Review: Room For Love

There are authors who haven’t published much but who’ve definitely left a mark on their readers. Such is the case for me with Ilya (Ed Hillyer): I’ve read less than ten comics or books by him, but his talent at writing believable characters has stayed with me. So, you can imagine how happy I was to see the publication of an all-new book, Room For Love¹, last November.

A lot of Ilya’s work is gay-inclusive (or even plain gay). A gay strip was included in the fourth issue of Steve MacIsaac’s Shirtlifter,  and gay characters were among the large cast of his two The End of The Century Club graphic novels, appropriately published at the end of the previous century and titled Countdown and Time Warp (both highly recommended). In fact, one of the protagonists of Room For Love comes from those stories, as Ilya has explained in the series of posts he’s written for the new book.

Frank with a client

Frank is a young rent boy, who lives in the streets. He has no difficulty finding men ready to pay him for sex but he keeps his cards close to his chest. Pamela is a successful middle-aged romance writer who’s lost her will to write and is in the process of losing much of her interest in life. They meet quite by accident (I won’t tell you how), and Pamela finds herself offering a room to the homeless youth. An uneasy cohabitation ensues.

Frank and Pamela play a game of cat and mouse, though the identity of each is not as clear as one might think. Is one of them looking for love? Are both of them? Do they know what they’re looking for? In fact, Room For Love is not a love story, but a story about love, as is attested by the dialog about the various Greek words all translated by the word “love” (philia, eros…). Some friendship does develop between them, some sex also happens, which thankfully doesn’t answer any questions the reader has about the characters. The boy and the woman are believable human beings, and thus not easily reduced to soundbites.

Pamela and Germaine discuss her backlist

Talking of believable human beings, there are a few other characters in those stories, including Germaine, Pamela’s agent and best friend, who happens to be a lesbian. Most of the time. Germaine is a complicated character, who’s not on the forefront as the other two, but she’s as vividly portrayed as them.

Ilya has always stricken me with the vitality of both his dialog and his artwork and Room For Love is no exception. Colored in two colors (one for each characters’ sequences) and drawn in a sketchy, paired-down style that is a departure from his more detailed style, with his usual busy and varied panels replaced by an effective use of very regular layouts that will certainly be easier to read for casual comics readers, the art for this graphic novel is as unsentimental as the dialog or the character themselves.
Indeed, with such a set-up, the possibilities for tear-jerking effects are endless. But Ilya manages to avoid them all, while giving his characters their spaces — meaning that we don’t know everything about them we’d like to by the end of the book, much like in real life. Pamela is shown as more forthcoming than Frank (or “Cougar” as he tells her he’s named, when he still doesn’t trust her at all), obviously less prone to lying to him than he is to her. That being said, both characters lie to themselves about their hopes, fears and desires, and Ilya, here also, manages to give them some opportunities to know themselves better without contriving an hollywoodian happy ending.

An example of Ilya's narrative talents

Though one might expect a somber tone for such a story, there’s a lot of humor in the situations and the dialog. Ilya is very good at playing with words, at writing dialog that works on multiple levels. His characters also retain a form of distance from themselves that leads them to some welcome self-criticism, often through humor, and contributes to the non-sentimentality I was mentioning above.

Room For Love is another proof of Ilya’s talent as a writer and as an artist. I’m sorry to not see new works by him more often, but I’ll take what I can get. This graphic novel definitely deserves to reach a wide audience. Let’s start with a queer audience!