Illustrator Albert Uderzo drew me in to Asterix's world with deftness and care
Asterix has been part of our lives for nearly 60 years, and of mine for nearly 50. I still remember my immediate assent to René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo’s world: it seemed right and fine that a Gaulish village should still hold out against the Roman invader, that combat should be determined by punch-ups in which no one is killed, that a shrewd, plucky and resourceful warrior should be best friends with a big lunk about three times his size. It also made sense that the chief of the village (never named, just “the village”) should be a henpecked figure of fun (albeit as brave as anyone when in a tight corner) and that the druid should be a venerable, white-bearded figure whose wisdom derived, in great part, from a delicious sense of the absurd.
The magic potion that gave the villagers the superhuman strength to withstand the oppressor made sense, too, especially to a child; children are always conscious of how weak they are and a magic potion would turn the tables neatly. I didn’t understand the superb joke behind the druid’s name, Getafix (a stroke of audacious genius by one of the book’s translators, Anthea Bell) for many years, but I did spend the odd summer day bunging leaves from the more interesting plants in the garden into a pan in an attempt to make the magic potion.
What drew me in was Uderzo’s visual style. I loved Tintin, the other half of the comic dyad from my childhood, and I loved Hergé’s clean style, the ligne claire of his pen, but Asterix was drawn as caricature: the big noses, the huge bellies, often being prodded by sausage-like fingers. (Not everyone was drawn like that: Geriatrix’s much younger – and I don’t think ever named – wife was a bombshell, and I fell badly in love with Panacea, who also besotted Obelix in Asterix the Legionary. I am not sure my ideas of romantic love have evolved much since then.)But what I particularly liked was the way Uderzo’s style progressed. The panels of Asterix the Gaul felt rudimentary compared to the later works and by the time Asterix and Cleopatra, the sixth book to be published, came out, you finally felt that this was what they ought to look like. It was an important lesson for a child to learn: that you could get better at what you did over time. Each book seemed to have its own palette and perhaps Uderzo’s best work is in Asterix in Spain. When I first came across the lines “come in under the shadow of this red rock” in The Waste Land, I was immediately transported to the sombre ochre tints of Uderzo’s parched Iberian landscape.
Perhaps the most popular of the Asterix books in this country, though, is Asterix in Britain. How could it not be? This was published out of sync with the French running order, as an understandable enticement to the British readership. Every nationality that Asterix encounters is gently satirised (apart from the Germans: they’re not treated gently at all. I’ll get back to this). But the British are satirised with an affection that borders on love: the worst of the digs are about our appalling cuisine (everything is boiled, and served with mint sauce, and the beer is warm), but everything points to the Gauls’ and the Britons’ closeness. They have the same social structure, even down to having one village still holding out against the Romans; the crucial and extremely generous difference being that the Britons do not have a magic potion to help them fight. Instead they have tea, introduced to them by Getafix, via Asterix, which gives them so much of a psychological boost that it may as well have been the magic potion. I reread this book in the light of the 2016 referendum result and despaired, almost to the point of tears, that such a respectful portrayal of this country was not reciprocated. There are those – Mary Beard among them – who say that the satire in the original French is rather more pointed. I’m not so sure.
My take on the Asterix series, at least during its golden age, when Goscinny was still alive to write the scripts, is that it’s a fantasy on French resistance during occupation by Nazi Germany. This is why the Germans are treated so unsympathetically in Asterix and the Goths, and why quite a few of the books turn on questions of loyalty and treachery. But one doesn’t want to over-intellectualise. Let us salute Uderzo for visualising a world for us. Look at the deftness and care he takes over the oaks, bluebells, mushrooms and dolmens of the forest surrounding the village on one side, the foaming sea on the other, and the great good cheer of the indomitable villagers themselves.
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