Name: Lost Girls
Rating: 3.375 (8 reviews)
ISBN: 9781891830747

Alan Moore

Melinda Gebbie

Lost Girls

Through breathtaking art and ecstatic writing, famous fairytale characters--Alice, Wendy, and Dorothy--share their most intimate revelations of desire in its many forms, shining out radiantly through the dark clouds of war gathering around a luxury Austrian hotel.

Tim Pendry

*Some Spoilers* How do we approach this graphic, very graphic, novel? As a consistent continuation of the ouevre of Alan Moore? As an investigation of the pornographic? Or as a subliminal political tract? Let us start with Moore because this text is recognisably within his style. Artists may come and go but Moore's themes are often those of the power of imagination to cast new light on the world. Much of his earlier work involved alternate futures and histories - the dystopia of Thatcher's Britain in 'Skizz', a fascist Britain of 'V for Vendetta' and the world where Nixon won the election in 'Watchmen'. Later work overlays this with a game of memes set around a grand theme - magic and the esoteric in the magnificent 'Promethea' series and popular literary figures in the finely tuned but sometimes disappointing 'League of Extraordinary Gentlemen' series. 'Lost Girls' takes the theme of pornographic literature and cross-fertilises it transgressively with three seminal (excuse these puns) children's stories about girls written by men - Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Alice is older and a lesbian defensively avoiding men, Dorothy is an up-front American flirt and Wendy is the repressed wife of an equally repressed and shatteringly dull British businessman. The whole is set at a point of maximum decadence - Austria-Hungary in the days before the First World War - and Moore's words are set to brilliant pastiches of the erotic art of the preceding decades: the cards of Becat, Von Bayros, Mucha, Schiele and more. He has found a superb artistic collaborator in Melinda Gebbie who has not flinched from the subject matter - my initial irritation with the girlish soft-hued pastel shades collapsed before the skill of her interpretations and versatility. But be in no doubt - the pictures and text are 'pornographic' in the most extreme way and there is no let up in it. As in all pornographic material, the story seems thin (three women tell stories of their past in a hotel on the eve of war) so that couplings and multiple copulations can be effected without too much distraction. Of course, Moore is cleverer than this. The story is, in fact, sophisticated with its investigations of the difference between fantasy and reality even if it slips into cliche with the 1914 theme by the end. The casual reader must understand in advance that this is not just the graphic presentation of sexuality but the sexuality of the histories of the young girls who became women, of fantasies of incest and exploitation and of the most callous Sadean activity. Each of the children's stories is subverted into a tale of simultaneous pleasure, extremity and both willing and unwilling exploitation. Alice is a victim of child abuse who becomes a sexual addict dragged into orgies, drugs and prostitution by a lesbian 'set' of singular obsessive cruelty. Dorothy discovers masturbation and sex on the farm and effectively half-seduces and is half-victim of a seriously abusive father. On the way there, she happily masturbates a horse while being anally buggered. Wendy is 'perverted' by street urchins who provide sexual services for middle class men when they are not engaged in sexual activity among themselves. This 'Tinkerbelle' is the sexual plaything of her brother, Peter, giving more cause to the jealousy in the story than Disney scriptwriters had managed. Incest is a central theme of the book - fantasies of every form of coupling (though minimally male homosexual) express a vision of the family dynamic which nods to Freud but which, in fact, is simply a play on one central theme: how is it that we both have such desires and control or repress them so effectively. Which is where we come to an implicit politic because Moore's position seems to be that civilisation depends on the maintenance of the separate realm of a free imagination which is uncontrolled. It is the pornographic extremities of the imaginative realm that act as an outlet for the repressive miseries and potential for violence and exploitation seen in the girl's 'real' stories and in the onset of war. This is not an easy argument for many people to understand. For them, the map of literature or art is the territory of real life and social relations. They cannot 'get' that the imaginal realm is 'other'. It is the same flaw in thinking that makes God a real presence in people's lives or has the same imagined creature judging an act from within. The inability to understand that these are two different realms is what results in the 'politics of disgust', the attempts to repress desire and the failure to deal with acts of exploitation when they appear. Child abuse is a general theme within the book. It is expressed graphically and often. Moore intelligently avoids the black and white interpretation where some evil adult seduces the innocent in favour of something more ambiguous and true to life. What is going on is a trading of desires and power which are enabled by secrecy and denial. Another theme is the fact that the girls are lost because no one talks about desire in their world of innocence, things are done in secret and the girls are left to fend for themselves and work out mysteries that are imposed on them by circumstance - whether stuck on a Kansas farm or in an English middle class household. This sophisticated and multifaceted work raises the essence of the problem behind social control and repression of sexual desire, one which appears to have passed by the Christians and feminists who encircle our unimaginative Prime Minister. Pornography as cause of sexual crime is simply special pleading by the criminal. The expression of erotic fantasy for most people most of the time is a liberation of desire and violence precisely so that it does not act in the world. It is a salve. It may even be a form of salvation. Sexual pleasure and even transgression between adults 'works through' the system so that exploitation and abuse remain in the literature and the art and do not leach out into the real world. Attempts to control the imagery of desire drives what cannot be obliterated not merely underground but into vicious corners where the imagined may become real - as in rural child abuse, predatory sexual abuse of urban minors and systems of economic sexual exploitation. All the pornographic styles and stories in the book arise out of an age of repressed expression of desire but are part of the solution and not part of the problem. The problem lies elsewhere - not in a fascination with the sexual, masturbation or curiosity but with social structures that make all these normal interests out to be 'deviant' or 'perverted'. The 'lost girls', on the other hand, are all exploited and abused not because they are sexual beings but because they are sexual beings without power to express their sexuality on their own terms. Alice is, in fact, not permitted just to be a lesbian but must enter a sub-culture that is vicious. Dorothy is a highly sexual creature who just wants to experiment on equal terms with men. Wendy has sexual desires but is forced by circumstance into danger or total denial and ends up with an apparently a-sexual bore who turns out to be a submissive gay. But it is even more complicated than this. Alice is not in control of her history and is even a little predatory towards Dorothy and Wendy but Dorothy and Wendy, as adults, embrace the predation. Dorothy avoids to the end the admission that her sexual affair was with her father but she is not traumatised by it, merely avoiding discussion of a social taboo where she was actually in more (though not complete) control than we might like. Her complaint is not of abuse but of having to continue a very run-of-the-mill sexual relationship after the transgressional glamour of a trip to the big city. She feels sorry, in the end, for her step-mother in a very true-to-life female reaction. Wendy's childish familial incest is pushed aside in horror when the games go wrong and she is threatened with rape in woodland by a paedophile as she turns from child to woman - but the horror results in decades of unhappiness until liberated by her new 'sisters'. The event is also not one of a victim either. She turns on the bully and uses words to whip lash him into humiliated withdrawal - she has become empowered under extreme pressure. In short, both Moore and Gebbie (and we are reminded that the graphic images are all produced by a woman) are reminding us that sex-positivity is more complicated than the 'victim' mentality imposed on us by our current culture. These ambiguities do not belong to society but to the individuals who are free to react in multiple ways - relaxed acceptance and complicity, defensive resistance or denial and unhappiness after a moment of empowered epiphany - and that any responses that may result in a personal transformation equally belong to individuals and not society. If Alice brings Wendy's sexuality back to life, there is no suggestion that her life between the rape attempt and her new friendships was a lie but rather that it had served its purpose for both Mr. and Mrs Potter and now it was time to move on. The men in the story are mostly all sad, lonely and weak characters - furtive child abusers, repressed homosexuals, men coming to terms with their own sexuality through strategies of denial, men who are thrown aside at their moment of transformation, secretive men, dead militarist men. In the end, there is no real conclusion to the book. You either share a general position of sex-positivity and triumph over abuse as the best 'normal' way of things or you will be, frankly, confused, 'disgusted' and even horrified. If the latter, then you have done something that Moore is warning us against - confused imagination for reality and failed to see imagination not as an expression of actual intent in the world but as a tool for internal transformation of the person who exists within that world. Perhaps our Prime Minister and his somewhat dim-witted advisers will finally get it. A free imagination does not cause criminality or abuse, criminals and abusers do crimes and abuse and such crimes and abuses arise not from pornography but from a lack of imagination in using pornography as a tool. The sexual imagination, like the Japanese and American imaginative flirtations with violence, is an inoculation against excess in a world that is stupid, brutal and cruel. The good society requires it because we are human animals in this world, not castrated saints in the making for the next. Our sexual desire is central to who we are even when we deny it or it is absent and because we, not an abstraction, are central to the social, sexuality is best accommodated in a positive way and not as a furtive business of misery and guilt.

Lost Girls

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