Peter & Max: A Fables Novel
By Bill Willingham with illustrations by Steve Leialoha
DC Vertigo 400pgs $22.99

I will try to address the questions that everyone asks themselves when they think about buying this book:

• Is this a good place to start if you’ve never read Fables?
• Does Bill Willingham have the chops to sustain a large novel?
• As a Fables fan, is it a must-read?
• Would the story have been better suited as a graphic novel?

And my answers are No, No, Yes and Yes.

Bottom line: Fables is a love it or hate it book and I love both Fables and its companion monthly Jack of Fables.  They are the first comics I read every month without fail.

After eight years, I still get excited for every issue.  Those that dislike Fables (at least the people I’ve spoken to) blame the tone and the writing; they are unable to suspend their disbelief long enough to enjoy the elaborate plots and multitude of characters.

Regarding the novel itself; the first twenty-odd pages of Peter and Max are quite successful; Bill Willingham explains the nature of the Fable worlds and how they affect our mundane (Mundy) world.  I sat back smugly and thought that every Fables nay-sayer should be reading these pages and getting the gist of the series.

But then things go down-hill rather quickly.  Willingham writes the novel in the too-clever-by-half fairy-tale style used rather successfully (depending on whom you ask) by Neil Gaiman. Unfortunately for Willingham his prose style comes off oft-times coy and at times annoying.

Throughout the course of this 400 plus page novel, Willingham juggles three narrative threads.  The framing device concerns Peter Piper in today’s world heading out for a show-down with his long-estranged and violently dangerous older brother Max.  This story is inter-cut with the two separate flash-back stories of Peter Piper and his older brother Max in the homelands and how they cope with the tragedies of war and invasion by the armies of the Adversary.

Willingham handles the present day tale with excitement, suspense and tantalizing hints of tales to come in the current Fables Universe.

However, It is with the two back-stories where the novel goes horribly wrong.  Am I being a little dramatic here? No.  The two most crucial scenes in the book—the dark change to Max’s psyche and then much later on, a reunion of two lovers are so mishandled they disrupt the entire novel.

In each case, I found myself standing on the edges of the anti-Fables camp.  My disbelief could not be suspended; both of these sequences are major plot points and they are the keys to the success or failure of the entire plot.

The reader gets the feeling that Bill Willingham knows nothing about how teen-agers speak or feel. The budding love story between Peter Piper and Bo Peep (yes, that Bo Peep) seems as though it was written by a man who never had a school boy crush.  Later on, there is an ill-devised “meet cute” that sinks the entire plot-line for good.

Even a rather exciting conclusion does not make amends for these narrative sins.

Don’t get me wrong: A lot of the novel is quite good; the tale of Max as the Pied Piper of Hamelin reminds us of why we love Fables.

In fact—after the awful start, most of Max’s story-line is quite engaging; but I had to force myself to mentally dismiss or at least over-look the ill-conceived beginning.

Peter’s back-story is something else all together.  Willingham works over-time to give the Fables “Peter” his Fables due and it comes off as hackneyed and silly.

One of the great conceits of Jack of Fables is that the book’s title character embodies every single “Jack” that appears in fairy-tales—Bean-stalk, Giant Killer, Frost, O’ Lantern, B. Nimble, & Jill etc.  In the context of the comic it makes complete sense—he is the Jack of the Tales.

Willingham tries to do the same with Peter.  But none of the Peter tales (save one) are worthwhile and as a reader, we can feel the presence of the author as he goes out of his way to manipulate the plot just to add another nursery rhyme to Peter’s burgeoning resume.

It all comes down to Willingham’s lack of craft as a prose writer.  But, it is very possible this could have worked effectively as a graphic novel.  Think for a moment of the most crucial moment in the run of Fables where we learn the true identity of the Adversary and over the course of five pages he re-caps his rise to power.

Willingham and his artist pull off this improbable tale because they knows their craft; the words told us part and the pictures supported those words. And it works–we buy into it.

But imagine those same scenes fleshed out in novel form; that huge improbable tale would have crashed under its own weight.  Peter and Max crashes almost every time it has the opportunity to soar.  It is too bad; Willingham is a terrific storyteller, but the prose novel is most definitely not the venue for his stories.

Thanks for listening; do you disagree?  Let me hear ya!