Book review: The Spectators - a graphic novel about life in Paris

We think of cities as anonymous, as sprawling - and they are. But they are also private, intimate, landscapes suspended between loneliness and community. This is what urban walking offers, a way to navigate the boundary between ourselves as individuals and part of the collective: city as identity.

Such an interplay sits at the centre of Victor Hussenot's beautiful, ethereal The Spectators, a graphic novel - or is it? - about city walking, city haunting, all the ways the metropolis can get beneath our skin. The city here is Paris; Hussenot is a French artist who has published three books in his native country.

There is no story per se, just a series of riffs, imaginative leaps. "Each of us," he observes, "sees the city in our own way … From the rift between sleep and waking bursts of lights … The mind's eye is set free … The invisible is revealed."

In part, Hussenot is referring to the voyeuristic aspects of city life, how we are on the outside looking in. But even more, he is pointing out its layers, multiple lives and multiple eras overlapping in real time.

One of the best sequences describes the Metro and its role as "the Parisians' ephemeral and shifting home". What Hussenot is getting at is history, both its presence and, in some sense, its collapse.