Toward the end Lévy incorporates a fable about a King for whom death comes, but who manages to negotiate a reprieve and yet is surprised to discover that death avoids all protections he subsequently puts in place. He ages the cast well, and invests them with individual personalities.Īround the halfway point the reality of the situation, if not the reasons for it, are obvious to all, and the plot shifts toward an inspection of what priorities are when death approaches rapidly. Frederik Peeters illustrates all this very skilfully in a matter of fact manner that matches the odd sterility of the script. The horrible truth for the cast is that whatever’s happening it’s beyond their control and they’re ageing far more rapidly than usual, every passing hour equivalent to two years of a normal human lifespan.

There’s a point at which Pierre Oscar Lévy has one of his characters run through the possible causes of what the people are experiencing, echoing the alternatives readers may be considering. A phone call is made to the police, but every subsequent phone call generates a message that the number isn’t in use. As the day passes parents notice their children have grown very quickly in a matter of hours, and when the corpse washes up on the shore some blame the man from Algeria. A number of other people then arrive at this remote shore area, a couple of family groups in cars, and others thereafter. He doesn’t stop to watch, but later sees that she appears to have died, possibly after hitting her head diving. The book begins as a man we later learn to be Algerian steps out of a cave to see a young woman swimming naked in the cove below. Is it an ecological fable? Is it a character study? Certainly the latter, as it appears to deal with humanity in microcosm, sharing out personality traits and concerns among the relatively few cast members. While the titular analogy is obvious, this isn’t a graphic novel that reveals its secrets, nor is any meaning very clear.

Sand Castle is a memorably creepy and disturbing meditation on the inevitability of death, which isn’t a topic that’s been widely explored in graphic novels.

Sandcastle levy