The God Interviews
The text below is reproduced from reviews of Natalie’s book on her website. I find writing here harder and harder, sometimes labouring for days over a draft and then scrapping it. In the early days I’d write simply, with the freshness and naïveté of an unguarded moment among friends; something I only manage now in comments and emails, which might be a bit loose and slapdash, but seldom cause later regret. (Note to self: a lesson here.) So I’ll let the following tell its own story:
by Ian Vincent Mulder—via personal email [to Natalie] January 30, 2015
Today I thought I would like to write a blog post about The God Interviews, but soon realized it wouldn’t do at all—I must address you personally. Your book is concise and punchy, I find myself wanting to comment in snippets, almost as if imitating its format. I shall give my personal reaction, not as some reviewer or critic whose job is to make judgements on behalf of the world. In any case, no one can give more than a personal reaction. So this is what I came up with: a kind of scorecard, evaluating the book under various headings.
The most profound page:
“What is really real about you?”
“That which cannot be imagined.” (page 82)
Most engaging, striking, enlightening (or perhaps just my favourite—especially because of the angels):
“Why don’t you just send angels to clear up the mess and end the pain?”
“There’s been a drop in the number of angels signing up for those jobs. I’m having to rely on civilian volunteers.”
It might be the wittiest as well, but I’m not doing a beauty contest on that—there would be too many contestants.
Comparison with Neale Donald Walsch:
I have a copy of his Conversations with God for Teens, having appropriated it from one of my younger children years ago. Walsch is wordy & ever-conscious of the misery in the world. His own life-experience, and thus the inspiration for his books, comes from a rather dark place. His format of short questions (apparently from real kids), answered by God at length with no word-limit, encourages the mushrooming of sermons, a multiplicity of selling points, examples, instructions. (He had a background in radio presenting, marketing & PR). Your comic-book format & artistic vocation dictates short questions and pithy answers. Your cartoon frames demand visual and conversational entertainment, inventive pictures and text. You are faultlessly fertile. Walsch soon gets tedious. I can’t think of an instance where artistry and entertainment conspire to corner you into mediocrity, or a wrong note. But I will dredge up some critical points in due course.
Most memorable image:
The Eternitree (page 43). Memorable for conveying that God stands in one-to-one relationship with all who seek this connection. See this page.
Most informative exposition of “the way God works”:
the double-page spread pp 48-49: one can only engage with God on his terms: love. The only divine power is to work as a team. The language is Goddish. I’m sure there are thousands of dense theological tomes which don’t manage to say anything as useful, or if they do, not as clearly.
Most sustained, visually inventive & witty exposition of a complex idea:
Chapter Five
Least successful chapter:
Chapter Three
Chapter Two struck me as a little odd, but I took it at face value - God saying something arbitrary to prove that Augustine is not talking to herself. And then, “If you can’t follow simple instructions, how can you prove that I exist?” which doesn’t quite make sense, is rather a non-sequitur, but I took it on board, thinking I was just dumb.
But in Chapter Three, we have strawberry = heart-shaped = symbol of Love (divine love), which is then confirmed in Chapter Four and thereafter, specifically pages 49, 88, 91, where the heart-shape is also identified with the cardial organ.
There is no doubt in my mind that the equation God = Love is not just offered as a cliché, but something felt. Yet I find a general difficulty with the word love, when it is presented as the singular attribute of your cartoon figure. Love, especially in the West, is a word we hear many times a day: in conversation, gossip, songs, all the media. Language is democratic---or rather anarchic. Every meaning is valid, even when we say that a prostitute has love for sale.
So I find a sogginess in the otherwise sharp & muscular argument, as expressed in images & words.
Best reference to Love:
Page 33:
“What did you do about it?”
“Cried, shouted, threatened, walked out, forgave, cried, punched, slammed, got revenge, cried, forgave, or didn’t”.
“You see, you have all those choices, I have only one.”
“Love, love love! But we’re not you - we’re only human!”
Listen listen listen!”
And perhaps this is the most profound page too, for it presents the pathos of God, the helplessness. For God is the still, small voice. What can he do alone? Not enough angels are signing up these days (like doctors in A&E! [Accident & Emergency, = ER in USA]) . . . And it offers the glimmer of insight, for those ready to pick it up, that God is the voice in the soul, that speaks to us. I would take it further and say that the soul is in everything, this force of Love is in everything, only as human beings we are pretty slow to catch it, we lose the connection. We are like a fish with no gills. Oxygen is all around but . . .
On the characters and their images:
Augustine is delightful throughout, even when incarnated briefly as a dog. God is vaguely Indian, and I wondered if his appearance was influenced by someone she had met. Anyhow, he carries himself lightly, as befits a figment of the cartoonist’s imagination who stands for the god within.* He is part of her, or she is part of him. Walsch’s God is a heavy-duty preacher. He doesn’t lighten up, doesn’t make jokes. I’ll never be able to read him again (not that I was in the habit of!)
Verdict:
A delight. I don’t usually read comic books. I watch “The Simpsons” a lot and appreciate how much humanity, humour and wisdom is poured into its rather crudely-drawn characters. Even your busy action frames are well-drawn where it matters. The main scenes, like the cover, where Augustine & God gaze eye to eye in profile, establish the delicacy---and I was going to say humanity, for God is portrayed as human for how else?---of the features, and the very expressive postures. Augustine with her little black dress, high heels & swept-back auburn hair, is all woman. God is athletic, like a yogi.
In the end of course God is unknowable so can only be portrayed that way, as in the evasive “wavy” answers of Chapter 10.
What do I take away from the book? Entertainment, aesthetic pleasure; further confirmation that the answers are within and it’s up to humanity.
What is the book’s message?
It doesn’t have a message. It is art. It is what Natalie D’Arbeloff does: shares her joy & sense of fun with the world, so that she and the world end up enriched by the exchange.
It is a book to own. I’m glad I have it.
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*The sentence beginning “Anyhow, he carries himself lightly” was my own interpretation of Augustine’s God, until she set me straight on the matter, thus: “My cartoon figure of God is the way Augustine (herself a cartoon) would visualise the Deity so It may resemble her but is not meant to be her. I do not believe that God is ‘the god within’.”
Anam Ċara
To become animal is to regain Eden. This is why I don’t have a use for the word “spirituality”.
I take those words back. In any case they don’t make too much sense. It’s tedious of me to be so pedantic, and something that cannot be justified without being even more tedious. By way of penance, I retrieve a book I’ve had for years and open it almost at random. The best kind of book to read is one that expresses what you have already thought or felt, at least in part, but couldn’t possibly say yourself. To discover something outside yourself that echoes and mirrors what’s hidden deep within you is magic. Literally, this is what magic is. This is what I found on pages 132-133:
The Celts had a wonderful intuitive understanding of the complexity of the psyche. They believed in various divine presences. . . . [He lists some.] Gods and goddesses were always linked to a place. Trees, wells and rivers were special places of divine presence. Fostered by such rich textures of divine presence, the ancient psyche was never as isolated and disconnected as the modern psyche. The Celts had an intuitive spirituality, informed by mindful, reverent attention to landscape. It was an outdoor spirituality impassioned by the erotic charge of the earth. The recovery of soul in our times is vital in healing our disconnection.
In theological or spiritual terms, we can understand this point of absolute non-connection with everything, as a sacred opening in the soul which can be filled by nothing external. Often all the possessions we have, the work we do, the beliefs we hold, are manic attempts to fill this opening, but they never stay in place. They always slip, and we are left more vulnerable and exposed than before. A time comes when you know that you can no longer wallpaper this void. Until you really listen to the call of this void, you will remain an inner fugitive, driven from refuge to refuge, always on the run with no place to call home. To be natural is to be holy; but it is very difficult to be natural. To be natural is to be at home with your own nature. If you are outside your self, always reaching beyond your self, you avoid the call of your own mystery. When you acknowledge the integrity of your own solitude, and settle into its mystery, your relationships with others take on a new warmth, adventure and wonder.
Spirituality becomes suspect if it is merely an anaesthetic to still one’s spiritual hunger.
La Vie en Rosé
The art of Natalie D’Arbeloff, which often combines image and text, has a directness and simplicity that may at first sight appear childlike. But it’s quite the reverse. For all its immediacy, it’s both subtle and profound, adult in the best as opposed to the X-rated sense. It comes from someone who knows the world and herself. Perhaps “knows” is too strong. The person who has “seen it all” can be cynical and jaded. Natalie is the opposite. Having met her face to face, I have the sense that she and her art are at one in their mission to radiate a joyous sense of wonder at this world, and the opportunities to make a significant mark upon it.
La Vie en Rosé is a short book. She calls it an illustrated novella. I think of it as a fable with a happy ending. Like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, it started as part of a game between a group of bright people. In the case of Mary Godwin, as she was then, the players included Percy Bysshe Shelley, whom she married, and Lord Byron. Cold weather prevented the outdoor activities they’d hoped for on a holiday beside Lake Geneva, so a game was devised. Each of them would write a ghost story. In Natalie’s case it was an online group and the game was a form of “Consequences”. Each in turn must write a 250-word story. Its opening line would be the closing one of the previous story. The one she was given was:
We gulp what is here and ours and nobody’s and nothing’s
You can read about it in her words here. I’m guessing that this line put her in mind of drinking and nihilism. So she created a recovering alcoholic expatriate Englishwoman living in a French village, married to a fashionable English poet, supporting him, arranging his lecture tours. The situation is unstable: we see it unravelling before our eyes. At a party he leaves his glass of rosé with her so as to flirt with the teetotal hostess, and whatever that may lead to. He’s devilish-handsome and it wouldn’t be the first time. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, says Byron. She gulps down the wine he’s so thoughtlessly left her guarding. Three years dry, now ready to drown in an instant. The wine inside her wants company, more of the same. After her long drought, she pours it down her throat from the bottle. Will she, like many a captive wife, merely punish herself, or will she break free of the two tyrants in her life? We know not. She flees the party, accosts a passing village priest, the reclusive Père Lafitte.
I imagine that it was around this point that the 250 words prescribed by the game ran out, perhaps with her drunken words to the priest as she grabs his arm, “Get me to a nunnery!”
Be that as it may, her characters came to life, refused to end it there. Readers wanted to know what happened & so did Natalie. She’s an artist who’s fond of having dialogues: with herself, or the angel Gabriel. She even got herself a reporter’s notebook and interviewed God, producing the best best comic book I’ve read. Perhaps her entire oeuvre may be seen as a dialogue: with herself, divinity, the reader and viewer.
To continue: the priest shudders at being accosted by a drunken woman, out in the street at night. It would be enough of an ordeal for him in the safe haven of a confessional booth. He’s not an outgoing man.
Père Lafitte was used to silence, he craved it as others crave communication . . .
But an unlikely relationship develops between the spurned wife resolved to start anew and a priest who has dreams of his own, dreams not incompatible, it needs to be said, with his ordained and celibate status.
I said it was a fable. It’s a fable about daydreams, and whether they should be realized in concrete form. The character of the priest is well-realized, his bleak solitary life with a few consolations—the bottle of good cognac he keeps in a cupboard for moments of need, the book he ritually reads at bedtime (Exploits Étranges et Extraordinaires), his secret garden. In certain ways, I see myself in him. At any rate, I recognize him as a real person, especially when he says:
I do not need to make my dreams come true.
(Some of us do say this. I do, daily, as I ponder whether I need to, want to, am prepared to, make the effort to, convert intense experience into written form. I’m sure Natalie must hesitate too, before sacrificing her ease on a new and demanding project.
Susan / Suzanne is equally real: a woman striving for her own independent life, no heroine, perhaps an allegory of Everywoman, lightly portrayed but real in her predicament, real in her quest to define herself.
Great is the author, in my estimation, who restricts herself to hints and nuances, who gives space to the reader to superimpose his own life-experience, to fill out the characters and situations. In a short novella or long short-story such a light sketching-in is a must. An inferior author or screenwriter will fall back on cliché. Not here. Yes, La Vie en Rosé could spawn a movie—though not with that title because it’s too close to La Vie en Rose about the life of Edith Piaf, named from a love-song she wrote. The mix of characters is reminiscent of an Iris Murdoch plot, but simple where Murdoch is convoluted and gothic. In Père Lafitte I see echoes of celibates in John Cowper Powys, a novelist who like Ms D’Arbeloff puts himself into each character, whose vividness shines from reflecting aspects of his soul.
I said it was a fable about dreams, and the possibility of their realization. Our author chooses a marvellous example from real life, the postman Ferdinand Cheval, who spent thirty-three years of his life building “Le Palais Idéal”. 
a page from The Augustine Adventures, No. 3
Her word-portraits and humorous monologues are as deft and simple as her illustrations and paintings. I’m grateful to have obtained a tiny volume in the series The Augustine Adventures: small packages. It’s a beautifully- presented series, twenty pages each of black-and-white cartoons (A6, stapled). In “Number Three, Oct 1984”, the author’s alter ego, in conversation with a mirror, tries to deal with the absence of wider fame. This is something I dearly wish will be corrected in both our lifetimes.
