(no subject)

[learnedax]

Finished V for Vendetta this morning. It's good. It's very good. I disagree, however, with jducoeur and alexx_kay that it is Alan Moore's best work. My central issue with it is that the story is, odd as this might sound, traditional to the point of not saying much. I had no foreknowledge of this book, and nothing in it surprised me. Great art can of course be made as process rather than product, and this is quite good art on those terms, but it also seems to go to great lengths to shake up the reader and tell them something interesting and new. I really wanted it to be both, but for me at least the latter aspect winds up coming off rather weakly.

Mine may also be a less than typical perspective. I'm a rabid fan of The Prisoner, and I saw a lot of parallels between it and this book (sure, all dystopiae look similar, but I see far more large and small echoes of McGoohan here than Huxley or Orwell).

Comments

[jducoeur]

Well, there's obviously an element of taste in it. I find V especially powerful, but I am a great fan of both psychological and political fiction, and this one hits very squarely in those areas. The transformation of Evey over the course of the story is fascinating to me. And while I don't entirely agree with the political prescription of the story, I think it's a really extraordinary contrast of the extremes of fascism and anarchy, taking both deadly seriously.

(It's also possible that, as previously mentioned, it speaks more strongly to those of us who were politically aware during the Reagan/Thatcher years...)