This graphic novel, the much-anticipated follow-up to the award-winning Stone Fruit (2021) sees Lee Lai further develop her comics voice into the portrayal of both the domestic and imaginative lives of her characters. Lai pushes the comics medium to make visual statements which have a mysterious and even contradictory relationship to the verbal and rational world, contributing a poetic heft to the text: umm, just how real ARE those black-and-white birds that flap around Cannon at her moments of emotional intensity? And – what do they mean?
Cannon and her friend Trish both grew up in the country (‘the townships’). Back in Lennoxville, they were one another’s lifeline, the only gay Asian kids they knew. Now living in big-city Montreal, Cannon has worked for years as a kitchen hand in a restaurant with a pretty crappy owner, and the flustered, high-stakes, volatile-chef scenes in the book are intense. Also deftly handled is the arc of Trish’s writing career, which is starting to take off, although, wait a moment, is she just being valorised as a token ‘voice’? And, oh no, is the friendship, the core of their lives for so long, beginning to unravel? The book begins with a bang: an explosion of frenetic destruction shown right at the start becomes retrospectively more and more satisfying as more and more of what led up to it is revealed.
The visual and verbal depiction of these women’s work worlds, family dynamics, new sexual relationships and most of all their comfortable/uncomfortable friendship are carefully woven together by Lai, an Australian now living in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal. Cannon also sees the welcome return of Sydney-based literary fiction publisher Giramondo to the world of graphic novels: huzzah! With this book, you’ll read the pictures as intently as the words, and do remember: pay particular attention to the birds.
