Idris has found himself transplanted to a lonely Welsh town where his divorced mother has found a job as a housekeeper for a stern, cruel man. The village is sparsely populated – a ditzy lighthouse keeper, an oblivious shopkeeper and his philandering wife, and a crass dead girl in a graveyard make up the whole of Idris’ community.
Yes, a dead girl. And she’s not even the narrative focal point.
Fantagraphics
The Idris File is a strange book. Filled with Nazi plots, ghost girls, and a sort of sad British domesticity, it’s a hard book to quite define. There’s a feeling of grim, NC-17 Amblin Entertainment to it in that it’s essentially an adventure tale following a young boy entangled in a strange plot, and this is all shot through with an uneasy humor: even the gruesome has a bit of pointedly ho-hum slapstick to it.
Welsh himself, cartoonist Dix captures a sleepy, seaside village with a perfectionist’s eye – the empty streets and quaint buildings, but the characters that populate the book are absurdist and misshapen, as if their inner lives have made caricature of their faces. Idris is, on the surface, an exceedingly dull boy, but perhaps he’s only bored; even in the book’s final, climactic moments (there is a sinking Nazi submarine involved), he is gawking and slow. The lighthouse keeper, seemingly a dim-witted, mild pervert, barks buffoonishly whenever he stumbles into Idris’ story, but even at the height of hijinks it’s the lighthouse keeper whose secrets most chill the blood.
Fantagraphics
For all its quaint and quiet seaside vibes – for all of Idris’s bored wandering – The Idris File is a book about gruesome crimes and frozen führers, political plots and infidelity. What should be action-packed is presented with a sort of hilarious, bored malaise: even a haunting is presented as commonplace, unsurprising. This is the banality of horror: buried under the tiresome gray of a seaside nowhere.
For all its cruelties an gruesome imagery, The Idris File is not a difficult read. It moves quickly, the action unfolds unexpectedly, and the reader is drawn along because each surprise is so comically outsized. It feels like a small book; it is not.
This is a boy’s adventure story for absurdists, and it’s a sodden sort of delight.
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