V for Vendetta: Political resonance

When V for Vendetta was announced as the subject of this month's Reading group, a reader called Sunburst called it "The finest, most intelligent and most relevant British novel of the last 25 years".

All of that is, of course, debatable (right down to timescale: in fact, some of the book is more than 25 years old). Yet there's truth in what he says. It is a good book, it is smart, and there's no doubt that it remains relevant – as TheOldRedDog pointed out:

"The thing I'd be most interested to see in the comments from the group is the reaction to the fact that when Alan Moore wrote V for Vendetta, he was working to the logical extension of the then-Thatcherite world and creating an all too prosaic and realistic portrayal of 'what could be'. Now that we have another Tory administration in power and the financial crisis has shown us that the powers that be back then never really went away, are the resonances simply déja-vu, or something else?"

Many other commenters noted that TheOldRedDog isn't strictly correct. Moore actually assumed the Tories were going to lose the 1983 election, and that Labour would remove nuclear weapons from British soil – thus paving the way for the avoidance of nuclear catastrophe that engulfs the rest of his unhappy world. (He has since readily admitted that such predictions were "naive".) But even so, there's no doubt that the evils of the British Tory party and Thatcherism were preying on Moore's and Lloyd's minds when they created the book – as they've both often confirmed in interviews. Here is Moore in conversation with a comic fan around the time of the release of the V for Vendetta film:

"They were talking less about annihilating whichever minority they happened to find disfavour with and more about free market forces and market choice and all of these other kind of glib terms, which tended to have the same results as an awful lot of the kind of fascist causes back in the 1930s, but with a bit more spin put upon them. The friendly face of fascism."

Make of that what you will, but there's no denying that much of V for Vendetta cuts close to the bone, especially now we're enjoying a bout of Conservative rule. The excellent TheOldRedDog again:

"I think it is this that Alan Moore was trying to get to – it doesn't take much to pierce the thin veneer of civilisation, and once we do we won't necessarily find mindless barbarism, but something far more insidious."

City bonuses, closing libraries, Nadine Dorries. It rings true, all right. But as TheOldRedDog's comment also suggests, there's far more to the book than anti-Thatcher allegory. MadameDeath said:

"In my humble opinion, V is a book about satanism and anarchism. Most readers miss that point, but V's actions certainly point to that area, which Moore is more than familiar with. Makes it all the more entertaining when you see thousands of protesters wearing the V mask."

Quite a few people disagreed with MadameDeath about the satanism, but it seemed an influence to me, too. Especially thanks to the repeated quotations from Aleister Crowley ("Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole of The Law") and that odd moment when V grows horns …

The anarchy, meanwhile, is undeniable – and that undoubtedly adds a certain something to the current use of the V mask as a symbol of protest. Of course, there's every chance that plenty of protesters don't know what the mask was originally about, but I think it would be wrong to assume too much ignorance. Certainly, the Anonymous movement seems to have borrowed more from V for Vendetta than just a cool symbol. Their videos, for a start, seem to replicate V's speech patterns – not to mention the staging used for similar transmissions in the book and the film. The many-headed nature of Anonymous – where the end result is more important than the individual bringing it about – also chimes with the denouement of V for Vendetta, as does their apparent desire to change world institutions by spreading a little well-aimed chaos and fear.

Apparently, Alan Moore himself is pleased. He told Entertainment Weekly: "I was also quite heartened the other day when watching the news to see that there were demonstrations outside the Scientology headquarters over here, and that they suddenly flashed to a clip showing all these demonstrators wearing V for Vendetta masks. That gave me a warm little glow." But my favourite soundbite comes from an interview with David Lloyd carried out by the Comics Alliance.

"What does it feel like," they asked him, "to have been part of creating a character that, years later, still stands as a symbol of rebellion?"

He replied simply: "Good."

Which brings us back to Sunburst's original comment. The book is still relevant. It has as much to say about our times as it does the 1980s. What did it say to you?

Origin
Source: Guardian