Previously in Last War in Albion: The Wachowskis oversaw a V for Vendetta film that heavily altered Moore’s story, making it into a Bush-era political allegory with a strong queer subtext. Moore wasn’t thrilled.

A man sits in silent contemplation of its dark secrets and exotic conjurations, his face lined and weary, aged by the devilish nature of his studies. – Steve Moore, Father Shandor: Demon Stalker

Amidst the merchandising generated by the film was a novelization of the movie script. This would usually be a banal bit of ephemera, but in the case of V for Vendetta it proved a curious and interesting detail of the overall event that was the movie by dint of the fact that it was written by Steve Moore. This immediately gave it a credibility and importance that movie novelizations generally lack, simply because it carried a tacit stamp of approval, or, at least, grudging tolerance from Alan Moore, without whose blessing there is no remotely plausible way that Steve Moore would have proceeded with the project. Moore’s assent was surely less about actually supporting the idea of a novel based on the script based on the disowned comic he’d written fifteen years ago than about supporting his best friend getting some money, but the fact remains that Steve Moore’s involvement meant that the novel served, at least in part, as Moore’s camp getting to put its own spin on the Wachowskis’ adaptation.

Those looking for scandal or for a “correction” to the Wachowskis’ version of the story will be largely disappointed. Save for one moment in which he impishly flags a major plot hole in the script by having Finch notice that the claim that the experiments on V were to produce the virus that Norsefire used to rise to power made no chronological sense (almost certainly what Alan Moore was talking about when he described “plot holes you couldn’t have got away with in Whizzer And Chips” given that he later noted that his friend had “done such a brilliant job on the novelization of the V for Vendetta film—even fixing a plot hole in the original screenplay for them”) and conclude that V’s account can’t be entirely honest, the novel is largely a faithful and straightforward adaptation of the film script, written in a breezy and direct prose style that reads fast and with clarity, working with an omniscient narrator who flits easily among viewpoint characters. If anything, it’s fair to criticize the novel for holding too closely to the at times drab liberalism of the Wachowskis’ vision—passages like one that describes Gordon’s satirical attacks on Chancellor Sutler as “satirical antics that, in many ways, were just as damaging to the powers that be” as V’s manifestos. 

Still, there are clear moments where he puts his own spin on events. This is clear from the beginning—after opening with the evocative and scene-painting fragment, “A strange, shadowy room, somewhere deep beneath the streets of London,” Moore continues with a bit of historical context that’s utterly absent from the film, which spends a couple minutes informing its presumed American audience who Guy Fawkes is but makes no effort to speak of “old, old London that had seen so much, in two thousand years of war and terror and despair.…

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Previously in Last War in Albion: Alan Moore’s first post-Watchmen project saw him returning to the beginning of his career to finish V for Vendetta.

“In the end, I was glad they got the ideas out but very disappointed that they blew it so badly and distorted all the Gnostic transcendental aspects that made the first film so strong and potent. If they had any sense, they would have befriended me instead of pissing me off. They seem like nice boys.” – Grant Morrison, 2005 interview with Suicide Girls

Moore’s evolution over the seven years of the project is perhaps clearest, however, in the larger thematic issues. Moore had originally envisioned V for Vendetta as an exploration of anarchism vs fascism in which all sides were taken seriously—as early as 1984 Moore talked about how he originally “ intended it to be a pretty trite piece of propaganda. But it didn’t work like that – it came out superficial and hollow. I realized that the only way to treat it honestly was to take the fascist characters and get deeply involved in their mentality.” It was not, obviously, that Moore was without any moral investment in the debate between anarchism and fascism—a debate Moore has suggested is both the absolute heart of all political debate and one that is in fact “as much a matter of the emotions and spirit as they are matters of abstract intellect and politics. Maybe even more so.” Given this, and especially given his summary of the debate as “should we be ruled,” there is only ever one position that Alan Moore has ever taken at any point in his life. And the idea that V for Vendetta is particularly ambiguous in what it favors between fascism and anarchism is, charitably, strained. 

All the same, there were moral ambiguities to resolve. Any ending was going to necessarily resolve some of the shades of gray, just based on what the plot beats were—who got to win, who got big hero moments on the way out, etc. And so Moore had decisions to make. He’s suggested that the bulk of these were already made, noting that “There were no major plot changes from the way I laid out the story when we were doing it for Warrior,” but in the same interview he noted that “the tone [of Book Three], I think, is subtly different.”  Speaking about it some years later, asked in an interview about V’s tactics, Moore clarified that the use of violence “is something which I don’t sympathize with,” and that “in Book Three, it’s finally decided that no it isn’t; that killing people is always wrong; and at that point the initial hero V stands down and lets a non-violent person take over the role.” 

It’s easy to read this transformation in light of Watchmen. It is not clear when, exactly, Moore embraced nonviolence. His earliest explicit endorsement of it comes in 1987, when he expressed a “deep aversion to all forms of violence and war,” but it’s a position one can imagine him taking at any point in his life.…

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