Page 45 Review by Stephen
Three young women discover the freedoms and financial constraints of leaving home for university.
How's that for a mass-appeal high concept pitch?
John Allison wrings every millilitre of mirth imaginable from the proceedings and evidently drank a lot less at university than I did, for he remembers all its home-leaving, life-altering novelties with pin-point accuracy.
Previously in GIANT DAYS Susan, Esther and Daisy have discovered:
Halls of Residence, their loud landing congregations and the bedsits' wafer-thin walls.
Halls of Residence's communal kitchens with foodstuffs protectively labelled.
Those labels routinely ignored!
Choosing degree courses for which you are singularly ill-suited.
Bluffing your way through them anyway!
Learning to dance and your first night clubbing!
Friends from home on weekend-long binges, crashing and burning in your bedsit, then finding a job to fund those binges!
Finding more binges to burn out on.
But oh, above all, I recall the exhausted delirium of staying up two nights on the trot, feverishly writing an entire last-minute dissertation which you had a whole month to hand in on time.
Now, in year two, it's time to be weaned off the comparative safety of campus and take a step even further towards self-governance if not more mature self-guidance: it's time find to sign a house-sharing tenancy agreement!
First, of course, you have to find a house to share and people to share it with.
With so many students competing for a finite number of digs, things move fast and it can seem like Anneka Rice on Treasure Hunt. Except not all of the houses are treasures. There's the live-in landlady from hell who won't abide free love or even self-love; the semi-detached whose definition extends to both its gutters and indoor plumbing; the one with no heating; several in a suburb far too posh, twee or net-curtain-twitching to feel remotely comfortable crawling back and forth from drunken and /or drug-addled late-night assignations.
[Top tip: unlike John's BAD MACHINERY which is emphatically all-ages, the responsible side of me - and I do have one! - would caution you that this may be for teens but not tweens.]
Susan, Daisy and Esther are already their own ideal unit but sometimes all that's on offer are four-bedroom houses. This means that you may have to poach popular people from other prospective households to live with you, but there is a much bleaker alternative:
"So what you're saying is, let's go fishing in the pool of isolated loners, whose friendlessness is the mark of how good they'd be to live with."
"Yes. Let's invite a nightmare into our lives."
All of this and more is explored by Allison then delivered direct to that part of your brain that craves ebullience by the magnificent Max Sarin. She will make the most of every opportunity to represent fanciful, figurative notions as actual occurrences, like the winged flight of available houses from a mobile phone's app.
"Come back, houses, come back!" screams Esther, clawing the air.
"The motherload has been compromised! We have to find Susan fast before they're all gone!"
Yes, there is a certain degree of melodrama both in the declarations and gesticulations, but that's what we relish in cartoon comedy: mountains for molehills, dug up with due diligence then thrown in our face with a precision that makes us smile with its smart. The great Will Eisner firmly believed in body language augmented for maximum empathy and communication, and he rarely worked in this burlesque genre for which it is most appropriate. Max Sarin is one of its masters.
