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Prior to its publication last month, "The Black Dossier" had become almost as legendary as the mysterious tome in its title. This third volume detailing the adventures of the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen—a team made up of Victorian literature’s most colorful heroes and anti-heroes—had been delayed for more than a year, and will not be distributed outside the United States for copyright reasons. While the end product is scaled down in some ways (the sound recording rumored to be included never materialized), it’s no less grand in scope, covering literary figures from nearly the beginning of human history through to the mid-20th century, weaving fantastic tales that manage to illuminate the real world as well as its fictitious one.
 Little black book: Sinister secrets await in the latest installment of "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier." |
"The Black Dossier" diverges from earlier League tales in a number of ways. It’s an original hardcover, not a collection of a previously released monthly mini-series. It features only two members of the team from the other two volumes—"Dracula" heroine Mina Murray and explorer Allan Quartermain, now rejuvenated after a dip in an African fountain of youth. And most importantly, it largely leaves behind the familiar Victorian steampunk setting, instead introducing readers to a post-WWII London taken over by a brutal, familiar totalitarian regime that has disavowed any knowledge of the League even as it acts to erase the team’s remaining members from history.
That’s where the black dossier comes into play. The book tells the secret history of the League, and it goes way beyond when Murray founded her group in the 1890s. This allows Moore to play with all kinds of toys, bringing in a diverse cast that includes Shakespeare’s Prospero, bawdy "woman of pleasure" Fanny Hill, Gulliver from Gulliver’s Travels, Big Brother from 1984 and 20th-century spy extraordinaire James Bond, among others. But the MVP of the piece is Orlando, the immortal sex-changing rogue best known from the eponymous Virginia Woolf novel and its film adaptation. Orlando’s origin here is greatly enhanced, with Moore Forrest Gump-ing him/her into nearly every major event in human history, fighting or fucking with countless legends.
As usual, Moore takes liberties with the art of storytelling, mimicking nearly a dozen literary styles (a Shakespearean play, English travelogue, pulp comic strip and Beat poetry among them). Ultimately, he experiments with the role of the reader, as "The Black Dossier" is the black dossier the characters themselves are reading, and by the epilogue the reader himself is directly brought into the story as a semi-active participant. (It’s no accident that this final section is rendered in spectacular, eye-popping 3-D, specialty glasses included.)
It’s easy to say that each new work by Moore is his greatest achievement, and "Black Dossier" is certainly up there in his storied career. But the book has its faults. It works much better as an encyclopedia of famous British characters than it does an actual adventure, as the search for and escape with the black dossier seems like an afterthought amidst the fascinating, dense passages dedicated to exploring the various characters. Moore is also exceedingly self-indulgent with his cameos and in-jokes. By the end of the book, hundreds of characters have appeared or been alluded to and, unless you’ve extensively studied even the most obscure Brit literary references, you’re undoubtedly going to be missing lots of them. That includes major plot points; a bizarre, arguably racist character introduced late in the book plays an important role, but there are few clues as to who he is, what he is, and why the hell he’s doing what he’s doing.
Your best bet for full enjoyment is to search the Web for annotated notes to explain all the ins and outs, because Moore certainly doesn’t make it easy. But that isn’t really his job. His goal here is to blow the dust off of some of literature’s most amazing creations and to show that, no matter how old and creaky they may seem, the power of pure imagination never gets old. Would that we were all so lucky.
