I read Alan Moore’s latest, Lost Girls, about two weeks ago. It’s taken me a while to digest it, and only until now I understood it was because I was torn between my emotional and intellectual responses to the book.
What follows is more of a commentary on the book than a review. It’ll contain what people might consider spoilers, so those who haven’t read the book and wish to be surprised should consider themselves warned.
Alan Moore himself has stated that his intention with Lost Girls was to explore sex. On a Science Fiction Weekly interview, he stated that “the only genre in which sex can be discussed is a disreputable, seamy, under-the-counter genre with absolutely no standards”. He sets out to do pornography, and he succeeds marvelously.
The Oxford dictionary defines pornography as
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printed or visual material containing the explicit depiction or display of sexual organs or activity, intended to stimulate erotic rather than the aesthetic or emotional feelings
And explicit depiction they deliver.
You’ve got it all. Straight sex. Shoe fetishes. Rape. Homosexuality. Lesbianism. Bestialism. Domination. Opium-addicted whores. Orgies. Teenage orgies. Incest. Child prostitution. Domination. War and murder. Moore manages to cram into this book every little bit of sexual material one can think of but Santorum in exceedingly graphic detail (both visual and verbal). It absolutely oversteps my relatively tame tastes, goes so far beyond that at several points I felt repulsed by what was going on and had to leave further reading for another day.
After a certain point I ended up becoming inured to the display, and luckily so - it allowed me to pretty much ignore all the parental rape going on and concentrate on what’s actually a very well crafted, exquisitely illustrated story.
In the off chance you don’t already know what it is about, Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, Wendy from Peter Pan and Alice from Alice in Wonderland meet in a hotel in Austria and proceed, in very short order, to fuck each other and while doing so share stories of their past.
Lost Girls, you see, assumes the original novels as candy-coated rose-tinted-lenses exceedingly-sanitized versions of what really happened, and Moore obligingly tells us. Using is talent for formalism he interweaves the three past tales with the lurid events going on in the Hotel Himmelgarten on what turns out to be the eve of World War I. Each separate thread carries its own particular page structure, visual flare and narrative style, depending on who the main character is (or if we’re looking at the story from an objective point of view).
But what kept me coming back to wasn’t just his take on the classic tales, which oscillates between imaginative (Alice), pedestrian (Dorothy) and heart-breaking (Wendy). It was the fact that besides all the effort dedicated to the pornography, the book structure itself and the setting, Moore still manages to sneak in a common thread about the loss of innocence and how we surrender to desires and actions we would at some point have considered abhorrent, while possibly at the same time deceiving ourselves about our true intentions and wishes.
Dorothy slowly discovers her desires, and begins experimenting with them willingly, slowly opening herself up to further adventures, until the most basic restraint is thrown out the window at the cusp of her tale.
Alice, on the other hand, is introduced to the world of sex against her will. Raped by a family friend, she cautiously begins experimenting with women while adolescent. The most calm and collected of the three while at the stories ‘present time’, she seems to always be controlled directed by someone else in her youth, even when she willingly allows herself to be debased by these stronger figures.
Wendy… Just thinking of her story makes me sigh.
The other three are a mostly straightforward imaging of the let’s see what he does for the Caterpillar type. They feel like someone (a very talented someone, mind you) wondering how to turn a classic tale into porn. Moore’s revision of Peter Pan starts out that way, but much like it happens on Barry’s tale to any children but Peter, it gradually losses its original innocence - a word oddly out of place in a story that begins with two underage brothers masturbating each other while their sister is fucked by a street urchin - and begins growing into something a lot older, closer to how the real world operates, and thus extremely dangerous for children.
Wendy grows up faster than Peter here as well, and even if Peter is After Tinkerbell is raped and murdered and our little Wendy confronts Hook, her eyes are older than Lovecraft’s gods and her words full of poison. She’s a old woman at 13, angry over life’s injustices, who has just realized that hitting the weak spot in a man’s insecurities can just make them crumble to dust. She’s really the one that destroys Hook in this tale, while Peter is hiding his fear behind bravado and claims that he’ll set up traps and ambushes.
Peter ends up growing too, which might be the saddest bit of it all. In the brief look we are afforded at his future, Moore shows us a soul that has lost the fight against reality, and whose wall of delusions has crashed over his head. Wendy survives her experience, even if the scars they left in her make her shun desire for years, but Peter is left permanently damaged and yearning for his lost childhood.
In the end, Moore is a writer, and writers make a living telling lies. He brings us in with the promise of a simple story - how complex can porn get? - and like Alice’s wardens, ends up pushing us into a rabbit hole that we can’t help but chase through to the other end. Were these tales written by a less talented writer I could easily move on, but as it is the stories have stayed with me. And every time I remember, I can’t help but think that Baum, Barry and Carroll lied to us.
This is how it really happened.