Cannon is the second graphic novel by Lye, a thirty-two-year-old Australian who lives in Montreal and makes art. Her first book “Stone fruits“, applied a similar visual style (characters with clear outlines, shading, soft landscapes done in gouache, stills from films) and similar themes of repressed feelings, strange romance and care. Both books, especially Cannon, are explorations of anger in the context of familial (chosen, biological) obligations. For Lai's characters, as for many of us, home is the place most resistant to real emotions. And leaving the past does not mean completely abandoning it. There is no clean exit in a relationship.
Mid-aughts, public high school in Lennoxville, east of Montreal. Two trashy blondes bully Cannon in the cafeteria, and Trish, who is as loud and uninhibited as Cannon gets, intervenes in the most awkward way possible. It's their meet-cute. They soon become best friends, and Trish is at Cannon's house every day, having dinner with Cannon and her mom. “I think Cannon is my kind of person,” Trish says in her intrigue. In their youth, Cannon and Trish fall in love, but never at the same time.
After school they move to Montreal, where everyone can afford to live independently. (It's still possible for chefs and writers in this city.) Their regular date is dinner and a movie—Australian horror films like “The Howling III: Marsupials,” whose gory scenes Lai recreates in red. (The book is mostly done in shades of gray.) On the couch, in the summer heat, their sticky bodies are inches apart even as their souls drift. Trish talks and discusses Cannon a lot. Later, she asks to spend more time together, but only in order to extract literary material from Cannon's life. Lai depicts their conversations as colliding speech bubbles. Trish's words erase Cannon's words as they slip off the page. Elsewhere, a recording of a meditation Cannon listens to while jogging plays a quick montage of her life. “Thoughts, after all, can be intrusive and disturbing,” a voice intones as she and her grandfather eat in silence, a vampire goes on a killing spree, and her colleagues panic in the restaurant. “Conscious breathing… inhaling… and exhaling…” I find these intruding speech bubbles to be chatterier and more effective at conveying failures of communication than voiceovers on screen or the ellipses and dashes of a traditional novel. Lai described comics as a form that “sits between prose and filmmaking.”
Model of containment (or repression) Cannon's mother lives alone and works as a teacher in a French-speaking home. kindergarten. Gung Gung, Cannon's grandfather, seems to manage to live on his own, with the help of Cannon and a part-time home helper. He is isolated, and for good reason. Flashbacks to his wife's funeral show him standing apart from the crowd and looking out the window. When Cannon's mom approaches him—”Baba,” she says, touching his shoulder—he turns into a red, superhuman ogre and screams, “Get lost!” in Cantonese. Another scene from long ago suggests that he was physically violent. Having suffered this all his life (according to the stories, Trish imagined him as a “thunder tyrant”), Cannon's mother cannot take care of him, even when he becomes an invalid, a “little nutty man.” Cannon must cook him pork, mushrooms and rice (why can't he turn on the rice cooker in advance?) and convince the assistant not to quit his job just because, in the assistant's words, “he's obnoxious and aggressive” and “does not speak English.” Cannon pleads, “Are you the one quitting?” but can’t seem to get angry at either the assistant or her mother. Cannon's unnamed irritation is frustrating to watch.
The addition of untranslated Chinese characters and Quebecois French is a clever move that adds to the overall feeling of misunderstanding. Cannon's second and third languages become a stumbling block for the reader and a visual shortcut for emotional distance. But Lai isn't interested in the gay immigrant plot twists that Trish hopes to erase from Cannon's life. What exactly happens between Cannon, her mom, and Gong Gong remains largely unspoken. So, when Trish begins to squeeze fiction out of reality, she reaches the breaking point of the narrative: “Something a little formulaic and sentimental with these family personalities,” as her mentor puts it. The built-in diasporic romance fails.
