Alan Moore, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Vol. 1
When I finished reading this, I may have screamed, “Booksfree, you WHOREMONGERS!” Because I liked this a lot and want to read more of it, but they do not have volume 2 and I feel no desire to actually purchase it myself. Oh, well, that’s what Christmas is for. Celebrating the birth of Christ our Lord? Nein! Getting your family to buy you crap you don’t want to buy yourself?
…what’s German for yes?
Anyway, Mina Murray is employed by a really fat guy to go around collecting a bunch of heroes to fight for Merry Olde England. Captain Nemo, Henry Jekyll, Alan Quartermaine–they all show up, in various states of decay and devastation, because they want a cure for what ails them or because they have nothing better to do. Moore imagines a Victorian England in which flight is possible, and going to the moon is unlikely, but probable. It’s all very cool and steampunky, but the interesting part is the ambivalence with which the characters treat the empire. From the moment you read the introduction, in which Moore mocks everything from Victorian attitudes towards race and gender to their blindness to the overwhelming poverty within England itself, the tone is set: The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen peels back the layers of Victorian pretension and shows us the seamy underbelly of England at the eve of the twentieth century. Instead of fighting for the nation because it is good and pure and true, as most Victorian protagonists did, our heroes fight for it because that’s the most pragmatic thing to do. It’s a nice subversion of the literature of the period, not to mention of our own.
That being said, there are some things that twigged me. Within about fifteen pages, Mina Murray is almost raped and has to be saved by an opium-addicted Alan Quartermaine; she then gets set out as cleavagey bait for Dr. Jekyll. Later, we meet another character–a future member of the League–when he rapes a number of girls at a boarding school. And I mean, Mina is actually very capable and Moore makes it abundantly clear that the rapist is a Terrible Person, but…a little sexual violence goes a long way, thanks. You’ve made your point, now move on.
Also, the treatment of race…well, it is what it is. On the one hand, Moore is obviously trying to play around with the more ridiculous Victorian conventions–the first villain is Chinese, which brings up a lot of the “Mysterious Orient” crap and it’s kind of hilarious. But having Mina almost raped by a bunch of badly drawn Middle Easterners? It didn’t feel like Moore was making fun of the convention; it felt he was just blindly using it. And that, friends, is not at all interesting.
Recommended for: Anyone with an exceptionally strong stomach, anyone who’s not going to get triggered by the sexual violence, anyone who can stand the fugly-ass art.
