GRAPHIC MEMOIR:Blue Pills:
A Positive Love Story, By Frederik Peeters, translated from the
French by Anjali Singh, Jonathan Cape, 192pp. £12.99 BLUE
PILLS begins with a series of unsettling images: jagged circles and
triangles, tentacled monstrosities, unidentifiable swirls of black,
writes
Katherine Farmar.
At first glance they seem almost abstract, but to Frederik Peeters they are terrifyingly concrete: they are cells in the human immune system, and not just any immune system but that of his partner Cati - for Cati is HIV-positive.
HIV is no longer the death sentence it once was, thanks to the development of anti-retroviral drugs, and so the "positive" in Peeters's subtitle is not as grimly ironic as it would have been 15 years ago. Yet the treatments that do exist do not amount to a cure: Cati must give her young son drugs every day to prevent the virus from taking hold, first in the form of a powder and later as the blue pills of the title. This routine is a daily reminder of the virus in both his blood and her own, and a guarantee that neither Cati nor Peeters can ever forget that she is infected.
It is not the virus that dominates the story of Blue Pills, but the love between Peeters and Cati. They first meet at a party, where Peeters is captivated by Cati's cheerful self-possession, watching mesmerised as she jumps into a swimming pool with a bottle of champagne in her hand.
When they re-encounter each other years later, Cati has married and divorced, and a cloud seems to have passed over her; it takes a few more meetings before they connect on a deep enough level for her to tell Peeters about her HIV. Peeters grants himself a moment of panic when he hears this - skilfully rendered as a cluster of words, flight rejection possession pity, floating over his head - but the moment passes, and they embark on a sweet and tender relationship that fills their lives with quiet joy.
Some of the greatest and most acclaimed works in the comics medium are autobiographical - Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, Alison Bechdel's Fun Home, David B's Epileptic - but what distinguishes the truly great graphic memoirs from the mediocre exercises in navel-gazing that trail in their wake is the willingness of their creators to be self-effacing, to resist the urge to intrude too much into their own stories. Blue Pills contains no hint of self-indulgence; a lengthy exploration of Peeters's thoughts and feelings concerning HIV, which would have been unspeakably tedious in the hands of many other artists, is depicted as an imaginary conversation between Peeters and a cloned woolly mammoth with a penchant for literary quotations.
When the vexed issue of sex comes up (as it must), Peeters is frank and earnest, but while he treats the problem seriously, there's a lightness to his approach which prevents the story from becoming bogged down in its own self-importance.
Indeed, Blue Pills often feels less like a book drawn by a stranger and more like a late-night conversation with a friend, after the wine has stripped away all pretences and the small talk has evaporated: it is intimate, revealing, and strangely familiar. There is an honesty and a palpable warmth to Blue Pills which makes it hard not to lapse into cliche when describing it; it really is a "moving testimony to the power of love", but to say this in so many words is to do the book a disservice by classing it with all the heartstring-pulling fakes that have been praised in the same terms. There is no sentimentality here, no ersatz learning of lessons; Blue Pills is the real thing.
Katherine Farmar is a freelance writer. She blogs about comics at http://puritybrown.blogspot.com and at http://www.forbiddenplanet.co.uk/blog