V For Vendetta

"It’s perhaps more famous as a movie. The movie came out in 2005 with the famous Guy Fawkes mask. The Anonymous hackers’ group used the mask and people buy them to go on demonstrations. The irony is that the copyright is owned by Time Warner, so every time you buy one, you’re giving more money to the corporate behemoths you’re protesting against. V for Vendetta is a graphic novel set in a future, fascist Britain. It mirrors 1984 in some ways. The fascists are called Norsefire. In the film, they come to power after a virus or some cataclysmic event beloved of movies; in the novel they’ve been elected in by the people’s apathy. The reason I found V for Vendetta interesting was again twofold. Firstly, it features citizens being dragged off to concentration camps and so on. And that, to me, tapped into the fears of racism, anti-immigrant sentiment and xenophobia which manifested themselves after the referendum. People reporting hate crimes against foreigners were up. Whether the actual crimes themselves were up, no one knows. Maybe people felt emboldened in reporting them. You don’t know. But it’s the idea that you turn in on yourself as a nation. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . The second point is that the novel ends with the Guy Fawkes character blowing up Parliament, just as his predecessor tried to. That struck me as a very, very interesting angle. A lot of Brexit and a lot of the Leave campaign was about ‘take back control’ or ‘take back our sovereignty.’ But sovereignty, in this country, is vested in Parliament. There was the whole debate about whether or not Parliament should vote on enacting Article 50. And the judges said, ‘Yes they have to.’ And the Daily Mail ran a column calling the judges enemies of the people, which is incredibly inflammatory. But this is how it works. We have always, for centuries, vested our sovereignty in parliament. You vote in your MP and they go and represent you. So Parliament, in lots of people’s minds, is both the repository of sovereignty and the enemy as well. That’s the weird doublethink that interests me about V for Vendetta . He blows up parliament and in the film it’s beautiful. There are fireworks and Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture. It’s logically totally ludicrous, but it’s an amazingly powerful scene. Should the MPs have a vote on the final deal? To mind, of course they should. That’s their job. Noel Gallagher puts it a lot more trenchantly than I do, which is one of my favourite quotes and I fought very hard to keep it in the book. It’s that weird distrust. You send your MPs off and who do they really represent? Do they represent you, the constituents? Do they represent their party? Or do they represent themselves? There’s no real, right answer. It’s not specified anywhere in British law that I know of, who an MP should represent. In V for Vendetta , the people have won. I guess the nearest analogy would be that parliament vote to stay in the EU and the building is stormed by hordes of angry leavers—which, let’s face it, wouldn’t be an awful lot more farfetched than half the things we’ve seen in the last few years. And they’ll all be wearing Guy Fawkes masks as well."