50 Book Challenge: book eight
V for Vendetta by Alan Moore and David Lloyd
I’m going to be showing my age now but in 1988 I was 17, going on 18, deeply interested in politics and angry at the awful unfairness of the world in a way that besets all teenagers but was particularly sharp for us, then. We’re all a product of the decade that shaped us but that means for me the circumstances that spawned this superb graphic novel and its post-nuclear dark future setting still look, nearly 20 years on, as familiar to me as the back of my own hand. You see, in those days, it really did feel like the resurgence of the far right was a few weeks away, at best. If you were a teenager in the late eighties, and especially if there was anything about you that didn’t chime well with values of the racist, conformist and socially-conservative Thatcherite agenda, then the themes of V for Vendetta will be as much a part of your mental furniture as snatches of Duran Duran songs, frilly shirts and old costume jewellery in your deepest cupboards, a deep-seated desire to cut the shoulder pads out of everything and bitter memories of the consequences of getting burgundy hair dye on your parents’ bathroom fixtures.
[Buy from Amazon
So much for the past. Everybody is at pains to point out, with bombs going off on the London underground and the film due for release any day now, how relevant V for Vendetta is for us today. I’m not even going to get into the argument about whether a graphic novel or a comic represents a work of literature. By 1988 my comic collection was already filling at least one cupboard and it’s filled a lot more since. I’m a big fan of Alan Moore who I think is one of the few artistic and cultural figures in Britain today who really speaks my language and whose words make my head nod seemingly of its own accord. Certainly he is about as far removed from the values of the racist, conformist and socially-conservative Thatcherite agenda as it is possible to imagine. But equally doesn’t mean V for Vendetta is a redundant cultural artefact any more than it’s an edgy reflection of contemporary political and social realities – or whatever other hype the promoters are churning out. See, things are different now.
We live in an age of frightening authoritarianism, lack of privacy and diminishing democracy where power is concentrating daily in the hands of a political elite and is wordlessly relinquished by an apathetic, consumer-driven, not-my-problem public that, because the perfect marketer-compiled solution for their template of beliefs doesn’t spring easily to hand, would rather just opt out completely. Yes, this present government is frightening. But it just doesn’t have the appalling, driven, swivel-eyed ideology of the Thatcher years. And our terrorists are not anarchists fighting over big issues but rather nihilists and pretty incompetent ones at that. So I’ll retire from this argument with my point made – except to say that this is a staggeringly important and impressive work of art and of fiction, much like Moore’s Watchmen, and one that anybody interested in the overarching political and philosophical issues of our times really should read. It was completed in instalments over a number of years and I do actually agree with the criticism that it loses a certain amount of clarity and focus as it goes on. But that’s a minor point. Highly recommended – but I’m not going to suggest it should be compulsory reading for anyone. That would hardly be the point, would it?
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