LOST GIRLS (BOOK REVIEW)

LOST GIRLS
Written by Alan Moore
Illustrated by Melinda Gebbie

As an artist I wholeheartedly support free speech, as it is the backbone of discourse and therefore progress. I gleaned most of my feelings and philosophies on free speech by following the career of Alan Moore, the enfant terrible of the literary world and author of the books WATCHMEN, V FOR VENDETTA, TOM STRONG, BIG NUMBERS and FROM HELL among many others.

If some of those titles sound familiar it is because they were not only shitty movies, but they were spectacular works of sequential art, known to you and I as comic books. Alan Moore is almost exclusively a writer of comic books, those funny page stories that are children's Sunday morning fodder. Moore, along with his contemporaries Frank Miller and Neil Gaiman, was instrumental in the transformation of the medium from goofy satire to hard-hitting adult fiction. So influential was he that TIME magazine ranked Moore's WATCHMEN as one of the greatest literary works of the 20th century. The book was an all-out assault on the American Dream, the values of men and society, and Nietzsche's exploration of the superman. It, along with Moore's other works, remain remarkably consistent in their upholding of one tenet: the freedom of expression.

With his latest offering, LOST GIRLS, Alan Moore has offered probably his most significant statement on freedom of expression, and probably his most controversial. The book avoids previous sociopolitical dissections and goes after the most misunderstood and maligned subjects of censorship: sex. The expression of sex and sexuality in society has a troubled history, one that is conflicting at the most base level. It is the eternal question: sex is something we all do, we are born with and are familiar with our naked bodies, they why can it not be shown in art without censorship?

This is the classic debate of sacred versus profane, and Moore dives into the debate by centering LOST GIRLS on three of the most sacred icons of English literature: Alice from Alice in Wonderland, Wendy from Peter Pan, and Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz. At the beginning of the tale all three of our heroines meet in an Austrian chalet at the dawn of World War I. The three ladies, now a bit older and wiser, share their life stories, revisiting the classic journeys that made them such beloved icons.

Moore and his artistic collaborator Melinda Gebbie humanize the ladies by retelling the stories through the prism of sexual repression, and employing perhaps the most obviously shocking genre to showcase these tales. LOST GIRLS, while stunningly rendered, is a work of pure outright pornography. Moore and Gebbie spare no time in distancing themselves from works of erotica by making the three heroines engage in just about every act in the sexual universe, from the most common to the heinously taboo. No detail is spared, and the book is outright obscene: Dorothy is fucked up the ass while jacking off a horse, Captain Hook unloads on Wendy while she's fucking Peter Pan, and Alice is kept in a drugged-out, zombie-like state while the Red Queen forces her to rape her servant girls into submission.

To say I was disturbed reading this is an understatement: the knowledge of these three pure-at-heart heroines simply having sex would alone suffice to make me cringe. But there is meaning within all of this calculated desecration, and a great one at that. Moore neatly sums it up through the words of a character who reads aloud from a pornographic text, citing his own observations as the following:

"It is quite monstrous... except that they are fictions, as old as the page they appear upon, no less, no more. Fiction and fact: Only madmen and magistrates cannot discriminate between them."

For all its obscenity, LOST GIRLS is a monumentally important piece of work because it tests us in every facet of our being- it tests our decency, it makes us realize that as humans we do have desires that we act upon, that there needs to be an academic and intrinsic understanding as to what is fiction and what is reality. If art is a mirror then we must never manipulate its reflection, as we owe it to ourselves and our collective freedom to see and experience the truth.

It may be easy to dismiss a work like LOST GIRLS as simple shock art, but we must ask ourselves- why are we shocked by this art? What moral fibers are being jangled by a frank and honest portrayal of sex? Moore's use of angelic and disinfected characters from the English literary lexicon forces the point even further- these women were not imagined as real women but as manipulative icons of puritanical goodness, demonstrating that the selfless and the sexless were to benefit in life, and while those who bowed to temptation were to be forever banished and condemned. Is it so bad for us to think that Dorothy had a libido? That Wendy may have found Peter Pan to be sexually attractive? That Alice may have on occasion masturbated for some pleasure?

Moore ends the story with a collective orgasm between the three heroines, and it is a release far beyond physical sexuality. It is art's declaration that real people exist, that they belong in our discussions, that every facet of them must be explored to find the truth in ourselves. We cannot have these important discussions if we censor ourselves, if we allow others to think for us, if we submit to the demands of those who are afraid of the true power of the human spirit. Censorship is poison, and honesty, while at times brutal and offensive, will always lead to positive change.

I fear that LOST GIRLS will ultimately get filed away as liberal smut, along with the works of the Marquis DeSade and Anais Nin. Moore and Gebbie laboured for almost sixteen years to bring this work to fruition, and their hard work and thoughtfulness is indicative from the high quality of the tome. I personally refute Moore's notion that it is a complete work of pornography, as pornography is typically a violent, sensory overload that has no other ulterior motive than to provide hollow satisfaction. LOST GIRLS is a work of highly compelling fiction, one whose payoff is not a cum shot but rather a realization of human nature and the puritanical forces trying to suppress it.

I recommend the book wholeheartedly with the knowledge that it is obscene, that it contains highly objectionable material, and that it is vastly inappropriate for children. But let me reaffirm that it is not smut. Far from it. LOST GIRLS is an important work, and those with an open mind will find their perspectives on truth delightfully challenged.