31 Mar 2014 23:31:38
Strictly speaking, Jane, the Fox & Me is intended for younger readers: it's published by the ever-brilliant Walker Books, home of Anthony Horowitz and Patrick Ness. However, this is a graphic novel so well drawn and beautifully told, I'm certain it will speak to adults, too – especially if you've only to think of your school days for your stomach to flip over. It's a collaboration between Quebec playwright Fanny Britt and award-winning illustrator Isabelle Arsenault, and I found it painfully evocative, the years dissolving almost as fast as I could turn its pages. We are in Canada in the 1980s (or so I'm guessing: the boys in the book like to listen to records by the Police while eating copious amounts of liquorice). At school in Quebec, Helene finds herself an outcast. Her enemies, a regular bunch of mean girls, taunt her in the playground and on the bus home, and write spiteful comments about her weight on the lavatory walls. Each day is a test. How to look nonchalant when your heart is racing? How to move with any confidence at all when you are convinced your backside is huge?
Helene won't tell her mother about her problems; she would only worry. Instead, she takes refuge in the pages of Jane Eyre, a novel whose heroine grows up to be both clever and slender in spite of her miserable start in life. Arsenault captures the sense of solace Helene finds in this book by using colour – she favours red, turquoise and a lush green – only when our heroine has her nose in it; the rest of the time, the world is rendered in shades of grey and brown.
Helene is sent to camp, and things can only get worse. She finds herself in a tent with the other unpopular girls: it's miles from the main cabin, and moving from one to the other is "like changing countries". But then… hope. Sitting outside to read, Helene spies a fox. It has strikingly kind eyes, and though it disappears into the night, it is soon followed by Geraldine, newly exiled from the cool girls' tent (it seems she disliked their particular brand of group justice, and had to pay the price).
Geraldine has a remarkable effect on Helene and the other outcasts. Garrulous and open-hearted, she's able to bond with them, with the result that they're at last able to bond with each other (before, they were separated by an awkwardness born of knowing they were touched with the same contagion). On Helene's return to Quebec, the attentive reader will now notice the odd blaze of colour in the monochrome landscape and, sure enough, the book ends with an epiphany, the paralysing beam of the bullies' searchlight having at last moved on. "You'll see, the story ends well," she tells Geraldine, pressing Jane Eyre on her new friend – a baton now, as well as a shield.
