Five Wounds: Review at 'Transnational Literature'

The latest issue of the academic e-journal Transnational Literature includes a review of Five Wounds, written by Aliese Millington. An extract is below: Think back to your first trip with Alice tumbling down the rabbit hole, or how it felt to enter the Matrix after Neo takes the red pill. Five Wounds: An Illuminated Novel takes you down a similarly twisting path and leaves you pondering the journey well afterwards. Pooling influences trans-national, trans-cultural, trans-temporal and transart form, authors Jonathan Walker and Dan Hallett spin the story of ‘five wounded orphans [who] must face their traumatic origins’ (blurb). These tales are told through the fascinating combination of Walker’s proclamatory prose, Hallett’s Goya and comic-book influenced illustrations, a Bible-like layout and handwritten notations. Described as ‘cruel and arbitrary’ (blurb) by the authors, the world of Five Wounds looks and feels at once early renaissance, modern and apocalyptic. I am particularly pleased to see a review in a journal on transnational literature, since many of the sources for Five Wounds are Italian: notably, Italo Calvino and Tintoretto. Below is a selection of transnational sources taken from a detail of an illustration (by Dan Hallett) on p. 100 of the novel.