V for Vendetta - Alan Moore

I slotted in V for Vendetta as my "book set around a holiday other than Christmas" for the 2017 Popsugar Reading Challenge, with the holiday here being Guy Fawkes Day aka Bonfire Night aka the 5th of November.  Most of the book does not take place on November 5th; however, the pivotal parts of the story do, and the characters' actions draw their influence and strength from that day.

I'm not a big graphic novel person, finding that they lack some of the depth and substance of prose books; a picture is not, necessarily, worth a thousand words.  And, following in this vein, I was not a huge fan of V.  Not necessarily because it was a graphic novel, though I wasn't terribly impressed by its art or flow in that respect, but because V is a pivotal character who just doesn't make sense.

The story is about Britain, following a war, which has become a totalitarian state under the control of a far-right party whose policies have included killing homosexuals, non-whites, and other groups that don't match their perfect idea.  There's an early panel which contains the words "Make Britain Great Again."  Hm...  In this world, Evey is a teenage girl who, desperately in need of money, tries to turn to prostitution, only to find herself caught by a sting targeted at sex workers.  On the verge of being raped and killed, she's rescued by the mysterious, masked, preternaturally strong and fast caped crusader, V, who takes her back to his home in "the Shadow Gallery" and begins to tell her of his plans to free Britain, and eventually to integrate her into them.

But V as a character never made sense to me.  He is an anarchist, wanting people to be able to live in "the land of do-as-you-please," but with an order instilled by the masses.  He evidently became this person after being the subject of a medical experiment in a "resettlement," aka concentration, camp, where he received an injection that damaged his mind.  This part was one that made me go, "What?"  Because the injection apparently killed everyone else who received it in horrible ways, and yet it just makes V into an anarchist with superhuman strength and computer skills...?  What?  And apparently a criminal mastermind to boot.  I think Moore was going for some sort of superhero origin story here (and V's mysterious identity contributes to this, too, and that worked) but I'm not convinced he truly pulled it off.  He's also a brutal, unnecessarily cruel character; what he did to Evey is absolutely unforgivable, unconscionable, and it was certainly not the only way to persuade Evey to his way of thinking.  She was halfway there already.  Yes, V is supposed to be an anti-hero instead of your typical mainstream hero...but I was never convinced of his heroism in any regard.

As for the art, I found it very bland, very washed out--which I at first thought might be an artistic choice, maybe saving splashes of color for particular points that would need emphasizing, but not--and with some of the characters being very hard to distinguish from each other.  There's also a shift in it at one point, probably because the original serialization of V was paused, and then resumed for the compilation later, but it means that some of the characters look quite different in later parts of the book than they did in the earlier parts, despite only about a year passing in the course of the book.

The end of the story is striking, and I commend Moore for going the way he did with it--however, Evey is not V, and I remain skeptical that she could pull off many of the things that V wanted her to, considering she didn't have any of the "abilities" that his background apparently gave him.  The strength of this book is clearly in its nature as a cautionary tale, and that is more important now than ever; its clear demonstration of the "slippery slope" is particularly noteworthy.  But I'm not sure that its message and ending can carry a story that was, ultimately, only so-so.  Overall, an okay read, but nothing I would go back to in the future.

2 stars out of 5.