once famously said that he imagined that paradise would be some kind of perfect library and this little tale of Niffenegger’s plays with that idea. This does feel an unfinished story in many ways and I hope that the author does plan to complete the cycle she originally envisaged. But despite that, this is a visual treat as well as an intellectual one. The drawings are bold and colourful without seeming to be too sophisticated and I liked the rather two-dimensional comic-book nature of the artwork generally.

Copies – hardback – are readily available for well under £10 and although the book is only about 70 pages in a landscape format it offers a rich experience for that kind of money.

Terry Potter

November 2016