Books are important to me, they are a guaranteed avenue of pleasure. However the first book I want to write about, is not a book at all – it’s a ‘graphic novel’; what most people think of as just a posh comic.

Graphic novels have come up in the world. They now have their own section in Waterstones book shops. If there is one graphic novel that will convince you of their artistic relevance it’s ‘Maus’. This is a personal history of Vladek Spiegelman a Jewish survivor of Hitler’s Europe, as told by his cartoonist son Art Spiegelman.

Maus volume 1 opens with a quote from Adolf Hitler ” The Jews are undoubtedly a race, but they are not human”. This one quote goes a long way to explaining how the holocaust could have happened in a civilised country.

Art Spiegelman depicts the Nazis as cats, and the Jews as mice, and tells us how his father survived in 1930’s Poland. The book ends with his father entering the concentration camp Auschwitz.

Maus volume 2 is the harrowing tale of how Spiegelman’s father survived the Nazi death camps. Parallel with this, is the personal story of their troubled father/son relationship. The reader begins to understand Vladek’s character and idiosyncrasies having gone through his traumatic war time experiences.

Art Spiegelman reconciled his differences with his father before his death in 1982, and Maus volumes 1 and 2 are his legacy.

John McNally