‘On Desire, Happiness, and Love’
Neil Gaiman’s Endless Nights is a refreshing side note to the famous Sandman series. It follows God-like characters, called the endless, in a procession of 7 unrelated tales. The most enthralling of these tales is the second comic merely entitled Desire. In this comic Gaiman illustrates the role of desire in human experience by unveiling a tragic glimpse into the romance of two young people in pre-Roman Britain.
The principal character is a young girl named Kara, who is infatuated with a beautiful young boy named Danyal. It so happens that one day Danyal goes on a hunting trip in the woods while his father, the tribal chief, goes to negotiate with other bands in the area. The negotiations end with the murder of Danyal’s father.
When word reaches the town Kara decides to set out and bring the news to Danyal. She tracks his path through the woods but she loses direction. She soon finds herself standing in front of an androgynous character of sublime beauty who reveals ‘himself’ to be Desire. Desire shows Kara how to make Danyal love her.
Kara finds Danyal and delivers him the bad news. On the journey back to the village Danyal begins to profess his love for her, but she responds by denying him. His advances become clearer and more desperate as the journey continues, culminating in a proposal for marriage, which she eventually accepts. When they return to their village they live in happiness for a short time.
One day when Danyal is out hunting a group of strange men enter the town. They want to rape Kara and steal the village’s riches. They show Kara the head of her husband and laugh. But she pits the men against each other by twisting their desires for her, and has each one of them killed. The final page of the comic shows Kara’s portrait as she crumbles from youth into dust, and laments the terrible life she has led.
When writing on matters of love Neil Gaimen has the tendency to cause the reader to actually love his characters. He accomplishes this because he has an almost inhuman ability to give a multidimensional personality to a fictional character. Moreover, his characters are relatable and typically admirable. He, however, also has no problem with ruining the character’s lives using tragedy that can only be compared to ancient Greek myth.
The result is most often a work of stunning emotional genius and relative philosophical insight. The moral of this particular story is that the pursuit of ones desires is not necessarily a road to happiness. It reminds me of his work Dream Country (Sandman Volume 3) where he writes, “the price of getting what you want, is getting what you once wanted”.
The insight that Neil Gaiman lends to the human experience through the medium of comics is extremely valuable. If there were ever a comic book that justified the classification of comics as an art form it would be Endless Nights.