There's something really charming about Moore's jouvinilia. Miracleman reads that way. There are things in it that he's trying to work with and accomplish that he can't quite do, but the exhuberance and energy and sheer density of stuff is exhilerating.
So far, V for Vendetta is a combination of standard generic approaches. First, we have the 'valiant rebel' story, ne man who's gone insane to combat an insane world. V is, in his own way, an antihero and a pastiche of a superhero, and there is a clever inversion of the standard superhero, here. Instead of defending a (by implication) perfectly sane and reasonable world, V's actually aligned against the world in which he lives, which is an updated version of Orwell's IngSoc with some new technology thrown in.
The generic structure reflects the point of the book: there's something wrong with the world. As with Battlestar Galactica (from yesterday), we can't read this story as a wholely internal continuity. It's no coincidence that this story comes on the eve of the Labour victory at the UK polls, and then a decade of ultra-conservatism in the form of Margaret Thatcher. The presentation of an obvious fascist government is a reference to a tyranny of a less obvious kind.
Second of the genres is the revenge story, possibly the revenge tragedy (I haven't read to the end). This only crops up a few 'issues' in (I'm reading the collection, so they all kind of blend together, for me), but there's a neat bit of narrative unity in linking V's revenge plot directly to the setting. V is, literally, a product of the world they created. He stands for the kind of insanity that fascism will produce, the violent thirst for vengeance against the powerful.
This is all part of an interesting way to read SF that, though it's nothing new, has been in my head recently. Individual characters in 'epic' SF (your Star Wars, you Dune, your Babylon 5, and even Battlestar Galactica, though less so in that last case) aren't just characters, they're historical signifiers. They represent a certain class or kind of person. Depending on the narrative, they might have fully three-dimensional personalities, but there is a measure of the icon to them, regardless.
Chancellor-come-Emperor Palpatine's machinations represent the slow degeneration from idealised democracy to tyrannical dictatorship. Paul Muad'dib Atredese represents absolute power corrupting absolutely. The political figures in Battlestar Galactica are direct references to, not necessarily individual people, but certain positions within the government and the military in the United States.
V, therefore, represents the anger of a dominated population just as much as the people he kills often represent those who either benefit from the domination, or have simply learned to live with it. What I can't help thinking, while reading V for Vendetta, or the granddaddy of fascist novels, Nineteen Eighty-Four, is that there must be a huge number of people who just live with it, who don't percieve any problem with the way they live. It's just 'the way it is.' If that's the case, then how do we know we don't live in exactly the same kind of world? Who, in our context, can we go to and ask? I suspect that only the seriously downtrodden and powerless could answer that question.
Posted by orion at August 12, 2005 2:56 PM | TrackBack