The
anti-Christ, an Empire of No One, regressive characters and the end
of dreams. Perhaps one of the more obvious places to start would be
in some mystical pool in present day Uganda.
In the Black
Dossier, we are first introduced to Orlando, who, in his/her era
spanning adventures, encounters a magical pool that bestows
immortality onto any who would bath in its waters. We later learn
from the Dossier that Allan Quatermain and Wilhelmina Murray do the
same, and it is what our two heroes here gain that becomes the
background that Century is set against. Immortality is no easy
condition, and riding out of time we learn that not everything can
survive the journey.
There is a part
in the last volume of Century, 2009, when Orlando makes a casual
comment about something the Mina had missed in the forty year period
that she had been forced to spend in the Coote's Centre, and an
expression comes across Murray's face that is too well-realized for
it to be unintentional. It is only one bit in a string of instances
wherein Mina shows how uncomfortable she has become with the idea of
immortality, but it is by far the most telling; since dipping in the
pool the characters risk complete detachment from humanity, and at
one end we have Mina, who is desperately trying to tie herself down
to some specific context, and at the other end we have Orlando, who
recounts the past to Mina like the synopses of missed TV dramas.
Of all the
characters to appear in Century, Orlando is, by his own admission,
the most shallow, personified only by those two eternal and extreme
aspects of the human condition, lust and aggression. Despite the
three millenia that he has survived, he is the least in control of
himself, as depicted in 2009 when he initiates the massacre, and 1969
(or rather 1976) when he gives up the search for Murray (unlike
Quatermain, whose reasons for doing so are simply because he is weak,
a difference that we will return to). He is also the one most likely
to reflect the state of culture that he happens to find himself in.
He bears, as shown in the Black Dossier, no allegiances, happily
throwing in his lot with whomever his whim suits him, and claims that
he wouldn't change a single thing, when, if his behaviour in 2009 is
anything to go by, we wonder if he truly can.
Consider then,
Exhibit B, Miss Wilhelmina Murray. Indeed, if there is anything that
holds Century together as it charts the rise and fall of culture and
fads, it is Mina's resolve to stick to the plan of stopping Haddo's
Moonchild, as well as the urgency that seizes upon her when she
realizes that she has stopped aging. She acts where Orlando cannot,
and where Quartermain dares not. Between Orlando admitting to his own
personal vacuity, and Quatermain crumbling beneath the weight of too
much reality, we see the break of culture reflected off these
characters. From the very moment that Orlando is ordered (by
Prospero, and not himself) to do something about the situation we see
an instant change in his character; it is as though he gets a whiff
of the Mina personality, and, more than simply play up to his
knee-jerk role of the 21st century ('Help the homeless...miss?'
'Get a job.'), part of him surfaces into character. Even the bit
at the front where he adds a belated '...sir.' when asked
about the massacre is very telling; he may be immortal, but years of
being a survivor has made Orlando just that and nothing more.
As far as
culture goes, however, there is a bit more than the three chosen
periods that we have been presented in Century; another theme has
been addressed here, hopping around in different guises, and that
theme is tradition. Traditions, passed down and perpetuated from one
generation to the next, can be argued as one of the less malleable
aspects that in turn affects the topology that culture adopts. And
those who would challenge its hold never seem to find a good end
until returned back to the fold of the very thing they ran away from.
Janni Diver, the anti-Christ, both children who rebel against their
given birthright, both somehow driven to stop the course of culture,
only for one to become the worst of what she opposed ('I'll tell you
what Jack, she's worst,' says Ishmael) and for the other to become
nothing but a flimsy angst-ridden, haloperidol popping poster boy of
his age, rather than the glory of whatever apocalyptic figure he
could have been had he accepted his role. Culture, more than merely
deciding, enforces the destinies of our characters.
And if
tradition is that aspect of culture that seeks perpetuity, then
certainly a third story awaits in the telling, and that is the story
of Wilhelmina Murray, and how she will address the very notion that
seeks timelessness, when she herself has become timeless. Century
does not end with 2009 so much as draw our attention to that which
seems most deserving of our attention: how to spend our time and what
it means to be given a life. The answers, we hope, will come later.
Even the most
stoic reader who must insist on a 'who won?' analysis to their
stories cannot walk away from Century without feeling that the
standard plot had somehow been overturned, and the final showdown
between the anti-Christ and Prospero/God/Mary Poppins nothing more
than a passing distraction, commentary masquerading as a fad. When
even the oldest of evils is brought to kneel, then perhaps Haddo is
right to say that Murray has ushered in their own age of apocalypse,
which probably is not as bad as it seems, since apocalypse, as Moore
points our often enough, means revelation.
("This is
a traditional apocalypse." Says Orlando to the
I-may-be-old-but-I-am-still-hot-M (emphasis mine), in a scene that
shows how flimsy end-of-world scenarios have become. Even the
Apocalypse comes in flavours.)
That leaves
just one final question, then. Where is my moon over Soho? Moore has
never shied away from the non-glimmery aspects of humanity, and in
the three slim volumes that make up Century the readers are dragged
through violation, disillusionment, lost, regression, and finally,
insanity. I would add death to the whole lot, except that I'm sure
that most readers were more than glad to see one final spurt of life
from our elephant-gun wielding hero from days of yore, instead of the
dead person he had already become. Where Murray chooses to continue
on with the plan of stopping Haddo, Quatermain chooses instead the
jungle of his own sanity. In this way Quatermain comes to embody that
period of 1969 most succinctly, as he experiences disillusionment
first at his own failure to live up to his reputation, and then
projects outwardly at others when this is pointed out to him.
Looking a
little closer, however, we see that what has happened is that
Quatermain (without being completely aware about it) has come up
against that one question that Murray has been exempted from during
her 40-year stay in the Coote's Centre: that of identity, and who he
is. It is their roles reversed at the end of Book 2, after the
Martian invasion, only this time it is Quatermain who has been forced
into introspection. Identity of self takes on a different meaning
when viewed through the scope of one now able to live through
centuries (or millennia, in Orlando's case); and through Quatermain
we see him struggle against his drug-addiction in an ugly tug of war
between man vs conditioning/meme, when others like Orlando and
Captain Cuckoo seemed to have long accepted themselves as vectors of
war.
(Murray's own
struggle in the Coote's Centre is hardly a fair comparison, as she
tries to anchor her identity in the here and now while Quatermain is
subjected to a real passage of time. One gets the impression that her
40 years are like one sedated spell, leaving her a scared mouse a bit
too eager to jump, but still able to pick up where she left off.
Quatermain, on the other hand, is worn by time we next meet him, and
has had no one to anchor onto, be it in memory or, in this case,
Mina. Yes, he was on drugs on the outside, but it is the awareness
that separates him from Murray.)
Personally, the
most heart wrenching part of Century for me is the little sing-along
that Murray and Quatermain carry out in 2009; an inevitable parting
of two lovers so far removed from each other, it is nonetheless the
tune of the Beggar's Banquet in the background that drives the point
home. We are back in 1910; yes, we had a good, colourful spurt of
life in 1969; where did everything go wrong? Immortality makes
everything harder to measure, and ideals hard to realize over one
lifetime becomes nigh impossible when stretched over eternity. That
is perhaps what makes Murray next adventure so exciting: we want to
know what answer Moore may have beyond the ones that we have been
presented with so far.
However the
story will turn out, it is nonetheless warming (in the heart, of all
regions) to know that stories beyond 2009 will involve a particularly
robust cast of immortal ex-Bond girls, which would of course make for
an extraordinary league all by itself(albeit one of women, but you
already knew that).
And that was
just me, thinking out loud. Just don't ask me about the references.
An addendum:
On top of the
whole theme of immortality that permeates the Century series, there
is another less obvious story being played out, hinted but here and
there but most obviously in the opening page of each volume. It is
the Triton, symbol of Poseidon, but here, Nemo, and the new era
ushered in by Janni Dakkar, who could very well be the moonchild that
Karnacki dreams about in volume 1 (Yeah, I know right? How obvious
can you get, have Karnacki finish off with that key word and whoop -
next page, naked girl, 'naked' as in 'innocent', as in 'child', and
sure let's just hang a moon over her, why don't we?). We see the
birth of her ideology in 1910, its extension in 1969 when she tells
Murray that, 'Our daughter and grandson are my immortality,' and its
fruition into 2009 and beyond come volume 3.
The true
disaster envisioned by Karnacki isn't the bombing of the docks, but
the passing down of the Nemo namesake that will only grow stronger
with time. That gives us another story to look forward to, and a
context by which we will be able to place the story of the moonchild
in Nemo: Heart of Ice, instead of merely dismissing it as some
tangential, 48-page special.
Lastly, and man
I promise I'll stop with this, I think with the League now, Moore
seems to be directly addressing the immortality of franchise
characters. In the same way that he had examined the power of
superheroes as it approximates god-like proportions in Miracleman,
Moore is a now asking, "What would it really be like for a
character to live through a world where time passes, but only not for
them?" This is, of course, what makes Moore so cool: how he
always manages to bring a fresh angle to an otherwise dull subject.
And while there *probably* is a story in the Silver Ages somewhere
about Clark Kent struggling with his internal doubts and his own
eternal youth, it hardly matters in a world where everyone else too
is young, and by the time we reach issue #1,000 there will still be a
Lois Lane and yes, a ma, a pa (dying again, I shouldn't wonder) and Krypto, all going at it has
before.
