15) The Twentieth Century, I Have Delivered It

Book Read: From Hell

Author/Illustrator: Alan Moore, Eddie Campbell
Pages: 590 (incl. Appendix)

When I was sixteen, my dad got laid off from his job. He and my mom took our family's collective savings and took myself and my three brothers on a trip to Europe: Paris, London and Scotland. It was one of the best trips of my life. To visit such amazing cities at an age where cynicism has not yet clouded the perceptions and everything is still wild and lovely was incredible. The trip was also a little desperate, I think, because of the circumstances surrounding our hasty departure. It was with this mindset that we embarked on a Jack the Ripper tour of Whitechapel in London at about the halfway point of the trip. Our guide was a short, white bearded Beefeater with an encyclopedic knowledge of 19th century London. He would finish each story and beckon us onward with a guttural spitty noise he made with his throat, sort of a "HRRRRCT!" sound. "Let's go down this street, shall we? Hrrrrcht!!" he would say, and the enthralled, disgusted crowd would follow. We finished the tour at the Ten Bells tavern where my brother got a taste of his first-ever English pint.

The bar is immortalized in From Hell, Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell's amazing graphic novel about the Jack the Ripper murders. Ten years later, as I read the novel and came upon the bar's first appearance, I was struck by how closely it resembled the bar I had had the good fortune to visit on that heady, terrifying, breathtaking trip. The entire novel throbs---sometimes literally---with this vividness. It's a perfect combination of dramatic license and historical fact, showcasing the true breadth of Moore's obsession with metaphysics, the moribund, and his talent for storylines that weave and snake around each other and collide over and over with awful, brilliant power.

Most of us know bits and pieces of the story of Jack the Ripper and some may be familiar with the multiple theories devised by "Ripperologists" about who the killer actually was. Moore has followed the theory raised in Stephen Knight's Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution that labels Sir William Gull, Queen Victoria's surgeon, as the killer.

Moore's Gull is a hulking, eloquent madman who worships art, nature and the occult (as attested by his alleged ties to the Freemason), a delicate soul who also happens to believe that his bloodlust is dictated by the gods themselves. He is a brute and a misogynistic monster. His lonely death in a madhouse---where his spirit moves through space and time, vaporizing and becoming, he believes, exalted---moved me to tears. He is the perfect Alan Moore villain---a man caught up in the misery of his time, held prostrate and completely helpless by his obsessions.

Of course, the story isn't just about Gull --- it is about the dour police inspector who returns to Whitechapel to attempt to solve the murders, only to resign from the police force in complete disillusionment. It is about the five prostitutes who fall victim to Gull's Liston knife. Moore's characterizations of these women, full of sickness and struggle, give them dignity. But again, as with all of Moore's writing, the story and characters become part of a larger understanding, a foreshadowing of what horrors are yet to come. The denseness of characterization, English history, backstory, the birth of Hitler, war, the soullessness of the future---it is overwhelming. So wisely, Moore and Campbell break the story up with panels of blackness and silence, and it's here that the story simmers with dread:



I don't know much about comic book artists, so I don't really know how to talk about the illustration above. I can say that Eddie Campbell's art is profoundly moving, and deeply disturbing. I have never seen anything like it, and to be honest, I'm not sure that I want to again. Blood has never appeared bloodless, so precise. His rough pen and ink scratches are almost painful to the eye. You feel he is taking you deep into the filth of Whitechapel---into its dirt, its despair, the consumptive, syphilitic heart. Moore usually does these stories that swirl with colour and life (the exploding flora and vitality of Swamp Thing come to mind) but this unusual match serves his style and the subject matter perfectly.

I can understand why From Hell hasn't gotten as much interest as, say, Watchmen or V for Vendetta . Although the subject matter in all three books is equally dense and rich, From Hell is a diseased, bleak and sprawling beast, graphic and unrelenting. It's a long, slogging read at times. But it is brilliant and meticulously researched, and I suspect that in its melancholy, its myth and conjecture, you may find a gleaming kernel of truth, and that is what makes the work rewarding.