Time for Lights Out, in which Raymond Briggs meditates on old age and death, is something of a palimpsest and not only because it has the feeling of a sketchbook, complete with spectral rubbings out. The past will keep poking through. When, for instance, he draws a “buggering bunion” that has developed on his foot, you can’t help but think of Fungus the Bogeyman and his taste for corns and ear wax.
Equally, when he remembers how his wife, Jean, asked him if she was going to die (she died from leukaemia in 1973, when she was just 43), you picture immediately Hilda Bloggs in When the Wind Blows, her hair falling out as she succumbs to the effects of radiation. And then, of course, there are his parents, Ethel and Ernest, whose story he told in a bestselling biography of 1998. They are everywhere here, just as they’re everywhere in his life, even now. Briggs still uses their old breadboard and knife and in his book he includes a sketch of both that is so serenely exquisite that it might as well be by Morandi.
Oh, but it’s a disorienting and plangent thing to read a book like this by Briggs. If you grew up with Father Christmas and Gentleman Jim, as I did, he will always have been a bit of a self-styled old git in your mind’s eye (therein lay some of the pleasure of his books for a child: the fact that they were neither easy nor nice). All the same, it is painful to register the indignity and fear that border these pages, like the black band on a Victorian mourning card.
Briggs is predictably wry about such things as his deafness and the way that, these days, his eyebrows grow faster than a beanstalk. But he won’t even try to make a joke of the anxiety, the dark thoughts, the invisibility and the growing forgetfulness that attend him now. They are, after all, the opposite of funny, though I was glad to see him reproduce a fan letter from a little girl that I saw in his loo when I interviewed him many years ago: “Michelle keeps on saying you’re dead,” it reads.
And then there is the past, the way the years concertina. What is it about old age – he is now 85 – that has a man thinking of his childhood when so much has happened since? Again, he traces the stories: here are his maiden aunts, who were so kind to him; here is his father, who kept a box of Rennies by his bed. You sense his weariness. Time for Lights Out is far heavier on words than on pictures; where once there would have been a cartoon strip, there are now little half-poems, sometimes even photographs. Thanks to this, it can feel effortful.
But there is a certain clemency here, too: a self-forgiveness. Above a quotation from DH Lawrence about how hard it is to die – “Be careful, then, and be gentle about death” – Briggs has drawn two doors on a landing, one closed and the other slightly ajar. Over the second, there falls a shadow: a beloved genius of storytelling and illustration, his hand not quite on its handle, but very close.
• Time for Lights Out by Raymond Briggs is published by Jonathan Cape (£18.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 020-3176 3837. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
