n the early 1980s, Britain's Labour Party defeats Margaret Thatcher. The victorious party forces the removal of American missiles from England. This doesn't save the country from the rough recession of the '80s. But it does save England from the war of 1988 and the nuclear warheads that wipe out Europe and Africa and, perhaps, other continents. Then rising waters flood London and the countryside, and the crops are destroyed. Uncounted British die of famine, disease and violence.
Then a new political party arises to save England. Under its banner, the members of Norsefire replace chaos with order by any means necessary. They detain the wrong sorts in relocation camps: radicals, homosexuals, blacks, Pakistanis, people who may once have belonged to socialist groups. And the new ruling party maintains a sharp vigilance for terrorists, watching citizens with video cameras in all public (and other) spaces and regularly hauling away suspects. Nothing is more important than order.
Then a terrorist destroys the Houses of Parliament with a sophisticated bomb. Known only as "V," the terrorist also kidnaps or kills important officials as if the government's many powerful defenses didn't exist. V is dressed and masked like Guy Fawkes, leader of the 17th-century terrorist group that plotted to blow up Parliament and assassinate King James I. V is extremely intelligent—perhaps superhumanly so, as the subject of a radical relocation-camp experiment. He's unidentifiable in his mask. And now he's seized a 16-year-old prostitute, Evey Hammond, from the custody of policemen with the power to administer instant justice, which they'd decided to exercise by raping and killing Evey. Has she been rescued—or condemned to an even nastier fate?
Suffering in the shadow of 9/11
As the National Comics Awards have proclaimed, Alan Moore is the best writer ever to grace the medium of sequential art. With illustrator Dave Gibbons, he won the Hugo Award for Watchmen, and throughout the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s he
received numerous Eagle, Eisner, Harvey, Kirby, Wizard and other awards. He achieved immediate acclaim in the U.S. when he began writing his first American comic book, Saga of the Swamp
Thing (soon retitled Swamp Thing). He swiftly followed it with more highly praised titles: Miracleman; the 12-issue DC Comics mini-series Watchmen; and the U.S.
reprinting and completion of the 10-chapter V for Vendetta.
Less well known than Watchmen or Moore's Hollywood-butchered League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, V for Vendetta deserves to be as widely read. This dystopia is, however, not an easy read, even by the demanding standard of Moore's intricate plotting. This is for several reasons. One is that the initial chapters, created early in Moore's career, aren't as strong as those scripted after a publication hiatus. Too, the later chapters alter the focus. The early chapters suggest V may be insane, using terrorism to cover his assassination of people associated with the Nazi-style death camp where he was subject to inhumane experimentation. The later chapters posit V as the voice of reason, info-dumping his theory that freedom and democracy can arise from the anarchy he sows. While V's belief isn't as simplistic as this summary, it's still naive.
However, the main reason it's tough to read V for Vendetta is unrelated to Moore's writing or co-creator David Lloyd's noirish art. And that reason is 9/11. Though this alternate
Britain's fascist government is a monstrous totalitarian dictatorship in need of overthrow, and though Moore leaves it up to readers to decide whether the ruthless V is hero, superhero,
antihero or villain, it's still disturbing to read a book that puts terrorism in any sort of positive light. Readers personally affected by 9/11 or another terrorist bombing may want to skip V for Vendetta. But anyone wondering how fear can create fascism in even the most freedom-loving democracies should read it.
