The object already fascinates. Drawing of Bertrand Gatignol plays with the format of his characters, between giants and dwarf-humans, caught in the web of parallel stories of which Hubert weaves the web and whose narrative system he complicates with long introductory chapters, while the following plates involve the reader in a cozy atmosphere of black lace and velvet, sometimes adorned with gold reflections. We are in a grimoire with its cryptic formulas and oracular sentences but also with its situations permeated with the fantastic.
The plot is suffocating mainly because its narrator is a recluse, today locked in a room of a castle of which, however, when she was the regent of the kingdom when the Founder was at war, she was at the height of her power. In his castle, as in the allegory of the cave of Socrates, the representation of the world of the First Born is essentially ideal and bookish. As is the case with every child emerging from adolescence.
In the illusion of a difference built in a permanent lack of assurance, in the hope of an ambition free from any contingency and above all a feeling of equality and respect between people: man and woman, nobles and peasants , giants and humans … But alas, the walls of conformism and contempt are thicker and more formidable than those of the castle. The cannibal, visceral, ancestral impulse of those around him fades with difficulty as it is so difficult to fight against his nature.
Through his succession of close-ups, Gatignol further underlines the feeling of suffocation experienced by the First Born and leaves the reader exhausted at the end of the volume as at the end of a long battle, admittedly unscathed and content, but still impressed by strong images that will accompany it for a long time to come.
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Les Ogres-Dieux T. 4: First born – By Hubert and Bertrand Gatignol – Soleil / Métamorphose
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