Review: Lost Girls by Alan Moore
Among comic book lovers there is a holy grail. Well, there are like 897 holy grails BUT my personal holy grail was to get my hands on a copy of Alan Moore’s “Lost Girls.” Alan Moore is my personal comic writer hero who wrote “Watchmen,” “V for Vendetta,” and “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” (among others). A few years ago he wrote a three part adaptation of “Peter Pan,” “The Wizard of Oz,” and “Alice in Wonderland.” Decried for violating the copyright of the original works and, oh yeah, for being child porn, some bookstores won’t carry it. Those that do charge $75, which I do not have. If you should try to get it out of the library or through interlibrary loan the waiting list is 6 months to a year long. Sometimes more.
But my friend Jeff’s new roommate owns (OWNS!) a copy and what’s more she was generous enough to loan me hers (THANK YOU SARA). And so I spent the past week thumbing my nose at the Meese commission.
“Lost Girls” takes place in a hotel in Austria on the eve of World War One. Three women, Dorothy Gale, Wendy Darling, and Alice Fairchild, meet and become friends. They tell each other the stories of their sexual awakening and heal from their wounds. Alice was assaulted by a family friend (nicknamed Bunny) and then became an assistant to a lesbian teacher who drugs her with opium and leads her into a life of decadence. Dorothy works her way through the farm hands on her aunts farm before going to New York City and sleeping with her father. Wendy and her brothers wander out of their parent’s house and befriend a homeless boy and his sister who seduce them but who are themselves terrorized by a wealthy pervert. All three experiences traumatized them but by telling them to the others they free themselves from their pasts. Unfortunately war is breaking out and whether or not they live to enjoy their sexual freedom is left untold.
Meese said that porn was defined as “I know it when I see it.” “Lost Girls” is definitely porn. But it certainly has artistic and literary merit meaning it’s not obscene all la the Miller Test. Okay? Well that out of the way, “Lost Girls” is beautiful and grating, lovely and infuriating and ultimately kind of stupid.
The art is gorgeous. Drawn by Melinda Gebbie in warm pastels, and black and white silhouettes she varies the art between the stories but it is universally stunning. The stories are clever parallels of the original, in my summery above I did a bad job of conveying the correspondence between the sexual events and the events in the original stories. Its very very clever.
During the Victorian era, when these stories were written, sexuality needed to be handled through metaphor and symbolism. The metaphor of the original stories is haunting and beautiful. There is a reason that of all the books written during that period those three stories survived. What Moore has succeeded in doing is simplifying the stories and making everything so so obvious. Once everything is laid out in the open its no longer open to interpretation, readers cannot bring their own experiences to the book. While many can feel that going through puberty is like flying away to neverland (and sex like flying) the hyperspecificity of “lost girls” robs the readers of the mythical experience of storytelling.
Same with the art. While it has been argued (and I agree) that erotica is just porn for rich people, there is something to be said for subtly. “Lost Girls” has orgies and entangled limbs and incest to make De Sade blush but ultimately its just kind of boring. At one point Alice dreams of her first sexual assault. She is being chased through the woods by a monster. This section corresponds to the Jaberwocky section of “Through the Looking glass,” a nonsense poem recited by the Cheshire cat.
“`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
"Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!"”
In “Lost Girls” the Jaberwocky is a giant penis. The effect of combining the horrible (sexual assault) with the surreal (the original poem) is ridiculous and insipid. It reads and looks stupid.
Ultimately that’s the whole book. By trying to transcend the originals Moore adds nothing and takes away everything. It shouldn’t be banned and it shouldn’t be $75, but just because it’s a literary scandal doesn’t make it any good.
But my friend Jeff’s new roommate owns (OWNS!) a copy and what’s more she was generous enough to loan me hers (THANK YOU SARA). And so I spent the past week thumbing my nose at the Meese commission.
“Lost Girls” takes place in a hotel in Austria on the eve of World War One. Three women, Dorothy Gale, Wendy Darling, and Alice Fairchild, meet and become friends. They tell each other the stories of their sexual awakening and heal from their wounds. Alice was assaulted by a family friend (nicknamed Bunny) and then became an assistant to a lesbian teacher who drugs her with opium and leads her into a life of decadence. Dorothy works her way through the farm hands on her aunts farm before going to New York City and sleeping with her father. Wendy and her brothers wander out of their parent’s house and befriend a homeless boy and his sister who seduce them but who are themselves terrorized by a wealthy pervert. All three experiences traumatized them but by telling them to the others they free themselves from their pasts. Unfortunately war is breaking out and whether or not they live to enjoy their sexual freedom is left untold.
Meese said that porn was defined as “I know it when I see it.” “Lost Girls” is definitely porn. But it certainly has artistic and literary merit meaning it’s not obscene all la the Miller Test. Okay? Well that out of the way, “Lost Girls” is beautiful and grating, lovely and infuriating and ultimately kind of stupid.
The art is gorgeous. Drawn by Melinda Gebbie in warm pastels, and black and white silhouettes she varies the art between the stories but it is universally stunning. The stories are clever parallels of the original, in my summery above I did a bad job of conveying the correspondence between the sexual events and the events in the original stories. Its very very clever.
During the Victorian era, when these stories were written, sexuality needed to be handled through metaphor and symbolism. The metaphor of the original stories is haunting and beautiful. There is a reason that of all the books written during that period those three stories survived. What Moore has succeeded in doing is simplifying the stories and making everything so so obvious. Once everything is laid out in the open its no longer open to interpretation, readers cannot bring their own experiences to the book. While many can feel that going through puberty is like flying away to neverland (and sex like flying) the hyperspecificity of “lost girls” robs the readers of the mythical experience of storytelling.
Same with the art. While it has been argued (and I agree) that erotica is just porn for rich people, there is something to be said for subtly. “Lost Girls” has orgies and entangled limbs and incest to make De Sade blush but ultimately its just kind of boring. At one point Alice dreams of her first sexual assault. She is being chased through the woods by a monster. This section corresponds to the Jaberwocky section of “Through the Looking glass,” a nonsense poem recited by the Cheshire cat.
“`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
"Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!"”
In “Lost Girls” the Jaberwocky is a giant penis. The effect of combining the horrible (sexual assault) with the surreal (the original poem) is ridiculous and insipid. It reads and looks stupid.
Ultimately that’s the whole book. By trying to transcend the originals Moore adds nothing and takes away everything. It shouldn’t be banned and it shouldn’t be $75, but just because it’s a literary scandal doesn’t make it any good.
posted by Lark(e) at 2:14 AM
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