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A review by paracyclops
The Great When by Alan Moore
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
funny
hopeful
informative
inspiring
lighthearted
mysterious
reflective
relaxing
sad
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
I'm always excited to read anything by Alan Moore—whatever else it may be, it will always be audacious, challenging, and generally quite the ride. The Great When is to be the first in his first series of novels (although it's probably only about a third the length of Jerusalem, so he could easily have chopped that up and claimed it as a trilogy). It is thematically related to Jerusalem, and to other works from his oeuvre, especially From hell, but tonally it shares more with some of his short fiction as collected in illuminations. It's a comic novel, written with serious intent, or it's a serious book written in comic prose—you choose. It's also an explicitly intertextual book, taking as its MacGuffin a fictional book from a story by the Welsh writer and mystic Arthur Machen. Other figures from Britain's bohemian-occultist demimonde abound in this historical fantasy, most notably the painter Austin Spare: it's a historical fantasy not in the (e.g.) 'Regency England with dragons' vein, but more along the lines of 'what if we took these beautiful lunatics absolutely literally?' As historical fiction, it's a very convincing and accurate evocation of immediately post-war London, and as fantasy it's an equally convincing evocation of that city's occult other.
The Great When is in an overt conversation with Iain Sinclair's novel-poem-essays Lud heat and Suicide bridge, which, like this volume, are books about the book trade, about London's hidden occult iconography, about William Blake, and about many of the other themes that Moore explores. Sinclair's books are also the direct inspiration for From hell and Peter Ackroyd's Hawksmoor, both of which kept coming to mind as I read, along with other books in that 'hidden London' strand, such as Michael Moorcock's Mother London. The Great When feels like a bridge between the more prosaic psychogeography of Will Self, W.G. Sebald, or the Situationists, and the outlandish psychedelia of Sinclair and the British occult tradition. It's also a relatively fast-moving, easy-to-read story in which things happen, which is not always something you can say about Alan Moore's writing. Moore is an excellent writer and a constantly entertaining prose stylist, but he's also prone to self-indulgence, and I suspect he's difficult to edit, since if his publisher doesn't want to print what he sends them, he's famous enough to just find another one who will. His writing here is much patchier than it is in Jerusalem or Voice of the fire for me. Sometimes his clever turns of phrase are just not that clever, sometimes his soaring sentences crash into pedestrian turgidity, and although I am continually delighted by his armoury of metaphors and similes, there were quite a few in this book that didn't seem to serve any purpose. A lot of the time he could have done with just getting out of the way of his characters.
Having said that, at least seventy-per-cent of the time, he strikes the right balance, and when he does there is a breathtaking audacity to his writing, which picks you up rather like his other London does his characters, and deposits you in the narrative downstream without you being able to quite work out how you got there. Whatever reservations I may have are formed in terms of the writer Moore is capable of being at his best, and that's an admittedly high bar for him to live up to. This is absolutely one of the best books I've read this year (or last year, or the year before that), and I'm full of fannish excitement for the next instalment.
The Great When is in an overt conversation with Iain Sinclair's novel-poem-essays Lud heat and Suicide bridge, which, like this volume, are books about the book trade, about London's hidden occult iconography, about William Blake, and about many of the other themes that Moore explores. Sinclair's books are also the direct inspiration for From hell and Peter Ackroyd's Hawksmoor, both of which kept coming to mind as I read, along with other books in that 'hidden London' strand, such as Michael Moorcock's Mother London. The Great When feels like a bridge between the more prosaic psychogeography of Will Self, W.G. Sebald, or the Situationists, and the outlandish psychedelia of Sinclair and the British occult tradition. It's also a relatively fast-moving, easy-to-read story in which things happen, which is not always something you can say about Alan Moore's writing. Moore is an excellent writer and a constantly entertaining prose stylist, but he's also prone to self-indulgence, and I suspect he's difficult to edit, since if his publisher doesn't want to print what he sends them, he's famous enough to just find another one who will. His writing here is much patchier than it is in Jerusalem or Voice of the fire for me. Sometimes his clever turns of phrase are just not that clever, sometimes his soaring sentences crash into pedestrian turgidity, and although I am continually delighted by his armoury of metaphors and similes, there were quite a few in this book that didn't seem to serve any purpose. A lot of the time he could have done with just getting out of the way of his characters.
Having said that, at least seventy-per-cent of the time, he strikes the right balance, and when he does there is a breathtaking audacity to his writing, which picks you up rather like his other London does his characters, and deposits you in the narrative downstream without you being able to quite work out how you got there. Whatever reservations I may have are formed in terms of the writer Moore is capable of being at his best, and that's an admittedly high bar for him to live up to. This is absolutely one of the best books I've read this year (or last year, or the year before that), and I'm full of fannish excitement for the next instalment.