Summary
The comic opens on November 5, 1997. Panels cut between London at night and Evey getting ready to go out with a look of concern. The Voice of Fate radio broadcast plays overtop, discussing weather, quarantine zones, meat rationing, a terrorist ring, and the sixteen-year-old Queen Zara. Meanwhile, V puts on his gloves and mask.
Evey propositions a man on the street, asking him to pay her for sex; she says she has a munitions job but needs more money. The man reveals a badge: he is a Fingerman (secret police) on a stakeout. Just as he and his colleagues are threatening Evey by saying they’ll do anything they want and then kill her, V appears, quoting Macbeth. The officer grabs V’s wrist and his hand comes off: from the hole, V sprays tear gas at the Fingermen then grabs Evey and flees. The hand explodes, killing the man holding it and two officers next to him. The two survivors say they’ve got to find V.
On a rooftop with the houses of parliament in the background, V tells Evey it’s a celebration: the anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot. Parliament explodes and V takes credit. Evey and other Londoners are mesmerized by fireworks that go off. V tells Evey to come with him to prepare for the first act. The point of view switches to the Leader receiving reports of the night’s events. He tells Derek Almond, head of the Finger, that he wants the culprit’s head.
In the second chapter, Almond goes to Jordan Tower at seven in the morning and meets with Lewis Prothero, the voice behind the Voice of Fate. Meanwhile, V has brought Evey to The Shadow Gallery, his home. It is full of books, films, and records—remnants from the culture which has been eradicated in society at large. The next panels show Prothero and some military men taking over a train car, barring the entrance of a civilian, claiming it’s full. Prothero talks about his doll collection and how it doesn’t mean he isn’t still a ladies man. V jumps on the roof as the train enters a tunnel. He incapacitates the driver and puts the lights out. Prothero ignites a lighter and suddenly V is sitting next to him.
Mr. Finch and other detectives question Mr. Bishop, the conductor, who says all he saw was a black shape with a face coming in the side window. He felt something like an electric shock then blacked out. Finch inspects the train carriage, where V has left on the wall a V with a circle around it. Finch finds a Violet Carson rose on the seat; he thought they went extinct during the war.
At the Shadow Gallery, V leaves Prothero in a room then goes to see Evey, who is crying. She says she was scared he wouldn’t come back. He says she can call him V, and she says she is Evey Hammond, a nobody. V says everybody is special, everybody is a hero, a lover, a fool, a villain. Evey says she is sixteen, born in 1981 in South London, during the recession. She shows V a photo of her as a child with her parents. V asks if she remembers the war. She does, She was seven: her parents were scared to death, not sure if Britain would be bombed. Her mother told her Africa wasn’t there anymore. She remembers looking from her parents’ back bedroom window when the Thames River barrier burst and London was nearly all underwater, with a yellow and black sky. The weather destroyed the crops; Europe was gone like Africa. Over the next four years there was no food, the sewers flooded, her mother died, there were riots, no government.
Then the fascists and right-wingers got together with the surviving big corporations and formed Norsefire. They marched into London, got things under control, then started taking away black people, Pakistanis, radicals, and homosexuals—she doesn’t know where they took them. When she was twelve her father was taken away for being a socialist, and she was made to work in a factory. She did that for four years, then was going to start sex work. Evey sobs while V reassures her that they made her into a victim, but that’s not the real Evey; she can wipe away all the pain and cruelty and start again. Her nightmare is ending, while Prothero’s is just beginning: he wakes up in a uniform on a bed before a barbed wire fence that says Larkhill Resettlement Camp. Meanwhile, Finch reports to the Leader that V is a psychopath; they discuss how their credibility will suffer if people hear a change in the Voice of Fate.
V dresses in a vaudeville costume to confront Prothero, who claims to have had nothing to do with the resettlement camps, which V calls concentration camps. V says he was there, at Larkhill in 1993. He walks Prothero through the set-like recreation of the camp, calling him Commander. Prothero grows angry when he sees that his dolls are lined up in gray and black striped outfits. Prothero realizes V was the man from Room Five, who they performed medical experiments on. V then reminds Prothero that he used to work the ovens. V burns Prothero’s dolls.
Later, at New Scotland Yard, V incapacitates a guard. The next scene show Almond visiting Roger Dascombe at Jordan Tower. Almond pushes in Prothero in a wheelchair; his face is painted white like a doll’s and the only word he says is mama. The prerecording of the Voice of Fate runs out at eleven o’clock. People can tell something is wrong with the new voice.
The fifth chapter begins on December 12, 1997. The Leader, named Adam Susan, narrates his belief in survival, the destiny of the Nordic race, and the strength in unity of fascism. As he moves through the city, he says freedom died in the war. He takes his seat at his control center and says he worships and loves fate. V speaks to Lady Justice on top of the Old Bailey central criminal court. He says his new mistress is named not Justice but Anarchy, as justice is meaningless without freedom. He sets a heart-shaped box at the statue’s feet; it blows up the statue. Finch questions Prothero, who still sits with his eyes open and repeats "mama," until he eventually is able to say “Room Five.”
Analysis
The comic begins on November 5, 1997, which was fifteen years in the future at the time V for Vendetta was written. November 5 is also a significant date: in the United Kingdom, it is known as Guy Fawkes Day to commemorate the foiled Gunpowder Plot of 1605, which saw Guy Fawkes get caught guarding a stockpile of gunpowder beneath the House of Lords. After torture, he admitted to wanting to blow up the House and assassinate King James I in the hopes of restoring a Catholic to the throne; he was hanged for treason.
While people in Britain traditionally light fireworks and burn effigies of Guy Fawkes on bonfires, the novel’s protagonist V wears a theatrically stylized Guy Fawkes mask, thereby inverting the symbolism and celebrating Guy Fawkes as an anarchist hero. The authors’ decision to use the Guy Fawkes mask for V’s disguise introduces several of the novel’s themes: theatricality, terrorism, government overthrow, and anarchism.
The theme of fascism arises when the Fingermen threaten to rape and kill Evey. Rather than protect citizens, the corrupt police put people in danger. V swoops in to rescue her, thus embodying the need to take justice into individual hands when oppressed by an inequitable state authority. Next, V’s successful bombing of the parliament chambers completes the work that Guy Fawkes set out to do nearly four hundred years earlier.
The motif of music arises when V brings Evey to the Shadow Gallery. Music, among other remnants of culture, had been wiped out by the fascist government, suggesting that these cultural artifacts of individual artistic expression were seen as a threat to state authority.
The theme of individualism comes up again when Evey calls herself a nobody and V corrects her, insisting that everyone is special, capable of inhabiting a multiplicity of roles throughout one’s life. V’s support makes her feel as though she has a story worth telling, and so she details the extraordinary events of her early life.
Through Evey’s story, the reader learns of the historical circumstances that led to the dystopian near-future rendering of Britain where the story is set. Following a nuclear war that devastated other continents, Britain’s government fell. After years of chaos, the fascist, white supremacist, racist, and homophobic Norsefire party took control, promising order at the cost of freedom.
The enigma wrapped around V begins to unravel when he forces Prothero to relive the years they both spent at Larkhill Resettlement Camp, which is an allusion to the German concentration camps of WWII. After being bewildered, Prothero finally realizes that V was the man kept in Room Five. V’s kidnapping and brainwashing of Prothero also serves as a warning to the Norsefire government. With different parts of the state’s propaganda apparatus named for body parts, V has started by taking out the Mouth (i.e. the Voice of Fate). This foreshadows how he will take out the different points until he has incapacitated the government completely.
