This is probably the most optimistic thing I’ve read all year. Graphic novelist Craig Thompson (most well known for his autobiographical Blankets) inflicts a thousand different shades of suffering on his characters and the people they encounter and yet despite child slavery, prostitution, self-mutilation, drought and all the numerous hazards of the desert, the over-arching message of this 672-page masterpiece, is of love. Towards the end of the novel we dwell extensively on the meaning of the title, ‘Habibi’ which translates to ‘my beloved’.

The story begins with Dodola, sold into marriage aged nine. Her new husband is a scribe who teaches her to read and write before he is killed by bandits, imbuing her with a love of story-telling. She adopts Zam, first a kind of brother but then the closest thing to a lover she has. When separated, they find themselves in diametrically opposed worlds; Dodola in the palace of a Sultan, bedecked with jewelry and surrounded by pleasure-gardens, and Zam in the corrugated alleys and ramshackle marketplaces of the slums.

All of this is reinforced by incredibly detailed illustrations and huge landscape drawings which echo with beautifully rendered calligraphy. In a particularly transcendental section of the narrative, Thompson shows the visual connection between the Arabic script and natural forms as a meandering river transforms into a line of text. It’s easy to believe that Habibi is the result of 6 years worth of frenetic scribbling.

Stylistically, the linearity of the primary narrative is continually invaded by the swirling quality of Dodola’s stories and the calligraphy and numerology of her studies – whilst spreads with insanely intricate patterns and borders are used to express moments of particular intensity. This dream-like quality owes more to Neil Gaiman’s Sandman than to the politically-charged graphic novels of the last decade. Koranic stories and myths, exchanges of riddles between Solomon and Bilqis, give the story a fantastical dimension. Habibi is a parable, an allegory, hovering above and obliquely commenting on reality.

Our contemporary reality figures throughout the novel in an exaggerated and prophetic form. Thompson gives us oceanic deserts and crowded cities, barren nature and polluted urbanism. Water is just as scarce and nearly just as valuable as it is in Talalay’s film version of Tank Girl. People hunt for food in vast tracts of junkyard and a mentally deranged fisherman decorates his home with objects scavenged from a choked up river, all pointedly evoking western documentary-rendered images of third-world poverty and ecological crisis’s.

Though the narrative is ostensibly timeless, snatches of modernity begin to appear; we see a pair of mismatched adidas trainers, abandoned toilets and spatulas, and when the Sultan runs out of water it is brought to him in industrial trucks. His guards look like steampunks. The novel operates in two recognisable time zones; overlaying this is a western conception of Arabic myth, the stylised suffering of a concubine and a eunuch, being the angels and kings of Dodola’s stories.

Thompson is also preoccupied by the shared heritage of Islam and Christianity; biblical stories appear in their Koranic versions, and points of differentiation between the two faiths are examined with critical rigour. The story of Abraham, Ishmael, and Isaac surfaces and resurfaces, but Thompson ignores the question ‘Who was to be sacrificed?’ in favour of the answer that neither was sacrificed – the angel Gabriel brought a ram instead. Habibi asserts that ‘There are no separations’: faiths, people, stories, words and images all come together to create a fundamental unity. It’s a message we’ve all heard before, but not often this prettily.