| |
|
I'm up to the 1898 part of the dossier and so far, I'm not really feeling it. The opening sequence is pretty fun, but after that it's just these endless text pieces that don't do much for me. Maybe it's the fact that I'm not that familiar with the British culture and literature Moore is replicating, but the entirety of this book feels like that atlas in Volume II that I've still yet to make it through.
I like the way that Moore is trying to synthesize the entirety of literature into this one continuum, a history of the immateria, but reading the history of an entirely fictional place, or a real one for that matter, gets a bit boring after a while. It feels like The Silmarillion, a book that I could respect, but is more interesting in idea than execution.
Plus, it's a bit jarring to have Mina and Alan look and behave so differently, I don't feel much of a connection to the characters from the previous volumes. And, if I hadn't heard Moore say that the characters became immortal, I'd just be baffled about why they're there.
And, after a while even the comics stuff feels more like spot the reference than a meaningful story. I don't know who a lot of the people he's referencing are, and even when I do, it's just, so Harry Lime is M, that's cool, but it's nowhere near as meaningful as the more developed characters in the previous volumes. It just becomes a bit tedious to hear about a bunch of characters I'm vaguely familiar with doing stuff from other books.
That's not to say there's not good stuff there. The Orlando segment was great, and I enjoyed his Shakespeare pastiche, but that's partially because I know other Shakespeare. I feel like Moore has written a book that only he can fully appreciate, more power to him for that, but between this and Lost Girls, Moore is rapidly becoming the Geoff Johns of Victorian literature, someone who's endlessly remaking the stories he read as a kid, and not bringing as much new to the table. |
|
|
