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I have a feeling that “but it’s all back-story/exposition” may well be on its way to becoming the default criticism of the book and I kind of want to join with Sleaze in starting the counter-insurgency now. To begin with, I think that’s a pretty reductive reading. The ‘back-story’ is still a story, charting the history of the league and its principle players, whilst simultaneously fleshing out the rest of the world and the major beats in its development. It’s hardly a series of boring facts, or simply a shallow exercise in literary referencing, a criticism which, I think it’s fair to say,could be directed at some sections of the almanac in Volume 2. For example, major historical events such as Gloriana’s reign and Jacob’s slaughter of the fairies, briefly alluded to by Orlando in hir back-story, are, further down the road, given real-world emotional clout and weight when we’re dropped right into the action in Faerie’s Fortunes Founded. This stuff isn’t some dull, lifeless aside in a travel-journal. Pysse and Shytte’s hatred of their Queen packs a nasty, doom-laden punch because we know where this is leading. And the tragedy of the death of magic in England is made tragic only because we catch a glimpse of Gloriana’s court and what might have been. And this is, of course, what the dossier’s about – to breathe life into all the nooks and crannies of the League’s universe. In this respect, it’s has the opposite effect to the almanac in that it animates the cold data compiled in the text sections of 2.
The 3rd League is as brilliant an evocation of the dream-world of 50s Britain as the first two books were of the fictitious late 19th century. The style, iconography and artifacts of 50s Britain are still prevalent in my g/f’s Grandad’s living room; the headscarves worn by grannies in Sainsbury’s on my Sunday shopping run; the suburban sprawl extending, halo-like around the fringes of our towns… I could go on forever. This isn’t stuff I would expect an American to be familiar with – it’s not as though Macmillan’s Britain is as easily recognizable as Disraeli’s; Victorian London is, afterall the romantic subject of so many films, whereas its predecessor in 1958 isn’t – and it might not therefore be quite as beguiling to foreign eyes as a consequence. Which is a shame because, from the atomic age space port to the sea-side chintz of the B & B, O’Neill’s pen really nails the time and place he and Moore set out to capture; filled with spies, clean, modernist lines and fish and chips.
I guess, in large part, there’s something distinctly unmagical about the comic-book sections of the ‘story’, which I think serves the dramatic one-two, one-two of the narrative very well. By the time we get to the church the weird and incredible back-story has reached fever-pitch in the pages of the dossier, but, on the ground, we could be forgiven for forgetting, in the case of Mina and Quartermain, just who we are dealing with - our heroes having spent a good portion of the book hitching with traveling sales-people across a drab, rain-drenched England, bedding down in soon-to-be-demolished slums straight out of the first two books and basically living out of a brown suitcase. And this is precisely why the denouement is so successful. Whose face didn’t burst into a smile when Drummond (and the reader both) finds himself confronted with the sight of Gally-wag’s airship preparing for take off? It’s the point at which the old-world banality of 50’s Britain - the tabloid headlines, the brown, woolly tank-tops and the aforementioned fish and chips - meet the imagination, wonder and psychedelia of the 1960’s, waiting just around the corner. It’s the moment the impossible bursts out of the margins and we, like the hulking antagonist, are left awe-struck and can, slack-jawed, only ask:
“Who are you people?”
And know they are all our most outrageous fictions made flesh.
Or at least that’s what it did for me.
Indeed, the idea that the final sequence is in any way abrupt seems to me to make no sense at all. We’ve been building up to the moment the Blazing world comes bursting into view for three books now. The first intimations of other-dimensional environments begin with Volume 1 and slowly, slowly embed themselves in our understanding of the league-verse over the space of hundreds of pages of comic and text. By the time we reach the 170th (?) page of the Dossier, I’d imagine most of us are getting tired of being teased with the idea of the fourth dimension and are more than ready to see it for ourselves. It’s dangled in front of us for most of the last book – of course it’s where Mina and Quartermain are headed! I can’t understand why anyone would assume otherwise.
I also find something terribly moving about the fact that it’s Gally-wag who carries us there. That this unspoken, willfully forgotten symbol of the British empire – this tool of oppression – should be so beautifully turned on its head, insisting on being seen and celebrated; that it should be an arrow pointing to a world of freedom ‘untarnished by all subterfuge or spies, unshackled from mundane authorities’, well, there’s something quite wonderful about that. Perhaps I’m not expressing myself well – perhaps there is something problematic about the use of this figure – but I really dug him. Especially when he kicked the baddies’ collective ass (which, I should add was also made doubly exciting because of the lack of magic preceding it).
Of course, we’re not really able to reach the blazing world without the assistance of another creakingly (or so I thought!) anachronistic tour guide – the ‘blink-wear’! There’s something so perfect about the poetry of having to don a pair of 3D specs in order to properly experience the end of a book largely concerning itself with the 50’s. The glasses make sense historically, thematically and are, ultimately, enormous fun, if your willing to just play along. The 3D work is incredibly detailed. There are so many highlights: the glowing pyramid, the characters’ ascent up to the party-level (truly vertiginous – I’ve dreamt about those slippery elevator-bubbles!), the Just So animals… The shifting Nyarlothep. He was fucking brilliant. Well done, Moore, O’Neill and Ray Zone. It would be easy to knock Moore for gallavanting off into familiar territory, but it’s all, as Sleaze points out above, so much fun that I can ignore the Socratic lecture-disguised-as-conversation stuff, allowing myself to be blindsided by sky fish, worm-headed courtiers, Giants and the general awesomeness of it all. To be honest, I wanted to clap as Prospero proceeded towards his tower, Caliban and Ariel in tow; and the final page seemed to erupt with thunder and Moore’s booming voice as the music swelled and the curtain fell.
As you can see, I thought this book was alright. |
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