Jack Brunel

Jack Brunel is an animator who courts Alleluia Cone through elaborate cartoon gifts and one unexpected personal visit. He never becomes her partner: she says she has no interest in him, and, after she sends him away from her apartment, he does not return. Yet his absence does not make him inconsequential. When Alleluia tells Gibreel Farishta about Brunel, the story becomes a trigger for Gibreel’s jealousy, turning a rejected suitor into a figure around whom the couple’s existing strain sharply gathers.

Identity and Introduction

Brunel is in his late fifties, works as an animator, and knew Alleluia’s father. He runs a small animation studio called Scarecrow Productions, named after the character in The Wizard of Oz. The evidence presents him largely through Alleluia’s account and through the cartoons he sends her; his character is conveyed less by an extended personal history than by his gifts, his artistic views, and the awkward persistence of his courtship.

His approach is initially indirect. From time to time, he sends Alleluia cartoons mounted in cream and framed in old gold. Each bears the same dedication to her, signed in Brunel’s name. The careful presentation makes the gifts conspicuous in her home: Gibreel sees them grouped by the front door when he inspects the apartment. Alleluia has kept them because she likes the pictures, not because she welcomes their sender’s advances. That distinction is central to the misunderstanding that follows: the objects carry Brunel’s intentions for him, but their presence in the apartment reflects Alleluia’s appreciation of the art.

The Cartoons and Brunel’s Artistic Outlook

The three gifts offer markedly different kinds of comic image. One is an old Punch cartoon in which Leonardo da Vinci flings the Mona Lisa across his studio like a flying object, imagining future travel to Padua. Its joke turns artistic work into an absurd anticipation of human flight. The second comes from Toff, a British boys’ comic of the Second World War. Its conflict pits the British Toff and Bert against caricatured German enemies, and its plots invariably give victory to the British characters. Gibreel reads this cartoon as an expression of an Angrez view of the war, but Alleluia does not tell him the history Brunel had related about one of the artists involved.

That omitted history complicates the comic’s confident division between British heroes and German foes. One Toff artist, Wolf, was a Berlin man who opposed the Nazis; he was arrested and interned with other Germans in Britain, while, according to Brunel, his colleagues did nothing to help him. Brunel reflected that heartlessness was the one quality a cartoonist needed, and treated Walt Disney’s capacity for feeling as an artistic flaw. The episode links his view of cartooning to the very world the comic simplifies: the division between sides on the page does not account for the vulnerability of an individual artist caught in wartime policy.

The third gift is a still from a film by the Japanese animator Yoji Kuri. Its dark visual joke shows a falling man meeting a fire engine equipped with a spike rather than a means of rescue. Gibreel dismisses the image as sick. Taken together, the gifts move from playful futurism through national caricature to cruel black comedy. They also give Brunel a defined artistic presence without requiring him to appear in person: Alleluia’s wall holds a small, unsettling cross-section of the work he chooses to send.

Courtship and the Visit

When the pictures fail to win a response, Brunel eventually appears at Alleluia’s apartment without warning. He is already considerably drunk and brings dark rum in a battered briefcase. At three in the morning, after finishing the bottle, he is still there. Alleluia briefly leaves the room, then finds that he has removed his clothes and is standing in the living room. He makes an extravagant plea for her to accept him. She gets him dressed as kindly as she can and sees him and his briefcase out. He never comes back.

The encounter gives the courtship a definite ending, unlike the ambiguity Gibreel later imagines. Brunel’s presence at the apartment is intrusive and embarrassing, but the account does not describe an ongoing pursuit after Alleluia rejects him. Her response is to end the visit and put him outside; his subsequent absence confirms that this is the last encounter reported. The battered briefcase, first associated with the bottle of rum, leaves with him, as do the gifts’ sender and their unwanted possibility of becoming more than pictures on a wall.

Narrative Role and Consequences

Alleluia recounts the episode openly and with amusement, apparently not expecting the intensity of Gibreel’s reaction. The narrative allows for the possibility that, amid recent strain between them, she may not have been entirely unaware of how the story could provoke him. It does not establish that she deliberately tells it to cause a quarrel. What is clear is the difference between the event she describes and the story Gibreel constructs from it: he accuses her of falsifying the ending, imagines Brunel still waiting for her call, and invents other possible lovers for her.

Brunel’s importance therefore lies partly in the gap between his limited, reported role and the scale of Gibreel’s response. Alleluia says she never had the slightest interest in him, and Brunel does not return after being turned away; nevertheless, Gibreel treats the old courtship as a present threat. His furious demand for an explanation of the dedications becomes an accusation against Alleluia, and she finally orders him out. Brunel does not cause the couple’s deeper difficulties, which are already present, but his cartoons and the story of their sender give Gibreel’s jealousy a concrete object. The episode makes a rejected suitor the unlikely instrument through which that jealousy becomes visible and consequential.