The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Volume Two (Alan Moore)

Having bought the entire canon of League titles from Amazon just over a week ago, I am now at the half way mark in my reading. Volume Two of the saga picks up barely twelve months after the end of the first adventure, in 1898. In a homage to science fiction novels by C.S Lewis and Edwin Lester Linden Arnold, mankind have walked the surface of Mars and have assembled a coalition to help native Martians drive away an alien threat. These aliens learn about Earth by spying on the heroic earthlings fighting on Mars and launch themselves to Earth, where they may find less well prepared defenders. From this point, the story morphs into a retelling of H.G Wells' 'The War of the Worlds' (the aliens expelled from Mars are indeed the same pod bound hostiles Wells describes) with the League forming the first line of Britain's defence.

Once again, Alan Moore manages to stitch together multiple works of fiction to form the metaworld that frames the action. The story barrels along at a cracking pace, and one thing I particularly enjoyed about this edition was the way the tensions of wartime are rendered; the lack of certainty and the desperation of the characters really comes through, most memorably in a loving, passionate but awkward sex scene between Quartermain and Harker. The characters develop further from their positions in Volume One: Griffin's untrustworthy nature grows to untenable levels, Hyde's affection for Mina is his motivation for some brutal revenge on the man who rapes her, Mina reflects on her experiences at the hands of Dracula and Nemo's ironic sense of justice and honour leads him to not only serve the Empire he hates to the best of his abilities but also to leave the League at the end of the Volume. There are multiple modern motifs of wartime morality- germ warfare, ethnic cleansing, lions being led by donkeys- and through these motifs Moore interrogates the validity of war itself.

The additional material at the end of the Volume is a 'Traveller's Almanac' which gives the most comprehensive overview yet of the alternate historical reality Moore has created from the literature and legends of the world. It is written in the pedantic and verbose style of the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth centuries and as such is actually rather a chore to read, though one of course admires greatly the scholarship and vision behind it. What become clear from this document is that there have been many different incarnations of the League, all of whom contributed to the knowledge gathered together in the almanac. This revelation foreshadows the events of the next entry in the series 'The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier', but more on that very soon...