Graphic novel of the month: All the Living by Roman Muradov

A woman dies and goes to hell. Or at least she assumes that’s where she is: the place she lands in is red-tinged and dark-skied, staffed by beings that could, at a stretch, be demons. “It’s nice,” she says, admiring its scarlet tree-flowers and lamp-lit undergrowth. But she’s not allowed to stay: everyone who arrives here must return to the world as a ghost, unless they win a lottery that will send them back alive. The odds of winning are long – one in 7.67bn – but the woman’s number comes up (“Huh,” says the surprised demon), and back she goes, against her wishes, to continue on with her life as though nothing had happened.

These are the events of the opening 12 pages of All the Living by London-based Armenian artist Roman Muradov, which doesn’t paint a much rosier picture of modern life than it does of death (at least there are nice flowers in hell). The woman tries her best to slot back in, but the city where she lives and works is a melancholy place. Leached of vibrant colours, except for occasional splodges of red or orange, it is populated by mere outlines of people. When the woman’s own ghost appears in her apartment and offers to take over the cooking and cleaning, she hardly blinks.

What a strange and beguiling book this is. No summary can quite prepare you for it. And yet, by Muradov’s standards, it plays things relatively straight. Many of his earlier works – including 2018’s Vanishing Act, also published by Fantagraphics – had ingenious premises and many brilliant moments, but they often seemed wilfully impenetrable, with frames so abstract or overloaded that it was near-impossible to tell what was going on. All the Living has its abstractions too, but within a simpler, more coherent storyline. When the artwork goes on a full cubist freakout, or is reduced to squiggles and haze, it deepens the dream-like mysteriousness of it all rather than plunging the reader into the dark.

Muradov says that this work – which he published in French in 2023 before translating it into English himself, revising it slightly in the process – is his “depressive pandemic mental breakdown book”. It shows. Home is a gloomy, cramped apartment at the top of a nightmarishly tall tower block. Work is a featureless office where the woman spends each day repeatedly pressing a single red button to no obvious effect, as time drags by. Between the two lie desolate train platforms and faded streets with ghost-people trudging to and fro. If there’s a better visual representation of the TS Eliot line about crowds of London commuters undone by death, I’d like to see it.

And yet there are flashes of humour here, even if it’s of the resolutely oddball variety. When they’re not determining the fate of human souls with a giant lottery machine, the demons dream of making ceramic tableware. “A round bowl with two handles, 12cm diameter, two decorative lines across, and a matte finish,” one of them specifies. The ghost of a librarian who died during sex is forever saddled with an ejaculating erection.

Beneath the scrawly surface of Muradov’s artwork, there is meticulous care and a painterly eye, borrowing from Japanese manga as much as European modernism. Each time I revisited the book, more salient details emerged: the neckwear that distinguishes the woman from her ghost and reveals a terrible secret; the deployment of red in the living world that is perhaps less arbitrary than it seems; the recurring crisscross motif that resembles the squares of a copybook showing through.

Some of the frames are so lovely, in their washed-out way, that they stopped me in my tracks. Even if you can’t tell what’s going on at times, and it leaves you with an overwhelming sense of life’s meaninglessness, this is one hell of a beautiful book.

All the Living by Roman Muradov is published by Fantagraphics on 24 February (£24.99) 

Illustrations by Roman Muradov