Graphic novel of the month: The Wreck by Lizzy Stewart

Anyone drifting into middle age who has watched their dreams of a bohemian existence being slowly flattened by the realities of adult life, with its money pressures and deadening routines, might feel a twinge at the start of this terrific new book by Lizzy Stewart. It’s 1995, and Charlotte and her partner Bill are muddling along in their damp rented flat in suburban Bristol – she’s an arts critic for a local paper, he’s a jobbing carpenter. As Charlotte turns 40, an old university friend, Fran, re-enters her life with a proposition that will, as Charlotte later describes it, give them the chance to “do youth all over again”.

Fran and her husband, Adrian (the outwardly more successful couple: she’s a producer at the BBC, he’s a famous war photographer), have bought a lovely old house in the countryside that’s too big for just them. Their plans to start a family ended in disappointment; now they’re looking for friendly lodgers to help turn the house into a place of joy and creativity. Despite the subtle faultlines that run through Charlotte’s friendships with Fran and Adrian, could she and Bill be persuaded to join them?

It’s an irresistible premise, which Stewart builds with unhurried control, laying little sticks of dynamite here and there beneath the foundations to heighten the tension later on. Even before the two couples begin co-habiting “the Wreck”, as they self-deprecatingly call the grand former rectory with its 25 rooms and acres of garden, we know things are destined to go badly – on the opening page Charlotte recalls her mother’s judgment that she was “determined to burn every bridge” in front of her.

But Stewart doesn’t rush us to the conflagration. First, over a hundred languid pages, we’re allowed to feel just how idyllic this living arrangement has the potential to be. Charlotte and Bill can’t quite believe their luck, that in their 40s they can once again hang out with friends every day, cooking for each other in the evenings and throwing impromptu parties at the weekends. Fran and Adrian are excellent company, in the main, and the house is full of their beautiful things, scattered about with effortless style.

Stewart renders all of this in expressive sepia-toned panels that occasionally burst into colour, in glorious two-page spreads that made me gasp a little whenever I encountered one. But, like Stewart’s previous book Alison, this is not a straightforward graphic novel, punctuated as it is by chunks of prose that can run for a page or more. In an interview, Stewart has described these hybrid works as “comics for people who are still testing the waters”. The format is surprisingly effective – the panels provide immediacy and nuance while the text brings explanatory power that deepens rather than reiterates what’s going on in the illustrations.

The two books have other things in common. Both are intrigued by alternative ways of living and attempts – however ill-conceived – to escape the daily grind. The titular narrator of Alison moves to London to become an artist in the early 1980s, when it was still possible, thanks to cheap rents, to lead a creative existence.

Both books are keenly alert to the ease with which the upper classes, and particularly men, glide through life compared to their working-class female narrators. For Alison, this ease is embodied in her on-off lover Patrick Kerr, a celebrated painter who can afford to be anti-establishment because he’s already so comfortably established himself.

For Charlotte in The Wreck, it manifests in both Fran, who is posh, and Adrian, who is not but whose charm and good looks, as well as the advantages of his gender, open doors wherever he goes. Charlotte’s response to this is not clear-cut resentment. She also wants what they have and hates them (and herself) for knowing she wants it.

Throw in roving sexual attraction, communication failures and a liberal dose of naivety and you have all the ingredients for a houseshare horror story. It’s a testament to Stewart’s writing that I desperately wanted everything to work out for the occupants of the Wreck. And, for a while, it does. Stewart is brilliant at capturing the glorious intimacies of close friendships as well as their pitfalls. But, as the title suggests, this experiment in communal living was never going to have a perfectly harmonious outcome.

The Wreck by Lizzy Stewart is published by Jonathan Cape (£25). Order a copy from The Observer Shop for £21.25. Delivery charges may apply

Illustration by Lizzy Stewart