The Mysteries
/“‘In our world,’ said Eustace, ‘a star is a huge ball of flaming gas.’
’Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is but only what it is made of.’”
I feel like the publication of a new book by Bill Watterson, whose “Calvin and Hobbes” ended its run twenty-nine years ago and who has remained almost entirely quiet since, should be more of an event than the release of The Mysteries has proven. But then, given the book’s title and most especially its subject matter, maybe that’s appropriate. Call it a mystery, but not one of the Mysteries.
The story is simple enough. This blog post will probably end up several times longer than the entire book. The Mysteries introduces the reader to a medieval-ish world of castles and half-timber towns in which the people and their king are bounded by dark forest. The forest is the domain of the Mysteries, whom no one has ever seen but everyone knows have terrible powers. At first the people strive not to understand but to protect themselves from the Mysteries, putting huge efforts into building walls and chronicling the long history of their fears in tales and art.
Then one day the king decides to strike back against the Mysteries, dispatching knights into the forest on a quest to capture and bring back a Mystery. After a long stretch of futile searching, one knight succeeds, returning with an iron box chained to a cart.
At last, a Mystery is revealed—and the people discover that there’s not, apparently, very much to them. Their fearful powers turn out to be “mundane.” And capturing one Mystery opens the way to capturing others, to the point that the people not only lose their fear of the Mysteries but come to find them boring. One clever illustration shows a medieval newspaper stall full of headlines like “YAWN.”
Then, the Mysteries understood and no longer feared or the object of much attention at all, the people demolish their walls, cut down the forest, and overspread the land. They mock the old paintings inspired by the Mysteries. They now live in a world of jet aircraft and skyscrapers and the king no longer appears on the balcony of his castle but on TV or behind the wheel of a car on a busy freeway, drinking a Big Gulp. At last, the narrator tells us, they control everything.
Or do they? The sky turns strange colors and, ominously, “things” start “disappearing.” The king assures them that this is normal, wizards study the phenomena, and life continues apace. Then, “too late,” the people realize that they’re in trouble. An indifferent universe wheels on.
In the final pages the viewpoint of the illustrations pulls back farther and farther from the people and their conquered land, into space, beyond the solar system and the Milky Way. “The Mysteries,” the story concludes, “lived happily ever after.”
One notable aspect of The Mysteries is that although Watterson wrote the story, it is illustrated by caricaturist John Kascht. Watterson and Kascht worked on the pictures in close collaboration for several years, experimenting with and abandoning many styles before arriving at an atmospheric, unsettlingly dreamlike aesthetic combining clay figures, cardboard scenery, and painted backdrops. The effect is powerfully eerie, especially as the pace of the story accelerates and the fairytale world at the beginning of the book gives way to one that resembles, disconcertingly, our own.
If the pictures are murky, moody, and ambiguous, often more allusive than concrete, so is the story. This, according to Watterson, is by design. I’m not typically one for deliberate ambiguity, but it works brilliantly here. This “fable for grownups,” as the publisher describes it, achieves a timelessness through its strangely specific soft-focus art and a broad applicability through its theme.
And what is that? The most obvious and easy referent to the consequences the people face in the book’s closing pages is climate change, whether anthropogenic or not. But The Mysteries is not an allegory but a fable. To narrow its message, if it has one, to a policy issue is to cheapen and limit it.
The core theme of The Mysteries is disenchantment. Since the Scientific Revolution uncovered the wheels and levers of the universe and the Enlightenment insisted that the wheels and levers were all there is, was, or ever will be, the mysteries of our own world have retreated further and further from our imaginations and the place we once gave them in our daily lives. The powers that once kept people within their walled towns have been banished—or rather seized and repurposed, put to work for the people’s desires. Fear or, to put it more positively, awe of the world has given place to self-assured technical mastery. We control everything.
Or do we?
The Mysteries is probably not what anyone anticipating the return of Bill Watterson would have expected. I was certainly surprised, but pleasantly. As befits the creator of “Calvin and Hobbes,” a work that prized imagination above all else, The Mysteries treads lightly but surefootedly across deep ideas, and powerfully suggests that whatever Mysteries once lived in the forest, we have not sufficiently understood them to warrant our boredom, apathy, and self-indulgence, and we certainly are not free of them. We are, in fact, in graver danger through our indifference to the Mysteries than we ever were when we feared them.
