Reviews

Voice of the Fire by Alan Moore has 12 chapters set between 4000 B.C. to 1996 A.D. The central theme revolves around how myth and fiction can affect our history. Though Moore mainly took his ideas from religion and philosophy, the echoes of people from the past telling their stories almost felt reminiscent of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas.

Much like Cloud Atlas, the concept of language alters throughout each chapter/year as it changes through time. Moore even created his dialect in the first chapter. It’s a lot getting used to, and I don’t blame anyone who doesn’t know what’s going on. I wouldn’t mind rereading it in the future. Neil Gaiman recommended reading this book backwards when the reader realises the subtle changes in the English language as we descend through time and space.

mattycakesbooks's review against another edition

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4.0

It's Alan Moore, so of course it's incredible. For those who are stuck on the first chapter, just stick with it -- I generally don't like intentionally difficult language, but I found "Hob's Hog" both interesting and rewarding. And after that, the stories are a) easier to read, and b) are generally shorter.

I do want to say, though: Moore said more or less the same things, more effectively, in his excellent "From Hell" comic book. The history of architecture, the impact of history on the present, the role that society has in creating monstrous people, the role that society has in destroying pure people, etc., was more effective in From Hell. Moore is clearly a genius writer, but I found his writing better in the context of comics, where he had less room to flex his literary nuts.

fritzh8u's review against another edition

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4.0

After the first chapter it was much less daunting.
By the halfway, hooked. The audiobook production value is fantastic

shane_tiernan's review against another edition

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4.0

I read some of this in e-book format while I was out of town and then came home and finished up with the book I had sitting on my shelf for years. I'm a huge Alan Moore fan and this book continued to impress. Experimental writing styles, lots of historical and occult references, dark, gritty, cool and sometimes (too) cryptic. I didn't love every story, but most of them worked for me and some I really enjoyed.

motherofallbats's review against another edition

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5.0

If anyone knows how to hack Goodreads' rating system so I can give this book 6/5 stars, hook a girl up.

I already took it as a fact that Alan Moore is one of the great living writers based on his graphic novels, and now he's freshly blown my mind with his prose fiction. His prose is very dense and at times difficult to get though, but is incredibly rich and rewarding when you do. He leaves me with that same vague spiritual hangover that Cormac McCarthy and Toni Morrison do - like the author just punched me directly in the face, but also saved my soul in the process.

This isn't a book that can be summarized neatly- much like Cloud Atlas, it's made up of a series of interconnected segments with very distinct narrative voices over a long period of history. I'm not a fan of "if you like [X], you'll like [Y]" statements, but I think it's safe to say that if you're in the demographic that appreciates big, messy, postmodern adventures like Cloud Atlas, you should absolutely give this book a read.

satyajitc's review against another edition

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5.0

‘So what’s this book about, then?’

It’s about the vital message that the stiff lips of decapitated men still shape; the testament of black and spectral dogs written in piss across our bad dreams. It’s about raising the dead to tell us what they know. It is a bridge, a crossing-point, a worn spot in the curtain between our world and the underworld, between the mortar and the myth, fact and fiction, a threadbare gauze no thicker than a page. It’s about the powerful glossolalia of witches and their magical revision of the texts we live in.

None of this is speakable. Instead, deliberate and gecko-eyed evasion: ‘Well, it’s difficult to say until it’s finished.’

I had always been hesitant to read this book because it felt like I would be found wanting in my inability to appreciate a book by a writer I have grown up with. But once you get past the baffling, mind-altering first chapter, Voice of the Fire becomes a gravity-defying leap through time, a roller-coaster pummeling of one's intestines and cranial matter.

And scattered among its passages of creeping revelations and slow-burn narratives are moments of pure farce and LOLity. I should have known. It's Alan Fuckin' Moore, after all.

I think, perhaps, too oft on women for my years. The maddening petticoated presence of them, every sweep and swish a brush-stroke on the sweltering canvas of my thoughts. Their sag and swell. Their damp and occult hinges where they open up like wicked, rose-silk Bibles, or their smocks, rime-marbled underneath the arms. Their ins and outs. Their backs. Their forths. Warm underhangs and shrew-skin purses, dewed with bitter gold. Imagined, they burn fierce and sputtering, singing, incandescent in my prick, my centre. I may close the lid upon this snuff-box filled with nymphs, yet in my dreams its clasp is broke and its contents not so quickly shut away.

Once, I believed that when I’d grown into a man and married, I’d be plagued no more by the incessant posturings and partyings of my bordello mind. I would no longer suffer the relentless elbow-cramping visitations of these succubi, that mapped the foam-splashed shorelines of my passion; penned their snail cartographies upon my sheets and clouded my good sense with humid, feverish distractions. So I hoped, but it was not to be. Though wed with an obliging wife whose cosy hole was made a velvet-curtained stage where to play out my lewdest skits, the tide of jiggling shadow-pictures did not ebb, but only boomed the louder in those bed-wrapped, warm-lapped latitudes upon the shores of sleep above the snore of spouse and cot-bug’s measured tick. Denied thus any hope of swift reprieve from satyriasis, I sought to slake my thirst for carnal novelty with whores and serving-maids. When this did little more than whet an appetite already swollen, I drew consolation from the thought that soon I should be old, the imprecations of John Thomas surely grown more faint and hopeless, easily ignored.

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