Tower and Town, September 2021

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Flake by Matthew Dooley - A Graphic Novel

Consider this. There are four types of vehicle that play sound as they drive: police cars, fire engines, ambulances… and ice-cream vans. "It's so incongruous," says Matthew Dooley, author and illustrator of Flake, the book that won the 2020 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction, the first time a graphic novel has scooped (pun intended) the prestigious award.

At the heart of this wry, warm, affectionate book is ice cream - or rather, the men who purvey it. Shy Howard is happy with his lot, half-heartedly selling his wares while doing the crossword. Enter brash Tony, intent on expanding his ice-cream empire out from the fictional Dobbiston (loosely based on Dooley's home town of Ormskirk, Lancashire) and across the north-west. Who will enjoy the sweet taste of success?

The language of Flake is joyfully playful – who could resist a double 99 from an ice-cream van named Walt Whipman? – and critics have compared his work with that of Alan Bennett. Dooley bats off such comparisons, but said in a recent interview that he was drawn, Bennett-like, to "a mix of the absurd and the mundane". 

For absurdity, look no further than Jasper, who has worked in Dobbiston museum for the last 20 years – aside from a six-month stay in French prison for trying to convert continental road signs from metric to imperial. Or the Dobbiston Mountain Rescue Service (of which Jasper is chairman), which is struggling for cash – unsurprisingly, since the one local peak has recently been downgraded to a hill.

As to the mundane, the opening frames of chapter seven are a lesson in bathos: "Howard was Captain Cone. Captain Cone was Howard. Though he'd never been sure…what he was captain of. A ship? A rocket? Ice cream itself? Or just the captain of his own van? The truth was…it had been the first name he had thought of." 

The illustrations, meanwhile, are a delight: the slow dunking of a ‘soldier’ into a boiled egg; a seagull eating chips; the gradual whittling down of the same ice lolly before each new chapter; close-ups of all 18 holes of a crazy-golf course.

Whether you're an aficionado of graphic novels or a newcomer to the genre, Flake will make you laugh, wince, rejoice – and head straight for the freezer.

Ben Tarring