Patience by Daniel Clowes, book review: A masterful rainbow through time

A portrait of a struggling couple flips into a sprawling, ambitious, time travel murder-mystery

Clowes' vision of 2029 is a veritable rainbow of vice and iniquity

There is an audacity to Patience that you might not expect from a comic book storyteller entering his 32nd year of working in the medium. As both artist and writer, Daniel Clowes' signature style has built up a huge following across a series of graphic novels, and has even generated its own adjective – Clowesian – to describe the acerbic, melancholic humour that drips off each and every page.

Building on the science-fiction theme of 2011's The Death-Ray, Patience sees the author's standard mise-en-scène of suburban isolation turned on its head within 13 pages, as a portrait of a struggling couple flips into a sprawling, ambitious, time travel murder-mystery.

The initial premise – or at least the theme behind it – is powerful in its simplicity. Warping back 20 years to investigate the death of his partner (the eponymous heroine) Jack's adventure can be seen both as a meditation on the limits of love – how well can you ever really know someone? – and an expression of the power of it.

In the last third of the story in particular, Patience becomes as much Meatloaf as maudlin – you would do anything for love, and, yes, you would even do that.

Things become more complex when timelines converge, but Clowes admirably eschews most genre cliches – with a few knowing hat-tips – to focus on the message of the story.

The nature of the time travel device, for example, is never made clear, but the inherent absurdity of such a contraption is embraced, rather than obfuscated with metaphysics or pseudo-science. No flux capacitors here.

If at times the story buckles under the weight of its own conceptual complexity, there's a boldness, both to the pencilling and the dialogue, that more than makes up for it.

The vibrant colouring leaps off the page, particular in Clowes' vision of 2029 – a veritable rainbow of vice and iniquity. And the flamboyance with which he illustrates the various drug trips and nightmare visions that punctuate is a joy to behold. You cannot help but feel carried along by a true master of the form, a cartoonist working at the very height of his powers.

Almost 20 years on from Ghost World – the work, later made into a film, that first brought Clowes international recognition – Patience is a new high watermark for the author, but also for the medium as a whole.

It is not just his longest work, but his most affecting, and the powerful emotional punch of the closing pages is one that will stay with the reader for a long time.

Clowes is a singular voice, not just in comics but in American literature, and I hope Patience might be the project that finds him the larger audience he deserves.

Jonathan Cape, £16.99. Order at £14.99 inc. p&p from the Independent Bookshop