Summary
At the Shadow Gallery on December 15, Evey asks V if there is some way she can help him. Five days later, at Westminster Abbey, the bishop Anthony Lilliman delivers a sermon about the scourging rain of “that dreadful night” that granted one race respite from God’s wrath. After the sermon, Almond and his wife speak with Conrad Heyer, head of the Eye (video surveillance), and his wife, Helen. Helen teases her husband for being England’s highest-paid voyeur; Almond’s wife Rosemary says she is hard on him, and Almond tells her to shut up. Viewing this scene from the window, the bishop and his butler discuss the sermon. The butler tells the bishop his young lady has arrived, but due to a mix up she is fifteen—older than he usually prefers his girls to be. The butler opens the door to Evey, dressed in pink and looking nervous and shy. The butler closes the door on them. V picks a purple rose from his greenhouse at the Shadow Gallery.
Chapter Seven begins with the butler having a drink with the guards at the gate. Inside, Evey asks the bishop if she can open a window. He tells her she should never ignore the inexpressible longings of a primal impulse. They go to his lavish bedroom. Evey sits on the bed while he begins reading some scripture, which she requests. As he reads about satanic evils, V kills the guards. The bishop attempts to remove Evey’s dress; she hits him in the face with a lamp. He calls her a whore and threatens to kill her. V appears and removes his hat, revealing two devil horns showing through his bangs. The lights go dark. At the Ear, two men complain about the lack of people having sex on a Sunday night for them to eavesdrop on. They tune in to the bishop’s home for “children’s hour.” They hear V talking and alert Almond.
In Chapter Eight, Finch and Almond meet at Westminster Abbey. V’s symbol is on the wall. They find a purple rose in the dead bishop’s hand. At the ear the next day, they listen to the recording of the murder. Beethoven’s Fifth is playing, making it hard to discern the conversation. Finch says the famous Da Da Da Dum motive is Morse code for the letter V.
Finch and Almond investigate at Westminster Abbey and figure that the girl was an accomplice. V played the record until a part in the conversation in which the bishop says of course he remembers the night regarding Room Five—he hasn’t stopped dreaming about it in four years: men burning, choking in yellow fog. He asks who V is and V says he is the devil, come to do the devil’s work. The detectives discuss how V reads out Psalm 23 from the Bible. Then Dennis enters and is killed. Then V and the bishop talk about transubstantiation, when a communion wafer (the host) becomes the body of Christ. V holds out something for the bishop to eat, saying he wants him to swallow it. Then there’s a funny noise, and then just Beethoven’s Fifth. Finch says the host V gave the bishop was full of cyanide poison. Finch asks the autopsy doctor, Delia Surridge, to investigate the Violet Carson rose.
In Chapter Nine, Evey is distressed that she participated in helping V murder the bishop. V sits calmly in a chair and reassures her, saying she’ll learn. In Knightsbirdge, Almond punches his wife Rosemary in the face when she tries to address issues in their relationship. He sends her to bed and cleans his gun. Evey tells V at the Shadow Gallery that she won’t kill anyone again. Dr. Surridge returns to her home and stares at the purple rose. V reads to Evey until she falls asleep. At the Nose, Finch makes the connection between Room Five and the roman numeral V; he realizes all of V’s victims once worked at Larkhill. At Surridge’s home, she wakes to the smell of roses and finds that V is in her room. She seems relieved when he confirms that he has come to kill her. The chapter ends with Almond waking his wife and pointing his gun at her face. He pretends to shoot but it isn’t loaded. He tells her not tonight.
Chapter Ten begins at the Nose, where Finch and Dominic Stone realize Surridge is V’s next target. They make an anxious call to Almond. At Delia’s house, she says she always knew V would come to kill her, after the inhuman experiments she and the others administered at Larkhill. Almond gets the call and drives to Delia’s. V gives her a rose and says that he already killed her ten minutes ago; he injected her when she was asleep. He says there’ll be no pain. She asks to see his face and he lifts his mask: she says it’s beautiful. In the hall, Almond points his gun at V but it isn’t loaded. V lunges at him and kills him. Stone gives Finch Surridge’s diary, thinking it will give them the story of what happened at Larkhill.
In Chapter Eleven, Finch updates the Leader and tells him that V is carrying out a vendetta. Finch reads aloud key excerpts from Surridge’s diary. She arrived at Larkhill on April 30, 1993 and met Commander Prothero. The diary details monthly updates on hormone therapy experiments she carried out. Most subjects—largely made up of non-white people and homosexuals—died, but the man in Room Five (V) had no physical abnormalities. He did, however, go insane, and develop a strangely magnetic personality. She noted that his face is very ugly. They let him work at gardening projects, and crop production doubled. He grew beautiful roses.
V’s cubicle became covered in junk and piles of ammonia. Using these gardening supplies, V created a large explosion that blew up the camp with napalm and produced a cloud of yellow mustard gas. She saw V standing naked against the flames and saw him looking at her as if she were nothing. The camp closed and V escaped. Finch concludes by saying some of the diary pages were torn out, so V only left what he wanted them to read. They discuss motives, debating whether V is getting revenge or clearing ground for people who could identify him, and wondering whether he has something bigger in the works. Book 1 ends with the Leader wishing Finch a happy Christmas.
Book 2 opens with a prelude of words and music for a song V plays called “This Vicious Cabaret,” about culture being eradicated. Beneath the song are images of Almond’s wife learning from a government letter that she won’t receive widow’s compensation, Evey watching videos and looking at photos of her family, and the Leader looking at computer screens in his office.
Analysis
As part of V’s efforts to train Evey to be his successor, he enlists her help by using her as bait in an attack against bishop Lilliman. As a Christofascist organization, Norsefire depends on the bishop to transmit propaganda through his sermons. However, the words he preaches to the docile public obscure his vicious and predatory behavior as a rapist of young girls.
To emphasize the hypocrisy of the bishop’s malevolence, V kills him with a poison-filled wafer—an act that desecrates the supposedly holy ritual of taking communion. V’s theatricality is evident in this gesture; so too in the imagery of the horns he reveals when he takes off his hat. If the bishop is meant to represent God, them V must be the devil.
Stone manages to see the connections between V’s targets and Larkhill Resettlement Camp. In an instance of dramatic irony, in which the reader knows something V does not, Finch and Stone dispatch Almond to Surridge’s house, having realized that she must be the next target. However, the irony inverts, and we see that V is already in her bedroom. To add to the irony, she is relieved that V has come to kill her, suggesting that she knew the day would come and she wants the anxiety of waiting to end.
Of all his murders, V’s approach to Dr. Surridge shows the most compassion. Because she is the only participant of Larkhill who shows remorse, V kills her with a painless injection. Surridge’s diary provides an opportunity for the story to explain more of V’s enigmatic origins and provides an explanation for the murders he carries out.
As an inmate at the Larkhill concentration camp, euphemistically referred to as a “resettlement camp,” V was subjected to medical experiments that killed all the other victims. The effects of the treatment led him to develop a magnetic personality and an interest in gardening. These details foreshadow how V used his charm to secure the gardening supplies that allowed him to build a bomb and mustard gas, reducing the Larkhill camp to rubble. This is V’s first destructive act of rebellion, and foreshadows his later terrorism against the fascist Norsefire government.
