Here's something rather quirky. 'Hotel & Farm' isn't a graphic novel, for a start, and it's not really a comic strip either, because there's very little continuity from page to page. Relatively early, we meet Maurice Playfellow, who changes his name to Jug Oar and decides that he'll compile a grand literary project, 'The Communal Narratives Surrounding the Ottoman Crib Hotel'. He's murdered almost at the end of the book, so perhaps explaining why it's "a faithful reconstruction of the lost work of Jug Oar (2000-2004)", but we don't see him in between. He's a collector not a narrator.

Even then, only half of what we read could really be considered along those lines anyway, because only half of this is about hotels and the stories about them that we experience unfold at different hotels. As the title suggests, the other half is about farms instead and the two halves rarely cross. Thus we get a strip about a hotel on the left hand page then a strip about a farm over on the right and then we rinse and repeat. Outside of commonality of theme, each hotel strip seems separate to each other hotel strip and each farm strip likewise to each other farm strip, the slim bookends with Jug Oar excepted. The artwork is simple line drawing touched by what I think is monochrome watercolour is consistent across the two themes and far less notable than the writing.

I'd love to know more about this project, but there's almost no information available. My ARC has no introduction (I don't know if there will be one in the published edition) and, rather oddly, not even a legal page (which will surely appear in the published edition), so I have very little to go on as background. The internet can't help much. If it wasn't for a single thread on a jazz forum, of all places, I might have believed that everything here was created specifically for this book, even though it doesn't feel like it. However, that thread suggests that it was indeed a serialised comic strip syndicated to newspapers, including one in Washington, DC, and the dates may well be that 2000-2004 timeframe.

Thus we're left largely in the dark as to what Katchor is trying to do, which may be appropriate. It certainly plays into the surreality of the strips. I see the word "absurdist" used a lot in regards to his work and that's entirely appropriate here, but I'd call it observational surreality. It's one man, presumably Jug Oar, looking at hotels and farms and presenting what he sees, the more unusual the story the better. It's almost told in documentary style, because when Katchor/Oar introduces us to someone, they identify themselves to us, as if everything's conversational and breaking the fourth wall.

Early on, assuming that everything's presented in chronological order and nothing's been added, there are mild attempts at continuity. Some characters reappear more than once and thus their stories grow, but it's rare and fleeting and soon ceases to be a project goal. Perhaps Katchor had milked everything he could out of Yalos Finger starting up a personal manure pit business. It's an agreeably bizarre scenario that could earn this businessman a spot in Chesterton's Club of Queer Trades and he's not the only one.

One of my favourite strips here includes another. He's an actor who works as a waiter for most of each week, which initially makes us think of Hollywood, where everyone is an actor or a producer or a writer, even if they have to fill your car up with gas to pay the bills. However, he has a regular gig at the Filtourian hotel. For one night a week, he's the victim of a fire in the Filtourian hotel, a staged and controlled disaster, then sits in the lobby and praises the hotel's well-trained staff. It is, as they say, a job. At least he's not a snack-food buyer for the Hamster House hotel chain.

Whether it was deliberate or not, it's these themes within themes that struck me the most. Such weird jobs or business models is one. Alban Talas closes his hosiery store for three months out of each year to sell custom made ankle socks out of his hotel room. Amula-Mula Farms specialises in breeding livestock for lucky charms. Lawrence and Dahlia Blossom own a storefront but overprice it so nobody can afford it, reappraise the building based on imaginary rent, use it as collateral for a low interest loan and use the cash to play the market.

If you're wondering if half of this is neurodivergent hyperfocus and the other half is deep cynicism, you may well be on the right lines. There are certainly neurodivergent characters here. There's an unnamed man who lies in bed at home and dreams of staying in hotels entirely based on how their names speak to him. Jerome Pourri is compelled to rearrange fruit, while Sophie is a coat hanger fetishist. Male prostitute Mickey Pontalac obsesses over the reuse of flower arrangements and a gentleman farmer's daughter ignores obvious come-ons to focus on niche historical facts. Sylvia is only able to eat food in small bite-sized portions, as long as their ingredients are "disguised through artifice and bizarre combination".

As you can imagine, Katchor can only milk each of these approaches for so long and preferably at suitable remove to avoid falling into a rut. My best guess is that these strips, in syndication, were weekly and alternated between themes, so there were two hotel strips and two farm strips every month, with two weeks between each reuse of theme. That's pretty sparse, even for a dedicated reader who frantically turned to the funny pages first every week. The effect would have been an awful lot different from binging through many years worth of strips in a couple of days. I'd highly suggest dipping into this with gaps, unless you find that it's totally up your alley.

I found it mixed, as such strips tend to be. There are glorious highs when Katchor finds the perfect phrase for a situation or nails a particular observation. The lows don't really count as lows, on the basis that they're just strips that don't connect and so we just move along to the next one. That's easy to do when they're all one page of eight panels long. So this page is a blah? Shrug. How about the next one? We don't even really notice a low unless a few of these come along at once. I felt the repetition at one point in a set of strips about different niche fruits: sudor melons, keranella, the deadly cadaver pear that's only sold for ornamental purposes. But Katchor moved on eventually.

I had to wonder about how much of this is actually real? Most of it's patently absurd, but often so absurd that it feels real. For instance, there's a strip about farmers wearing blindfolds so they fail to pick up the keranella that's rotting on the ground, so empty crates are filled with heavy sugar syrup instead that's canned and distributed. Of course it's nonsense, but it's the sort of nonsense that gets introduced by "you won't believe this but..." on a drivetime DJ's morning show. Perhaps some are urban legends. Are American barns really painted red because of slaughterhouses? The experimental cucumber hijack seems like another so false it must be true strip.

There's a lot here about change too, like the hotel that has three dedicated phones on the wall in their lobby, none of which work anymore but can't be swapped out because the wallpaper design is no longer printed. What matters most? There's a notably surreal strip about expansion through acquisition, where a hotel has snapped up so many adjoining buildings that one family have to find help partway to their room because their child has collapsed from exhaustion.

And these strips about change made me wonder if 'Hotel & Farm' gets more cynical, perhaps even embittered as it goes on? There's one strip that explicitly compares valuable features back in the day to their utter absence now, because of negative progress. They're explained by an optimistic, "Today, most guests are satisfied with the tomblike silence of a deodorized and air-conditioned room." There's a whole strip to attempt to justify the exorbitant price of phone calls and another to justify clogged up sinks. I wonder if, were you to throw me one strip at random, I could tell you roughly where it appears in the book.

At the end of the day, there's a heck of a lot here. On the positive side, that means that there's a lot of good stuff to find. On the negative side, that means that there's a lot of lesser material to wade through to find the gems. I could see a shorter, edited edition, maybe in a smaller format a half the size of this one, as a gateway to the complete version. Realistically, this is likely to be an easily polarised book. Some people are going to adore it because it speaks to their surreal sense of humour. Others won't understand at all. I'm more of the former but I also read this in multiple short visits rather than as a single immersion. I'm not the former so much I could have done that. ~~ Hal C F Astell