Wuthering Heights
Wuthering Heights, By Emily Bronte, Adapted by Sean M Wilson & John M Burns, Classical Comics
BAD KARAOKE versions of Kate Bush’s first hit single or half-remembered misty grey-toned images of Laurence Olivier, Merle Oberon and David Niven battling the tawdry happenstance that is their not-quite ménage a trios in the 1939 MGM film classic are what come to mind with most people when they consider Wuthering Heights.
Still, it surely remains one of the most well-known titles given to a novel; and while sales continue to assure the book has remained in print for nearly three hundred years now, it’s possibly one read more devoutly by the fairer sex than great hulking brutes like me.
Thus, even in my vintage - high-browed pretentious sort that I am - I’ve never read the classic in its original form; but I have completed a two-day sitting of its original text in graphic novel form, and realise it’s both deeper in its surface psychological trauma, more harrowing in its open physical abuse of characters towards each other, and more convoluted as well as being complex in the actual familial relationships between them, and concludes in a manner I had not suspected that demands romance should have its happy endings.
For all this, I’m damned sure Heathcliff is meant to be Hareton Earnshaw’s illegitimate child and the reason other family members and even household staff - aware but never expressing it vocally – do their best to keep him and Cathy becoming close.
But in love they are, except Cathy turns from a wild-child into a prissy lady of the manor type by marrying Edgar Linton, and so Heathcliff leaves to return years later with money gained mysteriously and the intention of marrying Linton’s sister in revenge. It’s tragedy writ bold, with melodrama ready and willing to slap you hard across the face for the slightest insult or misperceived grievance.
All in all, a tale of things unspoken, misread situations allowed to turn even worse with bitter recourses taken in turn by those who suffer. It’s not a nice story at all. The likes of modern TV series like Shameless and Eastenders may have those who complain but at least there’s a light-hearted moment or two in shows of that nature; Wuthering Heights is a tale of people moved liked chess pieces until they are crowned in despair. It’s compellingly moving regardless.
Without Classical Comics versions I very much doubt I’d have got round to reading the book, but here we have it paced to emphasise its graphic drama in an adaptation by Sean M Wilson, and so charismatically delineated by John M Burn – who offers more subtle facial expressions in a hundred and more pages than a dozen other fine talented artists will yet achieve in their own award-winning lifetimes; his works masterful without any grandstanding visual money shots required. It is total sequential storytelling, not just old school, not just British flavoured through and through; just genuinely admirable and a delight, even when the scenes being depicted are rarely pleasant ones where human beings show any kindness towards each other.
But, in the end, that is what happens; love finds its way through the extended family relationships of those main protagonists. Having not recalled this aspect (is it even ignored in the classic film version?) it actually feels like some modern Hollywood add-on where a happy ending is required to pacify demographics, and might have blighted my appreciation of the book should not the narrator, Mr Lockwood, have some concluding pages where he lays the story to rest with a spooky eeriness as he stands before the graves of the main protagonists.
Buy, read and engross yourself in this fine adaptation.
Sponsored by Target Media.
