Goodbye, Asterix

The Falling Sky is not just bad, it’s a complete waste of time. It’s Uderzo’s ninth solitary outing since Goscinny died in 1977 (though Asterix in Belgium appeared two years later), and it’s confirmation that the downslide that began with The Great Divide has finally hit rock-bottom.

It’s interesting to analyse why, since Uderzo tries all the time-tested devices — puns, gags, running jokes, community caricatures, national stereotypes — that make the Asterix stories as rich a treat for adults as the drawings and the slapstick humour do for younger readers.

The storyline, thin as it is, centres around the arrival of aliens from a distant star called Tadsilweny (acronym for Walt Disney). The ambassador, Toon, is in the little village we know so well to warn the villagers we know so well of ‘‘a real and present danger’’: Nagma. Rearrange the letters and it spells manga, the Japanese imports giving indigenous Franco-Belgian comics a run for their money.

So far so good. This is known territory for Uderzo, a set foreign target prime for lampooning. But then the artist decides to get political. So, in addition to a Schwarzenegger clone who thrives on hot dogs (which elicits a ‘yuk’ from Asterix), Uderzo throws in a great sage called Hubs, a mean space-invader in search of a ‘‘deadly weapon’’, strange missiles that threaten to set the entire village on fire and a face-off between ‘‘cyberats’’ and ‘‘superclones’’.

Predictably, the story gets lost somewhere in the overwhelming political innuendo. Though Anthea Bell and Derek Hockridge do a valiant job of the translation — given their record, no less could be expected — Uderzo simply does not possess the rapier-sharp wit and the narrative sense of his late partner. He loses his reader somewhere around page 25; the bulk of the remaining 22 pages is made up of unnecessarily large panels, a clear indicator that ideas are in short supply.

Call it wishful thinking if you will, but this is said to be the last Asterix album. Aficionados on the worldwide web have started pointing out the startling similarity between the covers of Asterix the Gaul, the first, and the latest volume. And, of course, there’s the falling sky itself — if they’ve conquered that final frontier, another cross-continental adventure will be a rather tame follow-up.

That is not to say, however, that we will miss all the wordplay, the revisionist allusions and the satire Goscinny and Uderzo’s creations introduced us to. Would Diagon Alley or Dumbledore’s Pensieve have been as much of a hit if Asterix hadn’t taught us to look for puns? Would Lagaan’s co-opting of the googly been as much of a success if we hadn’t seen how Getafix put the tea in Britain?

By Toutatis, no!