Talk Back

[Patguy]

"…But it was my integrity that was important. Is that so selfish? It sells for so little, but it's all we have left in this place. It is the very last inch of us… but within that inch we are free."

I've read this several times before, but wanted to do it again before the movie comes out. I'm very happy I did. (And, semi-coincidentally, it combines what seem to be my two major preoccupations this year: comic books and political violence. Am I reliving my adolescence?)

This is one of Alan Moore's first extended narratives, and in many ways it works as well or better than many of his later ones. It's as formal in structure (though not as complex) as Watchmen or From Hell, but it also has a straightforward anarchist agitprop quality that wouldn't reoccur in the later, thematically complicated works.

The formalism is extremely tight: every chapter is titled with a "V" word: "The Villian," "Video," "Vicissitude," etc. When Evey grieves, she’s always sitting on a staircase. Moore and Lloyd constantly cross-cut between parallel scenes, allowing the scenes to comment on each other. Images and dialogue reoccur in varying contexts to produce multiple meanings. "V" words and "V" images are ubiquitous.

Early in the story, the hero/villain V quotes briefly from Thomas Pynchon's novel V.:

"There is more behind and inside V than any of us had suspected. Not who, but what is she."

The material is apt. Pynchon's "V" is a woman, and that fact prefigures the end of V for Vendetta. Throughout Moore's story, V returns several times to the idea, pace Pynchon, that he isn't a person but a concept, an idea or a network of ideas. And Moore's hyperintensive use of visual and geometric motifs is strongly reminiscent of Pynchon; in V., Gravity's Rainbow and Mason & Dixon, Pynchon organizes his plots and themes around the shape of a V, the parabola and the straight line, respectively. Here, Moore uses the shape of the V as his primary recurring motif, just as later he would use the smiley face (in Watchmen), the color blue (Swamp Thing), binary notation (Miracleman), or, in From Hell, an almost impossibly intricate network of visual recapitulations.

All of Moore's stories are crammed with extratextual literary references, and here they’re more obvious than most. V is introduced quoting Shakespeare, and the last thing he says is a quote from Catullus. In fact much of what he says is a quotation from somewhere. This serves to reinforce the idea that V is more of a constellation of thoughts than a human being.

Alan Moore's worlds are fully interpretable, even if most of the people in them can't interpret them. The character of V might be more of an idea than a man (or a woman), but if so he's a pretty omnipresent one. There are Vs everywhere here: Vs in language, Vs in numbers, Vs on building walls, Vs in the sky, even Vs in the shape of the human body as it raises its arms. It's a sort of world-as-hologram, where every element of the world can be found in every other one piece. This is a literary conceit, of course, but it's also magical thinking. It disappoints my secular soul that Moore has become a sort of postmodern magician, but it doesn’t surprise me in the least.

Beyond all that, though, this is a truly political radical story, essentially an anarchist manifesto. There's some ambiguity about V's character, but none about his actions: his terrorist activities (murders, bombings and all) are portrayed as absolutely necessary in the fight against fascism. And the goal isn't state reformation, incremental progress, or the meeting of certain demands; it's the total anarchist demolition of the state.

V (and presumably, Moore) draws a distinction between "anarchy" and "chaos": chaos is the necessary transitional state between the fascist state V fights against, and anarchy is—well, something else. Something outside the scope of the book, apparently, since we never get to see what it looks like. I can see the argument that this makes the story politically naïve, since it doesn't seem able to postulate a viable counter-system to fascism. (Swamp Thing, Watchmen and Miracleman all end on similar uncertain notes.) Maybe so, but it doesn't diminish the power of the narrative itself, or the central argument that whatever comes next in the world, can't be worse than the world as depicted here. It's very—dare I say it?—punk. Remember that this story was started in England in 1981, when the idea of punk was a viable cultural force, not—as it is now—just a sort of fashion.

In fact, if I had to nitpick, I'd say that the third and final part of the story (written in 1987 or 1988) is a little less satisfying than the first two parts (written in 1981/1982). It's more talky, for one thing, spelling out its philosophy a little more didactically. Maybe that's the way it had to be: by 1988, leftists had been battered with over half a decade of Reagan/Thatcher; playfulness and punk attitude were less important than real political debate. It may also have something to do with the fact that in the intervening years, Moore wrote several years worth of Swamp Thing as well as Watchmen and The Killing Joke, outlined the unproduced Twilight of the Superheroes, and God knows what else. I'd feel a little tired too.

But actually, I don't want to nitpick. This is one hell of a story, and I think it gets better every time I read it. This time through I was surprised to discover how comparatively little space is devoted to V's terrorist campaign; most of the story is concerned with the supporting cast and with V's relationship with Evey. (There's more than a little of The Magus in the story of Evey's education, by the way—an unacknowledged influence, I think.)

The heart of the book, however, is definitely the harrowing "Valerie" chapter. As a story told to a prisoner by another, unseen, prisoner, it reminds me a lot of Dave Sim's great Jaka's Story, and I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Sim was influenced by this chapter. Of course, Moore and Sim might both have independently drawn their ideas from 1984. In any case, Moore is fundamentally more hopeful than Orwell; Winston Smith was thoroughly destroyed, but in V for Vendetta there is, at the last, "one inch" of humanity that can't be crushed by that boot on the human face.

One last thing. In an essay reprinted in this collection, Alan Moore credits V for Vendetta's artist, David Lloyd, with much of the fundamental aesthetic of the book, including the conspicuous lack of sound effects and thought balloons (meaning that the story is conveyed in images, captions and dialogue). For years I've thought of this as a signature Alan Moore style—particularly the lack of thought balloons—and it's certainly a very influential one. But I guess I've never given David Lloyd enough credit. So, for the record: thanks, David!

[Bea]

I've been wanting to read this for ages.

Thanks for giving me a good reason to set some cash aside to pick it up.
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I was born to speak all mirth and no matter.