At the heart of each of Joff Winterhart’s books – this is his very welcome third outing – is a supremely ill-matched pair of characters thrown together by a quirk of fate. In 2012’s Days of the Bagnold Summer, it’s a mother and her sullen teenage son forced by a holiday cancellation to spend the summer in each other’s company, with all the minor-key humiliations you’d expect. (Monica Dolan and Earl Cave played the pair in an entertaining 2019 film adapted by Lisa Owens and directed by Simon Bird.)
In the fantastic Driving Short Distances (2017), it’s a 27-year-old college dropout, Sam, and his enigmatic older employer, Keith, who tour the business parks of a regional English town – mere inches apart in Keith’s Audi A4 but separated by a gulf of generational and temperamental differences. The distances between the characters, and their fumbling attempts to reach across them, give rise to much of the poignant, beautifully observed comedy that ensues.
The odd couple in Winterhart’s long-awaited Dear Historian comprises Margaret and Lucy, who meet for the first time at the offices of a TV production company called Giant Past. Margaret is a historian in her 70s who labours away in relative obscurity at an English university. Lucy is a thirtysomething producer at the TV company, which specialises in zippy, populist history programmes. Against all the evidence, she’s convinced that Margaret could be their next star presenter.
We gain insights into both women’s lives, from their disappointments with men to their shared taste for soft, babyish foods
We gain insights into both women’s lives, from their disappointments with men to their shared taste for soft, babyish foods
They do seem at first like chalk and cheese. Lucy, despite a recent breakup, is all positivity and euphemistic media-speak, while Margaret, whose idea of a good time is researching archaic death rituals, is nonplussed by the younger woman’s drive to get her on TV. But as their friendship deepens, they discover more that unites them than sets them apart. The true mismatch here is between two radically different ways of bringing the past to light.
I thought it would be hard for Winterhart to top Driving Short Distances, one of my favourite graphic novels of the past 10 years. But somehow, with this rather offbeat premise, he’s managed it. A lot of the success of Dear Historian is down to the extraordinary amount of care he has taken in its construction. Though the book begins with a messy-looking ink blur, as Margaret watches the landscape streaking by through a train window, the artwork is far more sophisticated than it first appears. Winterhart used monoprinting, a labour-intensive technique that involves drawing on to ink rolled out over a sheet of glass, to create a tactile effect that adds real feeling to the story.
His characterisation is no less considered. Glancingly at first, and then more directly as the plot unfolds, we gain insights into both women’s lives, from their disappointments with men to their shared taste for soft, babyish foods.
Margaret, in particular, is a brilliant creation, perplexed and wryly amused by the world around her. “They’re all very nice and everything,” she says of the Giant Past team, “but just… so sort of… exhaustingly positive.” She’s more at home with the 17th-century doctor, poet and amateur embalmer John Witham Preece, her specialist subject, with whom she’s “like a 12-year-old girl, always just wanting to change the subject back to ponies”.
Winterhart has a great eye for odd little details on the margins of the story. In Driving Short Distances, Sam fixates on Keith’s nostril hair while key aspects of his new job are being explained to him. At one point here, while being lectured at by an overbearing TV guy, Margaret is distracted by his single-handed shelling of quail’s eggs. One of the loveliest pages of the book involves a chain of associations in Margaret’s half-asleep mind, from Lucy’s face to a cow’s dewlap to a bearskin-lined curtain in a Russian museum.
Margaret’s true opposite, in the end, is not Lucy but Giant Past’s founder, Allan Hands, an egomaniacal Yorkshireman who made his name posting historical content on YouTube. Though they are closer in age, the difference between their approaches could not be more pronounced. Whereas Margaret prefers to disappear into the background of her research, reducing herself to a nameless historian, Allan treats the past as an excuse for peacocking around in period costumes, his face eclipsing those of his subjects. The story Winterhart weaves around this curious clash of personalities is an unmitigated delight.
Dear Historian by Joff Winterhart is published by Jonathan Cape (£20). Order a copy from The Observer Shop for £17. Delivery charges may apply
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Illustrations by Joff Winterhart