Title: V for Vendetta
Author: Alan Moore (writer), David Lloyd (illustrator)
Genre: Dystopian
Trigger Warnings: Death, blood, guns, consentual sex, attempted sexual assault, concentration camps, human experimentation, racism/racist terms, homophobia/homophobic terms, nudity, torture, imprisonment, drug use, dismembered bodies, pedophilia, excessive survellience/loss of privacy, brainwashing, rioting and looting, trauma flashbacks, spousal abuse, antisemitism
Back Cover:
“Remember, remember the fifth of November…”
A frightening and powerful tale of the loss of freedom and identity in a chillingly believable totalitarian world, V for Vendetta stands as one of the highest achievements of the comics medium and a defining work for creators Alan Moore and David Lloyd.
Set in an imagined future England that has given itself over to fascism, this groundbreaking story captures both the suffocating nature of life in an authoritarian police state and the redemptive power of the human spirit which rebels against it. Crafted with sterling clarity and intelligence, V for Vendetta brings an unequaled depth of characterization and verisimilitude to its unflinching account of oppression and resistance.
Review:
I am not a huge fan of comic books and graphic novels. When I’m reading, my brain is too tuned to words, so my default is to read all the dialogue, barely glance at the pictures, and end up with no idea what’s going on. Plus I’m face-blind, so if characters change clothes or hairstyles (or if, like this illustrator, all your women look exactly the same), I lose track of who’s on the page and it makes things even harder to follow.
I picked this up because my book club is doing assorted graphic novels for May, and V for Vendetta was the only one on the list I’d actually heard of before. I knew very little about it besides the fact that the character V tends to be idolized by incels and the like, and also an internet headcannon that V is a trans man.
The story follows a lot of characters, most of which were hard to keep straight. On one side, we have V, the Guy Fawkes mask-wearing vigilante who is against the totalitarian regime ruling England, and Evie, a young woman who V rescues and keeps around for some reason, slowly introducing her to his ideas and world. On the other side, we have various high-ranking members of the regime. So not only do you get V’s side of the story, you also get to see the regime members, how V’s actions are affecting them, and how they react. I thought it was actually pretty cool to see both sides. And you know, I’m against totalitarian regimes, so it was kinda fun to see V throwing them into such disarray.
I only say “kinda” fun, though, because there is not much fun about this book. It’s dark and brutal, in case you couldn’t figure that out from the very long list of trigger warnings. There are no good guys here. The totalitarian regime is bad, obviously, but V isn’t a hero. He has his own agenda and will stoop to many inhumane things to get it done. He is for anarchy, which is the exact opposite of totalitarianism – I don’t think anarchism is all bad in theory, but this book makes it look a lot like V’s better verson of society looks like every-man-for-himself, social-Darwinism chaos. At the beginning, I could kinda get behind V and his fighting the regime, but then he did something I couldn’t overlook. (spoilers) (He tortured Evie for several weeks, including with waterboarding, to try and “set her free” and bring her around to his point of view). He’s just plain abusive, and that’s when I realized there are no good guys in this story, just bad guys with different ideas of what the world should look like.
This book is 30 years old, and I get that standards for women in media were different in the 90s. But there are only two types of women in this world: sex workers and weak women who know nothing and need men to protect them, with the only exception being a woman who cuckolds her husband, abuses her affair partner, and wants nothing but more political power. And they all are drawn the same – skinny, pretty, and almost universally blonde, which is both a tad sexist and also made it really hard for me to tell the female characters apart.
I have criticisms of this book. Quite a few, actually. But it was an engaging story – interesting, gripping, and hard to put down. It’s dark, a bad kind of dark that leaves me thinking I really wouldn’t recommend it, but it wasn’t a bad story. I had some difficulties with it, mostly owing to the graphic novel format, but that’s just me. If nothing else, Alan Moore knows how to tell a good story.
Bluejay Reads 