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The Dancing Plague
by Gareth Brookes
(SelfMadeHero, £15.99)
THERE may be several reasons for the growing popularity of graphic novels, among them the speed and ease of accessing a narrative, society’s ever-shortening concentration span or simply that our filmic world has inhibited the flexibility of our imaginations.
In Gareth Brookes’s The Dancing Plague, which engages as much as graphic non-fiction as novel,
the focus is on the dancing plague that broke out in late mediaeval Strasbourg, when one woman’s uncontrollable dancing developed into a kind of mass epidemic.
Not the first, but seemingly the last of its kind — various cases of mass hysteria are far from unknown following that period — the year 1518 sits roughly on the cusp of the emergence of modernity, when science began untangling itself from magic and religious superstitions.
This choreomania or St Vitus’s Dance seized hundreds of men, women and children, who jigged and whirled to the point of physical exhaustion and, apparently in some cases, death. It was recognised as demonic possession or divine retribution for whatever sins could be conjured.
Brookes’s sepia images retelling the story is anything but a mere comic-strip account. Colour is only introduced to depict the devilish conductors of this manic infection, and the book visually captures much of what must have been the everyday reality of the time — the corruption of the monastic scene, the underlying resentments of a class oppressed by a feudal nobility, the family tensions in male chauvinist households and, above all, the fear and cruelty of a world that may after all not have changed so much.
Apart from the two-month-long dancing episode, Brookes weaves in several other records of the lives of notable women of the period, and the author’s demotic text captures the earthy realism and humour of the age: “There husband, shit yourself inside out,” our heroine berates her overbearing drunk of a spouse.
This is a book many readers will return to and find freshly nuanced detail in every time, alongside a commentary on both the world half a millennium past and, inevitably, our contemporary pandemic- stricken times.
Further plagues may threaten, but ”meanwhile men will do a merry dance with the devil.”
