Laughter in the Library

When, on what felt like my 800th lockdown circuit of the park, I came across a fellow-walker trying his damndest to stop his dog barking at something unseen among the trees and get it on the move again, suddenly the name Dogmatix popped into my mind, remembered from Anthea Bell’s marvellous English translations of the Asterix comic-strip stories written by René Goscinny and illustrated by Albert Uderzo.

I left the dog and his master to it, and as I pushed on round my three miles, to exercise my brain I started thinking up names ending in ‘ix’ to add to those which Ms Bell had fashioned as Anglo-Saxon matches for Goscinny’s Gallic originals. It was a welcome mental workout, and good fun, a game of the kind they play on radio’s dottiest comedy, I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue. New names kept coming, one every few paces. Predictably, Prefix and Suffix came first; then feline Catatonix, flamboyant Histrionix, thespian manqué Amateur-dramatix. And on it went until Pandemix stole in and I put a stop to the game. For those of us – can there be many? – who haven’t discovered Asterix for ourselves or through our children, let me introduce him and his world. The year is 50 BC. Gaul has been entirely overrun by the Romans except for one village at the top left of the country, holding out even though encircled by the fortified camps of Laudanum, Compendium, Totorum and Aquarium. Diminutive, bulbous-nosed Asterix, sporting a Mercury-winged helmet and a moustache like two haystacks (haystax, even), doesn’t look cut from the cloth of heroes. He is, however, possessed of superhuman strength thanks to regular swigs of a magic potion brewed from mistletoe and worse by the resident druid Getafix. Asterix’s bosom friend and companion-in-arms is Obelix, a giant who by trade is – wonderfully inspired invention, this – a menhir delivery man. Good-natured, simple-minded and seriously obese, Obelix is also possessed of impossible strength, though unlike Asterix and everyone else, he never needs to top it up with potion since he ingested a lifetime’s supply when as a baby he fell into the druid’s vat. What Obelix does need, however, is to consume at least one boar a day. He’s the owner of Dogmatix, a sensitive little terrier who howls in empathetic anguish every time a tree is felled. Then there’s Vitalstatistix, the village chief who has no fears other than that the sky will fall on him tomorrow, which of course won’t happen since, as everyone knows, tomorrow never comes. Last but – to the detriment of everyone’s eardrums – not least, there’s Cacofonix the bard, a self-proclaimed genius who’s universally loved and admired so long as he doesn’t speak and especially doesn’t sing. Goscinny’s inspiration for Asterix was Vercingetorix, chief of the Arverni tribe, who, towards the end of Julius Caesar’s Gallic Wars, united what remained of Gaul’s tribes in an uprising against the Roman occupiers. In 52 BC, under Vercingetorix’s leadership, the Gauls won a famous victory at Gergovia, a long way from Asterix’s Brittany – it’s near today’s Clermont-Ferrand – but shortly after they were defeated at the Battle of Alesia, in Burgundy. To safeguard the lives of his surviving troops, Vercingetorix gave himself up and was carted off to Rome where five years later he was publicly executed. His surrender to Julius Caesar was depicted by the late nineteenth-century artist Lionel Royer. The moustache he’s given Vercingetorix, a curving auburn flourish, suggests to me not so much a Gaul as a Royal Air Force wing commander; nor do his fine-boned and chiselled features make him look like the native of Auvergne that he was. I should know. The faces of my Auvergnat great-uncles and second cousins were scarcely models of refinement; and, like ninetynine per cent of adult males in the southern parts of France, their moustaches were as black and uncurated as a house-painter’s brush. As soon as the pandemic eased enough to let my town’s library re-open, I made my way to its children’s section, where over thirty titles in the Asterix series are shelved. I skimmed the pages inside whichever of Uderzo’s lively covers appealed most. To reset the scene, I looked particularly at the first title in the series, Asterix the Gaul (1961). Then I proceeded to no. 8, Asterix in Britain (1966), and took it out on loan. I was intrigued to see what Goscinny had made of the goings-on among the rosbifs of Albion. The plot didn’t matter too much: Asterix and Co. bring a vat of the magic potion across the Channel to assist chief Mykingdomforanos and his fighters in the last village still resisting the Romans. Battle ensues, but the Romans – Stratocumulus, Claudius Detritus, Encyclopaedia Britannicus et al. – fail to get hold of the potion. A great victory for the village, but frankly it’s surprising the Brits can prevail in any battle, let alone this one, given their custom of disengaging from hostilities at five o’clock sharp to drink hot water with a spot of milk. Nor will they countenance fighting at weekends, when they like to gather in The Jolly Boar and The Jug and Amphora for warm beer and chat punctuated by ‘old fruit’, ‘old chap’, ‘jolly good show’, ‘I say’ and other expressions beyond any Gaul’s understanding. I’d expected there to be a gentlemanly game of cricket at some point; instead, we get a rugby match of unspeakable ferocity, the teams cheered on by the crowd’s ‘Hipiphurrax! Hipiphurrax!’ I finished Asterix in Britain musing on what Goscinny and Uderzo would have concocted had they produced a mirror story of the Brits in Gaul, Mykingdomforanos in Brittany, say. It would surely have been larded with clichés about the French, who’d be off to war in Citroën 2CVs, wearing berets, chewing garlic, smoking Gauloises and necking vin rouge, accompanied by wives and mistresses and chihuahuas in body-warmers. Battle would have been suspended on the stroke of midday for two-hour lunches of frogs’ legs and snails. And someone somewhere would have had an aunt with a plume . . . Yet, despite the fun and fantasy, I couldn’t rid my thoughts of Pandemix, that grisly interloper who set me thinking about the backcloth to Asterix. Goscinny’s idea for the series germinated in the 1950s, when the memory of the Second World War was still very raw and painful in France. Goscinny must have had in mind the enemy occupation of his country as he set about creating the Gaul of Asterix. For Caesar’s Rome, read Nazi Germany; for Asterix and his fellow fighters, General de Gaulle, the Free French and the Resistance . . . And then, what about today? The pandemic, Ukraine? Does either have comic potential? Perhaps, when a new Goscinny and a new Uderzo arrive on the scene sometime in the future, the answer will be yes. But enough of dark thoughts! Should any be lingering when I next visit the library, they’ll evaporate the moment I turn to the first page of whichever of those large-format white-covered Asterix titles I next pull off the shelf. And if, rather than taking it home, I decide to settle down and read it straight through there and then, I’ll be sure to stifle my laughter. Even in the relaxed atmosphere of libraries today, it wouldn’t do to have hysterix.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 77 © Martin Sorrell 2023