Source
Alan Moore's Lost Girls opens Michael Faber's eyes to Wendy, Alice and Dorothy as they have never been seen before
Saturday January 5, 2008
The Guardian
Lost Girls
by Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie
We'll get to the anal sex, horse masturbation and in a minute. But first, some questions: what if ET had landed in Birmingham during Thatcher's reign? What if Dr Jekyll, Mina Harker and Captain Nemo teamed up against Moriarty and Fu Manchu? What if the superheroes of the cold war era really existed, but must now contend with alcoholism, divorce, old age and mental illness? Welcome, if you're a newcomer, to the universe of Alan Moore. In works such as The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Skizz and Watchmen, he has distinguished himself as a literary reinventor, a man for whom the fictions of the past 150 years have the status of ancient mythology, to be retold in whatever audacious new forms the teller wishes.
Despite Moore's appetite for liaisons with the heroes and heroines of the past, he is sometimes foiled by his nemesis: copyright. Many of the juiciest characters are forbidden fruit, fastidiously protected by legal guardians. And so it has proved with Lost Girls, a sumptuous three-volume work of graphic erotica which Moore and his companion Melinda Gebbie laboured for 16 years to produce. The protagonists are reinventions of Lewis Carroll's Alice, Frank L Baum's Dorothy and JM Barrie's Wendy, united in a multi-orgasmic compendium that has been available overseas since 2006, but blocked from sale in the UK until now.
Why? In Barrie's will, the copyright of Peter Pan was gifted to Great Ormond Street Hospital, which meant that all uses of Peter's pal Wendy must be officially approved. Or must they? The true extent and duration of GOSH's copyright has been contested for many years. If Moore had put Wendy into a less provocative story, the hospital would probably have turned a blind eye. In Lost Girls, however, Wendy's first encounter with the Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up leaves her blissfully anointed with sperm.
On December 31 2007, Peter Pan passed into public domain, freeing Lost Girls to be sold in UK bookstores. This does not mean that the risk of prosecution for copyright infringement was the sole anxiety surrounding Lost Girls. The fact that its heroines are icons of children's literature, shown having sex from the age of 14 onwards, aroused fears that retailers and buyers might be charged with possession of child pornography. Granted, the book (all three and a half kilos of it) couldn't be more arty if it was hand-crafted by William Blake and annotated by John Berger. But there's no escaping the sense that the enchanted childhoods of Wonderland, Neverland and Oz are undermined when Alice the elderly says "Dorothy, dear, perhaps you might tell Wendy and I more about your farmyard fucking while we amuse ourselves?" Whatever the legal technicalities, it would be wise not to underestimate the offence that some people may take.
Ironically, like so many works of literature that provoke indignation, Lost Girls is a deeply moral work, both serious and sincere. Moore and Gebbie, appalled by the forensic soullessness of modern porn, are on a mission to reconcile fine art, philosophical depth, strong characterisation and hardcore thrills. Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain is just one of many literary classics evoked, as a disparate group of guests gather at the Hotel Himmelgarten on the eve of the first world war. Lifelong lesbian Alice (now Lady Fairchild) strikes up a friendship with Wendy Potter, a repressed bourgeois wife, and Dorothy, a young American yokel. Together they make a day-trip to Paris, attend the riotous premiere of Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps and, flushed with excitement in the aftermath, resolve to confess their most intimate secrets in a ménage à trois.
Monsieur Rougeur, the Himmelgarten's owner, is happy to encourage them; he's an amateur pornographer who has placed, in each room, a copy of his White Book - stories and illustrations purportedly by the cream of Europe's decadents. Lost Girls is liberally supplemented with excerpts from this forgery, allowing Gebbie to demonstrate her flair for impersonating Beardsley, Mucha, Schiele and Franz von Bayros. Gebbie also draws each woman's reminiscences in carefully differentiated styles, framed with mirror-shaped ovals (for Alice), tall window-like apertures (for Wendy) and wide "landscape" oblongs (for Dorothy). Largely executed in coloured pencils, Lost Girls is softer-focus and less startling than Gebbie's earlier work in American underground comics, but it is a major achievement none the less.
In one of the most lushly rendered sequences, "The Twister", 15-year-old Dorothy, convinced she will die as her house is buffeted by a tornado, decides that she can "do what the heck I liked", and frigs herself to a climax that's surreally mingled with the twister's impact. Post-orgasm, Dorothy's world looks forever changed, an Oz of rainbow sexuality, as if she'd been "put down someplace else in some whole other country". Similarly, the "Come Away, Come Away" chapter ends with a wickedly charming vision of Peter, Wendy and her wanking brothers flying high above the rooftops of Edwardian London. Seldom since the advent of mass-market porn has so much aesthetic energy been expended on masturbation.
Moore strives to differentiate the voices of each of his heroines: prairie American for Dorothy, prim English middle-class for Wendy, regal posh for Alice. In truth, the dialogue is shaky, frequently eroded by Moore's poor grasp of American vernacular ("Pity's sake," says Dorothy, "I ain't curtsied or nothin! Whatever must you think o' me?"), his grandiloquence (Le Sacre impresses Alice as "not unlike those opium moments where our memory and our anticipation, all our was and will-be is made gloriously muddled in the luminescent blur of now") and the inherent absurdities of pornspeak ("I'm going to give this prick-hungry American tart the sore quim she's so evidently begging for").
Moore's greatest strength, apart from the prodigious fertility of his imagination, is structure. A work of pornography that is 16 years in the making ought to be plotlessly incoherent, fitfully improvised and full of premature climaxes. Lost Girls is a sophisticated, cunningly conceived narrative that builds with Tantric sureness towards its finale. The sex, genteel and understated in Volume 1, escalates in frenzy as the protagonists' need to confront their suppressed traumas grows, until no porn can be porny enough to mask the sadness of children frightened to grow up. The damage done by comes into stark focus when Alice is ready at last to acknowledge the "moral mirror-world" of abuse she fell into, Dorothy confesses the ways in which her father "weren't no wizard", and Wendy relates the sordid fate of her beloved Peter.
In fact, as the shadow of war engulfs the Himmelgarten, Lost Girls reveals itself to be an elegy for lost innocence. Rougeur and his increasingly vulnerable guests demonstrate that they are only too well aware of the difference between pornography and reality. "Fiction and fact: only madmen and magistrates cannot discriminate between them," he says, before disappearing into the night. Lost Girls, despite its sometimes over-explicit philosophising, is ultimately a humane and seductive defence of the inviolable right to dream.
Get it here.
Matriarch
0 likes