Sandcastle
by Frederik Peeters and Pierre Oscar Levy
(Self-Made Hero, £14.99)

A SLOW zoom in to a cragged coast, a cave, a subaquatic tunnel leading into a mysterious inland beach. A dark-haired, bearded man in sandals appears from behind the rocks, yawns and packs away his sleeping bag into his rucksack.

He suddenly sees a young blonde girl undress down at the beach before getting into the water. He grabs his bag and escapes through the rocks.

So begins Sandcastle, the first graphic novel written by documentary film-maker Pierre Oscar Levy. It’s beautifully drawn by Frederick Peeters, an award-winning Swiss comic-book artist best known for his autobiographical graphic novel Blue Pills.

Sandcastle inspired the recently released American thriller film Old (2021), the story of a group of people who travel to a secluded beach somewhere in Europe, where time seems to be going faster than normal.

There is a married couple with their young children, a man and a female companion, a surgeon, his wife, their young daughter and the doctor’s mother and a close-knit husband and wife. Everything seems normal until tragedy strikes.

One of the children in the group discovers the drowned body of a young girl floating in the water, followed by the doctor’s mother suddenly dying of old age.

From then on, stranger things begin to occur, including the three children suddenly becoming teenagers and the whole group realising that not only they cannot escape the beach but that the place itself is rapidly ageing them.

It is a superb and unsettling graphic novel about our relationship to time, getting older and the death of our loved ones. It’s also a stark allegory of the fleetingness of life and our relationship with the people we love, one that has strong resonance with our ruminations in these pandemic times.

As Levy explains in the introduction of the book: “I often feel that we don’t pay attention to what is truly important in our lives.”
Both he and Peeters have done a superb job in creating a story that, while achingly current, seems timeless.

Peeters’s illustrations are highly effective, in part due to his impressionistic sketches and bold renderings of dramatic situations, intense emotions and mysterious landscapes.

Highly recommended, not only for graphic novel enthusiasts but also for the general readership.