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'The Forgetting Room' by Nick Bantock

Bantock's Latest Has A Way With Words, Too

Sunday, January 25, 1998

By Sally Vallongo, Toledo Blade

	The Forgetting Room By Nick Bantock HarperCollins $22.00

In the early 1990s, Nick Bantock appropriated a child's book form to create a sophisticated interactive work for adults: ``Griffin & Sabine.'' It was the first of an epistolary trilogy that entranced readers with its romance and fey sophistication.

Otherwise serious adults reveled in extracting letters from envelopes, unfolding love notes and peeking at exotically stamped postal cards, all attached to the pages of his slim book, as they sought clues for his mysterious romance.

By the time Bantock concluded his puzzling love story series with ``Sabine's Notebook and The Golden Mean,'' some 2.2 million copies of the Chronicle Books release had been sold. Not only had the Vancouver author-artist added a gamelike element to reading, he had borrowed from picture books the use of illustrations to develop a story.

Ever since, Bantock has searched vainly for a worthy sequel. His true pop-up book, ``Egyptian Jukebox,'' was clever artifice - nothing more. ``The Venetian's Wife,'' a short story, was an unimpressive foray into literature.

Now, Bantock has changed publishers and stretched himself to produce his latest work. At 102 pages, ``The Forgetting Room'' reaches for literary resonance and largely succeeds. It even includes fragrant references to Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca and his complex notion of primal force, duende.

Still clinging to the journal as a means of character development, Bantock conjures players of enough substance to hold interest. He paints vivid pictures of locale, but with words. And he has built a story compelling enough that the illustrations he couldn't quite do away with are mere page-dressing rather than being intrinsic to the plot.

Through Armon Hurt, the major living character, we meet the other central person, his beloved but recently deceased grandfather, Rafael Hurtago. ``The Forgetting Room'' is Hurtago's studio in an old house he has bequeathed his grandson. The place, for Hurt, becomes cosmic commons, where he reaches for his grandfather and finds himself.

Careful writing mixes fantasy, personal history and precise description to conjure a memorable story. Bantock doesn't fail to deliver a game, though this one is far more subtle and ambiguous.

And the author's signature illustration style, subtle melding of color, texture, and line into intricate if undecipherable designs, means turning pages is a voyage into delicious color and detail.

The book will make for a good winter read, ideally along with a glass of golden sherry and a CD playing flamenco music.