The Teller at the Tiller

The 4000-year-old Epic of Gilgamesh has burned through history like a fireball. It tells of two warriors who desecrate a sacred forest; seeking fame and glory, they instead cause catastrophe. The themes of this myth – hubris, masculinity, mortality, ecocide – have resonated across cultures and centuries. At once ancient and urgent, it still has so much to tell us. Now a writer, a musician and an artist have come together to create an extraordinary graphic novel that re-tells both the Epic itself and the astonishing story of its journey through time: from its birth in ancient Mesopotamia, through its long burial under desert sands and its re-discovery at the height of European empire, right up to our own precarious present. At the novel’s heart are two characters: the God-King Gilgamesh and George Smith, a working-class Victorian genius who pieced together the shattered fragments of the Epic, in an obsession that came to overwhelm him. As their twinned stories unfold, the fears, dreams and fates of George and Gilgamesh begin to interweave, with each man becoming the other’s guarantor of immortality . . . Epic in scope, visually astonishing and deeply moving, The Teller at the Tiller is a major new landmark in the graphic novel tradition.