60 pages • 2 hours read
Alan MooreV for Vendetta
Alan MooreFiction | Graphic Novel/Book | Adult | Published in 1990A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Book 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Book 3: “The Land of Do-As-You-Please”
Prologue Summary
Each page in the prologue, which takes place on November 5, 1998, ends with a page-width panel showing V waving a conductor’s baton over London. On one page, Dominic searches for Finch, who has been acting strangely. On another, the Leader stands before the Fate supercomputer and begs it for a sign that it truly loves him. Jordan Tower explodes, and Conrad and Helen Heyer panic about what the Mouth will tell the country. Creedy tells the Leader about the bombings; he says that they cannot broadcast a message about it because the airwaves are in use by someone pretending to be the Voice of Fate. The Voice tells London that in honor of the anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot, for three days their actions and conversations will not be surveilled, “and ‘do what thou wilt’ shall be the whole of the law” (187).
Chapter 1 Summary: “Vox Populi”
Chapter 2 Summary: “Verwirrung”
Evey asks if London is now experiencing anarchy. V says that they are currently in chaos and that true voluntary order will come after. He says that while authoritarian control is intricate, it thinly veils the unrest beneath.
The Leader watches videos of the chaos on Fate’s screens and fantasizes about his relationship with the computer. Rosemary buys a gun from Alastair. Creedy hires Alastair to find him gangsters to serve as “extra muscle” for the Finger. V tells Evey that authoritarians will do vile things to maintain control, but they’ll fail without justice and liberty.
Helen wants to instate Conrad as the new leader. Dominic calls Finch but reaches his answering machine repeatedly. He says that there are “problems” with the Leader but cannot say more over the phone.
V leads Evey to a new part of the Shadow Gallery, where he reveals that he has control over the Fate supercomputer.
Chapter 3 Summary: “Various Valentines”
Creedy meets with Alastair and offers him extra money for his loyalty. Alastair then meets with Helen, who offers him more money to work as a double agent.
Rosemary, who still works as a cabaret dancer, thinks about what she has sacrificed for survival. Finch travels to the remnants of Larkhill.
V creates an encircled “V” symbol with dominoes, whose complex layout can topple with the smallest disruption. Dominic tells the Leader that V has been controlling the Fate supercomputer. An illustration shows V toppling the first domino as Fate displays V’s symbol.
Chapter 4 Summary: “Vestices”
On November 7 at Larkhill, Finch takes LSD to get into V’s frame of mind. He looks at the human ovens and wonders if he would have joined Norsefire if he had known about them.
He hallucinates that he sees a group of people of diverse races, sexualities, and ideologies—he realizes that their diversity made them beautiful and repents what happened to them. He imagines that he sees Delia, his former lover, as well as the Bishop and Prothero, who interrogate him and take him to Room V. Distressed, he realizes that he has imprisoned himself and he can set himself free. Ecstatic, he plunges naked into the nearby water, celebrating his rebirth.
Chapter 5 Summary: “The Valediction”
Evey presses V about his plans. She has spent months reading and learning and is frustrated by V’s vague answers. He leads Evey around the Shadow Gallery and explains the functions of the rooms to her. He prepares her to take care of his rose garden in the future. As V tells Evey about how anarchy needs both destroyers and creators, they relocate explosives to an underground train V has planted with flowers. He continues to sidestep Evey’s questions.
Chapter 6 Summary: “Vectors”
A series of single-panel illustrations on November 9 show the Leader sitting before Fate, Rosemary with a gun under her pillow, V’s underground train car, and Finch walking alone down a deserted road.
Helen and Conrad begin to get intimate as she eats chocolates. When Conrad tries to escalate things, she shoves a chocolate in his mouth and says he can have “the rest of the box” when he is leader (225). Later, she and Alastair have sex. Helen thinks that the cameras have been disabled, though in reality they’ve been rerouted to the Shadow Gallery, where V watches.
Still trying to retrace V’s footsteps, Finch enters the closed-down Victory tube station.
Chapter 7 Summary: “Vindication”
As the Leader prepares to address the citizens, he thinks about his childhood faith in God. He now sees the Fate supercomputer as God.
Finch comes across V’s train car in the London Underground, where V takes him unaware. Meanwhile, Rosemary approaches the Leader, gun drawn. As Rosemary shoots and kills the Leader, Finch shoots V. Though V walks away, he has been mortally wounded.
Chapter 8 Summary: “Vultures”
Creedy makes a statement about the Leader’s assassination. Finch interrupts with news that he shot V. When Dominic asks Finch where their confrontation took place, Finch lies and says he doesn’t remember.
Conrad is delivered a parcel that contains a video recording of Helen cheating on him with Alastair. Creedy broadcasts a notice to the populace, saying that V has been fatally shot, and if he doesn’t appear to them before midnight, he is dead. As it plays, Alastair kills Creedy.
V finds Evey just before collapsing.
Chapter 9 Summary: “The Vigil”
Evey holds V as he dies. He tells her to discover whose face is behind the mask without knowing his face. He requests a “Viking funeral” and tells her he loves her and good luck before he dies.
Evey contemplates V’s final riddle and plays through several scenarios of what would happen if she took away his mask. In one scenario, she removes the mask and sees the younger version of herself. She then decides that she knows “who V must be” (250). A page-width illustration shows Evey smiling V’s wide smile.
Chapter 10 Summary: “The Volcano”
On November 9 at 9:30 pm, Finch tells Dominic that he is leaving his position as head of the Nose and advises Dominic to do the same. Alastair enters the Heyer’s house looking for Helen but comes across Conrad, who attacks him. Conrad kills him but is fatally wounded. When Helen comes home, she is angry that Conrad’s death means her plans have failed. As her “parting gift” to Conrad, she sets up a camera so he can watch himself die.
People gather outside, waiting to see if V will appear at midnight. Evey appears dressed in V’s mask and cape. She tells the civilians that Downing Street will be blown up tomorrow and that by embracing anarchy, they can bloom anew from the rubble surrounding them.
A man stumbles away from the riots, and Evey, as V, saves him.
Chapter 11 Summary: “Valhalla”
On November 10, at 2 am, Evey puts V’s body in the underground train car loaded with explosives and sends it down the line toward Downing Street. She walks to the roof and realizes that V had been preparing her to succeed him. She takes her mask off to watch as Downing Street blows up in the distance.
Disguise back on, Evey returns to the young man she saved. She welcomes him to the Shadow Gallery with the same words V used to welcome her.
As Finch walks through London, he sees Helen. She clings to him, calling him by the wrong name, and begs him to join her in restoring order to the country. Finch pushes her away. The final illustrations show Finch walking away from the city into the darkness beyond.
Book 3 Analysis
This book emphasizes The True Nature of Anarchy and the way it is opposed to its opposite, fascism. Anarchy can be over-simplified or mischaracterized as a lawless, violent system with no rules and no consequences. In Chapter 2, when the country is embroiled in chaos, Evey asks V if this is what anarchy is like. V clarifies that “anarchy means ‘without leaders’ not ‘without order.’ With anarchy comes an age of ordnung, of true order, which is to say voluntary order” (195). V’s goal is not to foment chaos but to destroy the hierarchies that striate Norsefire society. Hierarchies collate power at the top and disempower those at the bottom.
Anarchy, unlike fascism, decentralizes power; this is shown through the ambiguous character of V himself. V’s defining characteristic is his lack of identifiable physical characteristics. He could be anyone, and therefore, he is everyone. After V’s death, Evey realizes that if she takes off V’s mask to see his face, “something will go away forever, be diminished because whoever you are isn’t as big as the idea of you” (250). This Perseverance of Ideas and Symbols is what makes V and the ideology he represents immortal. His Guy Fawkes mask does not symbolize anything personal about V, but rather, about everything V represents: anarchy, freedom, liberty, perseverance, justice, etc. When V is killed, Evey can don his mask and carry on their ideological mission, which is not tied to V as a single person.
This sits in stark opposition to the way that Norsefire operates. Norsefire, like all fascist regimes, centralizes its power in a cult of personality around a small number of people. Systems like these historically don’t have longevity because their power is tied to individuals, making them vulnerable if those individuals are killed. The first large fracture in Norsefire comes when V kidnaps Prothero, who acts as the Voice of Fate, one of the most important Interconnected Tools of Fascism. This presents a problem for the Leader, who has used Fate to justify his power. Though Norsefire is aggressive and totalitarian, its authority is so centralized that it is extremely fragile, like the dominoes V sets up. In response to the Leader’s death, the government declares a state of emergency, and Helen says, “This country’s a political vacuum. Nobody’s in charge” (239). Without the individuals within whom Norsefire has collated its power and authority, the fascist system falls apart.
This final book uses Rosemary and Finch to elaborate on the ability and responsibility of individual citizens to hold their governments accountable. Rosemary is disillusioned with Norsefire on a personal level: Without Almond, she is without protection and security, denied a pension, and forced to dance in a cabaret. Finch is disillusioned on a systemic level: He realizes with horror that he’s turned a blind eye to the genocidal actions of the government he works for and has therefore enabled them. Rosemary and Finch enact great change in two different ways. As Rosemary walks toward the Leader to kill him, she thinks that she is “insignificant,” and yet “history’s moving my legs” (234); Rosemary is one woman, but as V says in Book 1, “everyone is special” (26), and Rosemary knows that one woman’s actions are capable of changing history.
While Rosemary enacts change through violence and can therefore be considered one of anarchy’s “destroyers,” Finch can be seen as a “creator.” He chooses not only to leave his job at the Nose but to leave London behind entirely. He denies Helen’s request to build a new order with her and walks away from London down a dark highway toward “Hatfield and the North” (265). This symbolizes his desertion of the previous systems he participated in and his pursuit of something new. Finch’s individual journey parallels the choice Britain faces as a whole: To return to the system they once knew or walk forward into the dark unknown. Though the book does not answer this question, Finch’s individual decision leaves the reader with hope for the country.
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