Leonard Cohen: On a Wire
By Philippe Girard
Translated by Helge Dascher and Karen Houle
Leonard Cohen’s music isn’t for everyone. I know Hallelujah, but my favorite version is Buckley and when I first heard that version I thought it was a really good cover of Rufus Wainwright’s song. I can’t say I’m a huge Cohead, but I’ve certainly enjoyed his music when someone points out I’m listening to it. This casual interest in the musician-poet caused me to stop and grab Leonard Cohen: On a Wire off a library display. Reading it, I find myself no better or worse due to that passing glance.
If you don’t know anything about Leonard Cohen, he’s had quite a life. This graphic novel biography flashes snapshots of stories he’s told before. The loss of his father and then dog. His early years studying around the world. The many tours his music has taken him on. All the way to living as a monk for over a decade and losing money enough to leave that life for the road once more. Knowing nothing about him makes this story a lot to take in, it contextualizes what little I do know and presents his life as a seemingly magical story with a deeply flawed main character who can never seem to do the right thing, regardless of his opportunities. The art is interesting and allows for a wide interpretation of characters that come and go, either in his life or in some way interacting with it.
The one issue I had with the art was that a lot of the women looked identical. Flipping through I can see some features that should set them apart from each other, yet every time a blond woman was introduced, I couldn’t tell if I was looking at a new character or one of the many who came before. Maybe Cohen had a type, but some of these were side characters who never had names. When I did recognize a character, it was like putting a cartoon to a name, no one stood as themselves from name alone, but it was interesting to see this art style interpreting names from album covers I’ve been listening to since high school.
While the individual stories are fun to read, the overall narrative is hard to track. My understanding is that most of these were drawn from anecdotes, so I can see why it swings so quickly from scene to scene. Maybe if there were more structure it would have been longer and spiraled into more of a project than it aspired to be. Maybe this is the perfect size anyways and I wouldn’t have enjoyed my brief afternoon with it if I had been set to read another hundred pages better narrating Cohen’s life. Still, last five to ten pages felt like an ending to a different story, a more fictional project that took liberties with the telling. I think my biggest hurdle is my lack of knowledge about his life and so when it ends the way it does, I am left wondering what came from a direct quote and what came from the author’s imagination. I don’t think my lack of knowledge is a fair excuse for not understanding, and ultimately I think this book requires you to accept what you don’t get.
On a Wire was cute, lovely even. To see these stories in comic form was more enjoyable than words alone, but maybe less than if the interviews they were pulled from had been stitched together into a documentary. In the end it felt more like a grandfather recounting his life to children who were only paying attention to the most interesting parts. Call me crazy, but I would have liked a little more boring history to fill in the gaps. In any case, picking it up at my local library was the best case scenario, and maybe that’s all it needed to be.