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REVIEW: St. Swithin’s Day One of Morrison's unearthed classics...
Reviewed by Benjamin Russell St. Swithin’s Day is a story in four parts, each section marking a countdown to July 15th, as experienced and narrated by a nameless 19 year-old English boy. Our unnamed protagonist is depicted wandering, talking to himself, musing over the future and the countdown to finality. He claims to know the future, he knows precisely what will happen on July 15th, because he’s going to shoot British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher as she walks into the front doors of Hay Technical College. And his life is counting down until then. Initially he dabbles with fulfilling the conventional expectations of a madman assassin: we first see him boosting a copy of Catcher in the Rye, a novel infamously carried by John Hinckley, Jr. -- supposedly in homage to the assassin of John Lennon, who was reportedly found calmly reading the novel after shooting the singer. Catcher in the Rye provides the bassline to the traditional theme song of disaffected youth. The wanderings -- mental, verbal, and geographic -- of Holden Caulfield were endemic of a dissatisfaction that a certain age of youth felt due to a sense of dislocation. Any college English major could find parallels aplenty between Caulfield and the main character in St. Swithin’s Day, but Morrison's protagonist eventually rejects the novel and such comparisons, tossing it in the Thames with other objects he planned to have planted on his person in order to disorient the "experts" that would study and attempt to dissect his remains and their significance. He begins the story wanting to perpetrate a hoax: to have the secret knowledge that the symbols he effectively wears on his sleeve are meaningless. He wants to leave the world having made it think a great untruth and go laughing to wherever he ends up after the dust has settled. Instead he writes NEUROTIC BOY OUTSIDER on his forehead, and decides to take a stand for something deeply personal. He no longer wants to play a prank -- which is an empty change, a hollow lack of effect that seems to have an impact, but in fact does nothing -- but he wants to effect actual change. Two days before the event, NBO visits Winchester Cathedral, the burial site of Saint Swithin, allowing any unfamiliar reader to be introduced to the titular reference. Saint Swithin was buried in the common churchyard of Winchester Cathedral with the bodies of the poor and nameless. NBO tells us that it is said that when his body was later moved to a shrine, it rained, as Nature reflected the grievous sin that had occurred - the defiling of the Saint’s last wish. (Oddly enough, Raymond Webster's The Catholic Encyclopedia states that upon the moving of the body to the shrine, "A number of miraculous cures took place" which the reporting of led directly to his canonization.) In the tradition of Saint Swithin, Nature produces rain to indicate that something wrong has been done, in the same way that the storms attack the boat that Jonah attempts to escape on. Morrison’s biblical parallel, however, is that of Noah. When NBO’s father dies and is buried, it rains for forty days and nights. The rain of Noah was sent to cause floods to wipe evil abominations from the world; Noah's rain is therefore cleansing, but destructive. The rain of Saint Swithin is also a statement of something wrong in the natural order. NBO’s father is buried near a monument to Karl Marx, inscribed with the quotation, "The point, however, is to change [the world]", and the change that NBO is attempting -- so that there can be restored order -- is to stop the rains. In killing Thatcher, he believes, he can. The adolescent psychology and rationale from motivation to action doesn’t completely follow, perhaps. It’s difficult to tell whether this is a fault of the author or the character, but I would be willing to bet on the latter. NBO is fickle and lacking direction. St. Swithin’s Day is the story of his wrestling with a symbolic gesture that could end his life, but which could restore order to the world -- an order that has been missing since the death of his father. To his adolescent mind, it all seems to make perfect sense. Any holes in the argument are leaps of faith or magic or being-nineteen that the reader just has to accept as givens. The adolescent violence of the act is placed against a narrative about girls and pop music and directionless confusion and acne. Despite the direction of the subject matter -- desperation that is to lead to an assassination -- it is a quiet read, thoughtful and well-paced, and perfectly accented by Paul Grist's minimalist line work. The portrayal of youth is as compelling as that of the allusive Holden Caulfield. St. Swithin’s Day succeeds on so many levels because it is the detailed portrait of an individual. The fact that NBO has no name, and takes on the group identity of Disaffected Youth by inscribing the label on his forehead, in no way detracts from the fact that his story is unique, his thoughts, conclusions, and dialogue are personal. The reader can relate to them because they are of a type, but NBO is not an everyteen. And his unique story and his idiosyncracies are perhaps the best assets of St. Swithin’s Day, for despite his namelessness, NBO is able to change the world by being an individual who rids himself of his required assassin props, his fear, and his curse. Grant Morrison was in the process of writing St. Swithin’s Day for the now nonexistent Trident Comics press in 1989; it was eventually published as a complete work through Oni Press in 1998. Highly
Recommended.
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Writer:
Grant Morrison
