Slava is a dad, worker by day, painter by night. The announcement of the arrival of a little girl finally convinced him to stay at Nina’s side, the face that everyone is trying to keep alive. However, opportunities are becoming rare. For a long time, producing more than was reasonable would have earned a medal for the miners and mechanics who worked themselves to death. But the USSR is no more. In the capitalist world that has taken over, each contract is earned, knife between teeth. Until the situation improves, all staff are technically unemployed. For his part, Dimitri Lavrine has achieved his goal: he is richer than he has ever been. More isolated than ever, too, and confronted with a feeling of emptiness which takes over his life.
The characters before the story. This largely describes the creative approach of Pierre-Henri Gomont (Pereira claims, Malaterre, The brain leak). Glory is no exception to the rule. Before the context and the adventures, it is for the protagonists that the comic fan is passionate. In this third volume, everyone gains depth and ambivalence. Starting with the title character: is he truly an actor in everything around him? The young man with a bohemian appearance seems more of a spectator, overwhelmed by everything that is happening around him. But his role as narrator also places him in the position of one who analyzes the world, while he finds himself confronted with painful choices to make. Lavrine, too, leaves a form of Manichaeism to reveal another face and nourish reflections on the deep meaning of life. Nina, hardworking, courageous and altruistic, continues to be infinitely endearing and embodies a form of naivety in the face of the brutality of liberalism.
Through them, the upheavals of Russia are told. More secondary, Volodya is probably the most striking illustration of this. In a decade, the country has undergone a transformation that the West has digested in more than a century. From one day to the next, everything that punctuated the days of the tall, gray-haired man, all his certainties about the way of working, are undermined and shaken. In the happy mess that is post-communism under Boris Yeltsin, some people take the turn without difficulty and become richly rich. Others discover a new way of working to which they never manage to acclimatize. Without delving into history (or economics), the author manages to pertinently highlight the excesses of a totally unbridled market economy. But the words are never heavy or moralizing. Animating his boards like a play, Pierre-Henri Gomont hits the mark, with texts of great finesse. The comedy is omnipresent and the reader can laugh heartily until, without warning, emotion takes over. Enhanced with the appropriate dose of action and a few twiststhe reading is at once poignant, funny and carried out at a frenzied pace. All this makes Glory an unclassifiable work, a mixture of multiple genres and totally apart.
Concluding a series is never easy. With the final episode of his trilogy, Pierre-Henri Gomont puts a masterful end to his ambitious project.
Read the preview.
Read the chronicle of volume 1 (After the fall), the chronicle of volume 2 (The new Russians) and the interview with the author.
By D. Kebdani
