Book Review: “Hostage” by Guy Delisle will hold you captive

Book Review: “Hostage” by Guy Delisle

Guy Delisle’s latest book, the product of 15 years of work, has a lot of aspects that don’t necessarily lend themselves to an exciting or engaging graphic novel. For one thing, a majority of the story is about a man handcuffed to a radiator in a bedroom furnished only with a mattress, not exactly a visually dynamic setting. For another, the shading of Delisle’s artwork is done largely in muted tones of grey and brown, creating very flat renderings.

There are other factors that may make readers wary. Many of Delisle’s pages follow a strict 6-panel-per-page format, which quickly becomes visually repetitive and further flattens the art. And there are large sections of the book in which the lead character, in order to distract himself from his situation, goes over obscure historical battles of the Napoleonic wars in his mind — in alphabetical order, no less.

But the remarkable thing about all of this is that it works. “Hostage” is absorbing and fascinating and builds to a highly emotional conclusion. The book is an account of the experience of Christophe Andre, a humanitarian worker for Doctors Without Borders, a non-governmental organization, or NGO, in the Caucasus in 1997. He was abducted by Chechen rebels and held hostage for months. Delisle’s book is the result of direct interviews with Andre.

It is no spoiler, then, to reveal that Andre did survive the experience. Indeed, how he does survive makes up the bulk of the novel. It’s not so much a life-threatening situation for Andre as much as it is an extremely tedious experience: With only twice-daily breaks for meals and bathroom use, Andre is handcuffed to a radiator next to a mattress and spends most of his time staring at the ceiling and bare walls of the room.

The challenge for Delisle, then, is how to render this scenario engagingly on the page. But Delisle recognizes that to do so would paint a false picture of Andre’s experience. And so the story of Andre’s captivity is told in muted, dull colors with repetitively paneled pages and a distinct lack of action. In reading the novel, one gets an idea of just how boring the experience of a hostage must be. At one point in the novel, the most exciting thing happening is Andre’s attempt to reach a pile of drying garlic that has been left in the room with him. (This is after he is moved to a larger room that serves as a kind of storage shed.) Andre’s struggle to reach the garlic while still handcuffed becomes surprisingly dramatic and involving, just as it must have been for Andre himself.

If one is willing to engage with the deliberate slow pace and flat presentation of the story, there are great rewards when the novel reaches its climax. This depicts Andre’s escape from his captors and his efforts to be rescued by his NGO colleagues. This part of the story takes up the last 60 or so pages of the novel, and the tension, suspense, and anxiety it evokes rivals a Hitchcock film. Though the color palette does not change, the pace is quicker, the captions and dialogue are more intense, and Delisle breaks away on the page with a greater variety of both the number and shape of his panels. It is impossible to not read all of this in a rush to see how Andre makes it.

“Hostage” is something of a change of pace for Delisle. Many of his other graphic novels are travelogues, including the fascinating “Pyongyang,” an account of his visit to North Korea as part of an animation team. “Hostage” is also a much longer work than most of Delisle’s other books. But it is also one of his best. It presents a non-romanticized account of Andre’s experience in a way that makes you feel some degree of the tedium Andre himself must have gone through. Delisle structures his book in a way that will make you value the daily freedoms we all take for granted. Readers will have a hard time forgetting the story of Christophe Andre and the outstanding artistic achievement of Guy Delisle in telling it.

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