Summary
In the eleventh chapter, the toilet paper scroll Valerie left hidden in the cell provides narration. As Evey recalls Valerie’s story, she is being questioned while having her face held in a basin of water. Born in Nottingham in 1957, Valerie realized while she was in high school that she was gay. She told her parents by bringing a girlfriend home and then left home to attend drama school in London. She became a film actress and met Ruth, who she fell in love with. Things changed with the war in 1988: by 1992, the fascists were rounding up the gays. Ruth killed herself in her cell. Valerie’s films were burned, her head was shaved, and she was put on drugs in the cell as she writes. She says she doesn’t know who is reading, but she loves them, and wishes she could kiss them. The chapter ends with Evey kissing the scroll and being sat before a statement that is read to her: the statement says she was abducted by the terrorist known as V, who brainwashed her, sexually abused her, and then had her help with V’s murders. Evey refuses to sign, and the guards are asked to arrange for her to be shot.
In Chapter Twelve, a guard enters Evey’s cell and suggests that she could have a job with the Finger. She says she’d rather die. The guard says that since there's nothing else to threaten her with, she is free, leaving the door open. Evey leaves her cell and finds a mannequin of a guard standing on a platform with wheels. She opens the door to the interrogation room and discovers the man who questioned her was another mannequin; a tape recorder played his reading of the statement. Baffled, she opens another door and walks into the Shadow Gallery, where V welcomes her home. She asks why he tortured her and cut off her hair: he says because he loves her and wants to set her free.
In Chapter Thirteen, Evey continues questioning V’s motives and the paradox of him claiming to want to set her free by putting her in prison. He says she was already in prison; she’s been in prison all her life. He says happiness is a prison. He says he didn’t put her in prison, he just showed her the bars. Evey has the beginnings of an asthma attack, like she used to have as a child. V cradles her and reminds her of how her parents and lover were killed. He tells her that she was calm when she was willing to die too, and asks her to remember how it felt. She said she felt like an angel. Calmer now, she goes with V to the roof, where she stands naked in the rain with her arms outstretched. She doesn’t feel the cold. V says he did the same five years earlier.
The point of view switches to Finch and Stone at their office in the fourteenth chapter. It is September 3, 1998. Six months have passed without any more activity from V, and Stone wonders if it’s all over. Finch is reading a book by Arthur Koestler. In the Shadow Gallery, Evey goes up and kisses V’s mask while he is playing piano. She thanks him for setting her free. She says she realizes he invented Valerie, but V shows her a wall of portraits of Valerie. He says the letter was written by her and delivered to him; she was the woman in Room Four; her words set him free five years earlier. The point of view switches to Rosemary getting prepared to go on at the Kitty-Kat Keller. She is throwing up. The manager puts his hand on her shoulder and offers to stay in the dressing room with her.
In the Shadow Gallery, V shows Evey his roses, one of which she may pick and give to V for the man who killed Gordon. Evey decides to let it grow. In front of his computer screens at the Head, the Leader sees the words I love you flash onscreen. He bolts upright and screams. Rosemary weeps as her manager advances on her sexually. V and Evey dance under a disco ball, discussing what’s next. V says he’s going to give the world what Valerie wanted it to have: a great abundance of roses.
The third book begins with a prologue in which Dominic Stone and Brian Etheridge, at the Ear on November 5, 1998, discuss how they haven’t seen Finch in two weeks. Stone asks Etheridge what he knows about Koestler: he says he used to campaign for the right to die with dignity, then killed himself. Stone says there has been nothing but silence on the terrorist case. Evey, who V now calls Eve, moves an armful of children’s toys out of her room and V puts them in a chest. She asks V if he is going to do something and he confirms he is: the end is nearer than she thinks, all they have to do is choose the right moment to begin.
V goes up to the roof with a music stand and sheet music. At the Head, the Leader asks his computers if he is loved but receives no reply. V pretends to conduct a symphony, watching buildings explode in the distance: The Ear, the Eye, Jordan Tower, and the post office. Stone isn’t in the building but he learns that Etheridge died. The Leader orders Peter Creedy to get transmitters out to reassure the people, but V is already broadcasting, telling the people of London that for three days they won’t be watched or listened to.
In the first chapter of Book Three, a schoolgirl graffitis the word bollocks on the road and spray paints a V on a brick wall. Creedy reports to the Leader, discussing a funeral for Etheridge. The Leader says I love you out of nowhere, causing Creedy some confusion. The Leader says he didn’t say anything. He tells Creedy to shoot any looters. Looting does begin. Meanwhile, Rosemary buys a gun from Alistair Harper, saying she wants to protect herself. When he leaves, she holds her fingers under her chin and says "bang." Creedy shoots a woman in the head for looting. Meanwhile, Eve is doing gymnastics while V listens to the police radio broadcasts through a late seventies radio cassette player. She asks if this is anarchy and he says it is just chaos; with anarchy comes "Ordnung"—an age of true, which is to say voluntary, order.
The confusion (“Verwirrung” in the chapter title) continues in Chapter Two. At the Head, the Leader watches images of bodies being hanged and mass graves while masturbating. At the Shadow Gallery, V explains how anarchy works, saying that the involuntary order of authoritarian societies breeds dissatisfaction. Behind the Kitty Kat Keller, Alistair sells Rosemary the gun she asked for and advises her to get home. When she leaves, Creedy and Finger officers offer him a job. Helen Heyer has her husband Conrad bathe her while she order him around. She goes up to the bed and switches out the light with him in the room; he holds the towel to his face. Stone calls Finch and leaves a message: he says he doesn’t know what he should do. Next to the phone is a crumpled piece of paper that says “registered poison.” V takes Eve to his “secret love nest,” saying he is taking her to meet his mistress, who he says had an affair. He brings Eve to a replica of the Leader’s console at the Head.
Chapter Three begins at the Nose the next day. Creedy arrives as Stone is looking through love letters sent to the people of London. Stone rejects Creedy’s suggestion that their departments should cooperate more in future. At a bar, Creedy talks to Alistair and offers him ongoing work with the Finger, running Creedy’s auxiliary force. Alistair gives to Creedy a bunch of love notes that he found. He then leaves to meet Helen, who says Creedy is planning a coup and wants to be Leader. Helen offers him six hundred pounds per week to keep working for Creedy but remain loyal to her. She says Alistair could be running the Finger soon enough.
While dancing in a chorus line, Rosemary narrates how, during the war, her neighbors helped her with food, only for her to stand by while the government took them away. She says she can’t sleep at night. The point of view moves to Finch, who is alive and is at the gates of Larkhill Resettlement Camp. He narrates to himself that he is there for Delia Surridge. He is where it started, and where it ends. Meanwhile, V has been setting down dominos into the shape of a V with a circle around it. From reading the love letters, Stone puts the pieces together and goes to tell the Leader about how V knows “everything about us and our system.” Stone says V has access to Fate, the computer system. The Leader is watching a single screen with V’s symbol. V tips the first domino.
Analysis
On top of giving Evey the strength to endure the state’s violations of her freedom, Valerie’s story provides further context for the world that existed before the events of V for Vendetta. Valerie’s difficult decision to live openly as a gay person was ruthlessly punished by the state. The arbitrariness and harshness of being punished for her sexuality emphasize how governments have historically—and still do—unfairly exert control on people’s ability to love freely.
While it had appeared as though Evey was being held in an effort to break her spirit and make her sign a document that would condemn V as a terrorist, in an instance of situational irony, her torture and imprisonment turn out to be part of V’s plan to train her as his successor. Though she is incensed to learn that he was the one torturing her, she comes to thank him for helping her tap into the sense of freedom she felt when she had nothing more to lose. V’s efforts can be seen as a test of her morals: though she was facing death or collaboration, Evey chose to die rather than help a ruthless state apparatus.
Valerie’s story takes on additional thematic significance when V reveals that she was a real person, and that she was held in Room Four at Larkhill, in the cell next to his. His discovery of her story inspired him to fight for anarchic freedom, justice, and individuality in the face of fascist oppression that seeks to flatten differences and control minds and lifestyles. While showing Evey his rose garden, V also reveals the symbolic meaning of his blooms: each represents a life to avenge. When he says he plans to give the world a great abundance of roses, he means a large number of people are going to die for the harms they have caused.
By taking out the government’s surveillance capabilities, V sets off purposeful anarchic confusion among the people of London, who are free to loot and live with less fear of repercussion. While panels show the ensuing chaos and the building unease and desperation among the people trying to stop V, V sets down single dominos. The contrasting images suggest that V knows precisely what he is doing in creating chaos.
Simultaneously, Stone realizes that V has access to Fate, thus knowing everything Norsefire has been doing and planning. But it is too late: the V symbol appears on the Leader’s screen, suggesting that V has been toying with the Leader all along, making him fall in love with the computer system as a means of distracting and manipulating him. Ominously, the final panel shows V tipping the first domino, symbolically setting off the topping of the Norsefire regime.
