THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN: BLACK DOSSIER

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier, by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill: Meh. Alan Moore really, really loves to mimic different literary styles, eras, genres, and media. His imitations are spot-on, and they can be brilliant when woven into a story, but when he layers disembodied supplementary material into his books, it’s often just TOO MUCH for me—from the pirate comic and birdwatching article in Watchmen to Allan Quatermain’s crazy drugged-up vision at the end of the first League volume to…well, most of this book. I appreciate the idea of it, but it loses me in practice. I mean, there’s no question Moore is a genius and I don’t want him to dumb himself down, but for me there’s a point at which being ambitious and challenging just crosses a line into being exhausting and boring. I’m pretty damn detail-oriented and a freakin’ English major to boot, but I also like a good story, and when I have to wade through page after page of densely written, eye-numbingly typeset, and—in my opinion—frequently tedious pastiches, it smacks of authorly self-indulgence. It’s just telling, not showing. I’m happy for the diehard fans who will love delving into all the minute clues and references, but this casual reader did a lot of skimming and eye-rolling. The book (really just a little appendix to the series, meant to lead up to Volume 3) fills us in on Mina and Allan’s doings in the twentieth century (they’ve become immortal), allowing Moore to move forward from Victorian literature (sigh; I liked the Victoriana) to 1984, Jack Kerouac, and Orlando, as well as glancing backward to Shakespeare and Fanny Hill. The framing device, in which Mina and Allan steal the dossier documenting their adventures back from the government, is pretty amusing, especially the highly unflattering portrait of James Bond as a brutal, corrupt misogynist. The dossier itself is what tested my patience, though of course I loved the P.G. Wodehouse parody, “What Ho, Gods of the Abyss,” in which Bertie Wooster narrates how the League narrowly rescued his Aunt Dahlia and her friends from a monster out of H.P. Lovecraft. The book ends with a rather loony but visually awesome 3D sequence, and I was pleased to discover that the 3D glasses were still carefully tucked away in my library copy of the book. I now await Volume 3, Century, with mingled anticipation and trepidation.