Ginseng Roots
Craig Thompson, Faber, £25

THIS remarkable book, that has elements of David Copperfield and Grapes of Wrath within it, comes in at a hefty 450 pages. But what pages!

Like holding the ginseng root itself, this graphic memoir bleeds the red dust that the root has come from, and fills its pages with an intertwining root system that takes us from Wisconsin to north-east China.

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This story of the medicinal root cracks through the pages to become part memoir, part travelogue. The writer harvested the root as child in some of the most extreme weather conditions, a labour in conflict with his desire to become a cartoonist rather than the fundamentalist option his Baptist parents espouse. Then, with Craig Thompson, he travels the globe researching the book to discover the history of the root, while seeking to heal himself both mentally and physically.

The wonder of the book is that it covers so much. Sections portray truthfully the sense of self-doubt that can infect creativity: suddenly discovering that your ideas are no longer popular and that you lack the ability to draw. But alongside this and throughout Thompson illuminates the healing that is a cultural discovery.

The horrors of family and ageing are not shied away from and one of the most moving moments (of many) comes towards the end when Thompson’s mother, walking with husband and son through their now derelict farm, turns to her son to admit: “Sometimes you need other people and not family. It doesn’t have to be blood relatives. There are so many forms of families.”

Powerful words but made so much more powerful by the drawings that go with it. They are walking along a semi-deserted dirt track, and the father (between wife and son) turns back to look over his shoulder. At what? The farm and its memories? Or us?

The detailed notes and acknowledgments at the end of the book explain why this book took so long to draw. He even allows his brother to speak for himself with his own drawings of events described.

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The book ends with questions: “Are we intertwined? Are we individual? Are we wild? Are we cultivated? What does it mean to CULTIVATE?”  

Thompson answers the questions for us: “You work and accept that the labor is in vain because the value is in what’s left in the gouged-out Earth ... all these tiny broken threads.”

This is Craig Thompson’s masterpiece.