Text and Illustrations by Jon McNaught
Published by Nobrow in 2018.
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". . . the very spot where you now stand . . . was once a scorching desert . . . it has also been a tropical ocean . . . a steaming swamp full of dangerous reptiles . . . an icy tundra where mammoths roamed . . . or deep inside a vast mountain range . . ."
. . .
Review by William D. Tucker.
Kingdom is a vacation in a book. For good and for bad. No more, no less.
A British family-a mother, her teenage son, her elementary school age daughter-go on a road trip to the beach where they will stay in a rented house. The mother and her son are addicted to their screens. The little girl is not permitted a mobile phone or a tablet, but she is allowed to watch TV. Remember when TV was the Great Rotter of Children's Brains? Now, it seems so wholesome and square, as we see the three of them at night in the rented living room by the light of a Dr. Who-esque program that the daughter is totally into, while Mom and older brother are complaining about lack of signal.
Before they get to their beachfront lodging, they stop at a gas(petrol?)station/minimall, with all the wonderful commercialized Third Places: an arcade, a Starbucks, a Tesco, and a Burger King. They eat at Burger King. Kingdom captures the hemming and hawing over the combo meals, and the deathly bored look on the freckled face of the teenage girl working the point-of-sale in all their . . . well, it's not glory. It's observational, almost a documentary approach. This is the way people went on vacation at the end of the 2010s. This is how they ordered Burger King. This is where they sat outside to eat as birds swarm overhead ready to sort through whatever remains once the humans leave.
We get different perspectives on the action: an adult woman's, a teenage boy's, and a little girl's-the mother, her son, her daughter-and how each of them project their minds onto the constructed world all around them.
The mother bears the weight of reality: she pays for everything, she decides the destinations, she decides when they all go home. Although she is a screen addict, she is no fantasist, for it is the duty of the Modern Adult to doomscroll and fret and wonder what it's all coming to even if they do it quietly as this woman seems to manage.
The teenage son is antsy, and he's looking to assert his independence, even though he is already somewhat disenchanted with meatspace: he spends as much time as possible playing video games. He looks with interest at the condom dispenser as he exits a public restroom. He eavesdrops on twentysomethings talking about how wasted they got last night. Nature strikes him as a bore until he comes across a rotting animal carcass. He discovers a World War II era pilbox, which brings him closer to the action hero dreams he enacts in the virtual realm.
The little girl is able to enjoy a movie in the moment or walk around staring at her reflection in puddles or get absorbed into reading an inane book of trivia she happens to find. The child is not burdened by the responsibilities of her mother or the antsy fomo of her older brother, nor is she addicted to social media and memes. It's possible that she will become ensnared in the fullness of time once she is middle school age, or, alternatively, she will be killed by a pandemic or a nuclear war. Kingdom was published in 2018, a . . . happier time, I guess? Shrugs.
Kingdom features a sequence wherein the family unit goes to a natural history museum documenting the evolution of life from microscopic replicators through the dinosaurs and cave people to now when the weight of history bears down on us in real time with always-on-we-never-close social media feeds. The museum is boring and busted, some of the touch screen exhibits and push button light-up displays are out of order. Kingdom shows us the trash and jury-rigged electrical works accumulating behind the scenes, but no disaster. Kingdom just seems, I dunno, amused by how dull a museum can render the grandiose saga of cosmic evolution.
Kingdom isn't satire. It's not saying everything is fucked, nor is it saying everything is going to magically be okay. It's fiction, but it's not reaching for spectacle and melodrama even though-amusingly-it uses the blue/orange color palate of a blockbuster. There's even cameos by Iron Man (as an action figure), Batman (as a plushie inside a claw machine), and Spider-Man (printed upon a beach towel). Not to mention the juicy Burger King sign, the alluring Starbucks mermaid, and the-I assume for British audiences-reassuring Tesco logo.
Kingdom is a vacation in a book. No more, no less. For good, for bad. It appeals to the burdened adult, the antsy teenager, and the curious child inside me, although, admittedly, I am way more in the head of the adult than the other two.
Kingdom invites us to project ourselves onto it, into it, even as it tries to document very, very tiny details of human life in the late 2010s. Much like an actual vacation, it left me wanting more but also acutely aware that I had too many things to attend to once I got back to stay gone forever.
