The Sandman, Volume 6, Fables and Reflections

The Sandman, Volume 6, Fables and Reflections-Neil Gaiman

How I found this book: At Borders in Long Beach, where they also had Sandman dolls…I was tempted.

Setting: Circa 1993

Main Characters:

Dream/Morpheus: The personification of dreams, and one of the Endless, he plays different roles throughout the stores.

Plot: This volume, like some of the other Sandman volumes, is much more a collection of short comic stories, and I will highlight each of them in the Themes section.

Themes:

Fear of Falling: A young director is putting on the first performance of the play he has just written, and is worried about both success and failure. Morpheus arrives to set his mine at ease about taking such a big leap of faith. This is one of several minor stories depicting Dream in his guise as storyteller and friend to all of those who create dreams.

Three Septembers and a January: Dream and his younger sister Despair get into a bet concerning Joshua Abraham Norton, the so called “Emperor of the United States”, (a real, life character in San Francisco in the 19th century.) Their bet explains why Norton was the way he was and his life, and it is one of the few stories that shows the Endless actively involving themselves in the lives of mortals, something Dream usually only does sparingly. This also shows where some of the seeds of Desire’s current snit with it’s big brother come from.

Thermidor: Almost like a darker A Tale of Two Cities, Lady Johanna Constantine, (I’m suspecting the ancestress or relation of the current John in the DC Universe), is asked by Morpheus to run an errand that could prove dangerous. She is being sent into the heart of the aftermath of the French Revolution to find of all things a relic that the Revolution members would rather see forgotten in this so called “Age of Reason”. Yet even Robespierre can’t prevent the truth of the old stories, and that you can’t destroy what has come before just to suit your political desires. This story is important as it also introduces us to Orpheus, the son of Morpheus, and sets up what will be one of the major later story arcs in The Kindly Ones.

The Hunt: Some stories live on and on in cultures, as any good dream does and this is a fairy tale of a young werewolf who falls in love with a beautiful princess, and decides to find her, and finds himself instead.

August: Dreams can build empires, or to my enduring despair, they can destroy empires as well. We all know the story of Octavian “Augustus” Caesar’s rise to power in ancient Rome, and how he became Rome’s ‘princeps’ or First Man, (more the idea of ‘first among equals’.) This story tells us the secret behind the drive of this rather sickly, though politically brilliant man, (horrible general though.) After being raped by his great-uncle, Julius, Augustus works to subvert his now hated uncle’s plan to make Rome a great empire, and using the Syballine scrolls decides to take Rome down a path that his uncle had groomed him not to take, thanks to the help of Morpheus in a dream.


Every book sucks somewhere: As a Roman historian, I had a lot of historical issue with the Augustus story, (especially in the idea of Caesar raping his great-nephew, as no Roman who was grooming someone to be a leader would do something like that. That’s what slaves and prostitutes were for! But the storyteller in me loves the idea of perhaps Rome taking a different path….and oooohhh, that would have been fun. At least for me, the Roman historian, it would have been. Perhaps not so much for Gibbon, who wrote the most famous, if not completely accurate, book on the fall of the Roman empire.

What did I like: I loved the story regarding Orpheus and Johanna Constantine. It's an interesting preomise, and really gets to a serious point that I feel Gaiman is trying to make, and one I agree with myself.

How would I rate this wormy book: Like many of the other Sandman graphic novels, I would rate this as a FAT WORM. It sets up Dream as what he is, the Endless in charge of our myths, fables, and insights into ourselves.