Laura's Reviews > V for Vendetta

Eh.

Okay. There's political writing, and then there's political comics (Watchmen, also by Moore). Pure political writing, essays or editorials or what have you, doesn't have to leave everyone satisfied. It can leave some angry or displeased or challenged, so long as it makes its point.

POLITICAL COMICS HAVE TO BE DIFFERENT.

A political comic must not only make a clear political point, but it must ALSO be interesting in a way that is peculiar to comics: it must have a gratifying narrative, it must be artistically sound, and it must have the same kind of emotional influence that a regular old novel or movie would have, because comics are, primarily, STORIES.
V for Vendetta is a glut of political writing stuffed into an attractive skin of art and garnished over with the platitudiest delivery I have ever had the misfortune to be exposed to outside a 50s superhero comic. My god. It's got the same blind and senseless energy of delivery that any Superman-hurling-a-car comic would have. This stems, I think, primarily from the fact that it's an anarchist comic, and making anarchism into a coherent and attractive viewpoint is nearly impossible, given that anarchism is probably the illest-conceived of any extant ideology.
However, because it's ANARCHISM, because the writing is coherent and cleverer than most graphic novels', because it's all draped over with mystery, because it's a well-designed book, tone and layout-wise, and because the art is fantastic, the essential failure of the book-- the fact that it lacks anything behind its shell of hyperenergetic blathering-- gets a pass.
Seriously. The book tries so hard to be political and symbolic it crushes itself. Premise-wise, the story doesn't make a lot of sense-- we hear that England was living in a government vacuum for several years, and that London was straight-across flooded, and that every other landmass on the planet has been nuked, AND that a nuclear winter has occurred, but for some reason they're still living in a fully-mechanized modern consumer society. All right. Sure. Also, it appears that the only remaining political ideologies in the universe are Fascism and Socialism/Communism, with Anarchism resting on its own crazy-ass axis out who the hell knows where. All right, again. Beginning to sound more and more like Revolutionary Spain/every third world country ever. Sure. Got that. 'First and freest Republic in the world loses all sense of its political heritage and persecutes the hell out of its inhabitants' is the ONLY trend in British apocalyptic fiction, but this is the worst I've ever seen it done.
I don't know. What is Moore posing here as the only options for political ideology? He paints a world in which one can ONLY be EITHER a ethnocentric homophobic racist fascist or an 'anarchist'. All right. What does he mean by this? Returning to a state of nature? Gradual and spontaneous shift to democracy? End of the modern mechanized world? Spontaneous national adoption of a sort of leaderless socialist state? Hmm. Moore handles his material childishly. For me, the political-apocalypse stories that WORK show the protagonists yearning after a state of leave-me-alone-let's-all-be-friends sort of political neutralism-- a state of 'let's have universal human rights and that's all please' joy. A utopia of 'being a normal person'. Children of Men is like this. Even Watchmen is less heavy on the socialism and focuses more on the 'let's stop being persecutors and start being nice to everyone else again' mentality. Readers can therefore identify with the protagonists-- they aren't radicals. They're just normal people trying to be normal again. But in V for Vendetta, the only way peace can be achieved is if every individual person is a politically-radical crowd member willing to use mob violence.
Not inspirational.
I don't care what you think about the degree to which individuals must be political to preserve their rights. This book makes no coherent political point and the messages it DOES articulate are comprised solely of platitudes. It fails to rpesent any realistic view of any political spectrum whatsoever. Instead of focusing on human rights/the dignity of man/the right to be free, it sours the whole batch by presenting some shallowly-conceived idea of anarchism as the solution to all modern political crises. The fact is that this book reads like a poorly-contrived piece of anti-Thatcher propaganda.

Which is essentially what it is.

EDIT: I've read some other reviews of this book on goodreads and I've decided I have to make one point.

You CANNOT like this book becuase 'V is an amazing character.' V IS ALMOST NOT A CHARACTER. Moore specifically has him talk about how who he is is not important. V is a big bundle of soggy political ideology stuffed up into a man-suit with a funny mask on the front. The whole backstory bit exists to give the situation-- the SITUATION, not the character-- plausibility. The fact that the backstory even exists sours Moore's ideological point, which is unfortunate, since the point was shallow enough to begin with. V is suppsoed to be an 'everyman', and is supposed to represent the potential in all of us to make a difference. But how did he get like this? First of all, he's insane, mildly or seriously, but slightly insane at some level, at any rate. Secondly, he's got SUPER POWERS of combat/the mind that he was given in a crazy SCIENCE-FICTION HORMONE EXPERIMENT. All right. So the potential to make a difference is there in all of us, but we need a hero to tell us this is so, and that hero himself needs to be a super-human person in some way before he can take up the job? I don't think so.
There's some extreme cognitive dissonance in this story. Moore can't decide whether to espouse the power of the people as a body or the power of the individual-- an individual who, in some ways, is nearly as charismatic as a 20th-century dictator, yet who is, in other ways, utterly flat and irrelevant.
V is not a character. V is an idea, and a cloudy one at that.