Dickens & Prince by Nick Hornby review – a tale of two greats

 

Charles Dickens and Prince

Dickens & Prince by Nick Hornby review – a tale of two greats

This article is more than 2 years old

Hornby draws parallels between the Victorian novelist and the musician in this heartfelt homage to these brilliant, driven individuals

Peter Conrad

Mon 28 Nov 2022 

At the start of this heartfelt exercise in hero worship, Nick Hornby gathers together a throng of what he calls “My People” and ushers them into a VIP room in his head. They make up an eclectic pantheon, with Arsène Wenger jostling Joan Didion and the sitcom scriptwriters Galton and Simpson next to the gloomy painter Edward Hopper. Dickens and Prince are “two among many” in the gilded crowd, but Hornby singles them out for special homage. Dickens rescued him from the stupor of adolescence by showing that books were an escape route for the mind; Prince, with his keening falsetto, the prestidigitation of his guitar-playing and his hyperkinetic dance moves, delivered a physical excitement that is music’s special prerogative. Dickens made Hornby laugh, while Prince thrilled him by seeming to offer “hours of erotic ecstasy”.

Nick Hornby / Why we love graphic novels

Nick Hornby, novelist and screenwriter

Why we love graphic novels

Sunday 5 November 2017

How did you get into graphic novels?

I read more comics when I was a kid than books – Marvel as well as the Dandy and the Beano, so I already had a love for the form and the colours. But I hadn’t really thought about reading graphic novels until the beautiful 13th issue of McSweeney’s, and then I was introduced to the work of Chris Ware, Daniel Clowes and Charles Burns. They led me to Alison Bechdel and Marjane Satrapi.

FacebookTwitterPinterest

 An image from Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis. Photograph: Jonathan Cape

What do you love about them?

What’s not to love? The best ones are ambitious, serious-minded, and beautiful to look at.

Do you have a favourite?

Bechdel’s Fun Home and Satrapi’s Persepolis in particular are two of the most spectacularly successful works of art of the past 20 years. They ask for much less of your time than some giant prize-winning novel that you may never finish, so the experience is actually as cinematic as it is literary: in and out in two hours, with your life enriched during the process, if you’re lucky. (And if you’re not, you don’t end up wanting to hurl the book across the room.)

THE GUARDIAN