A Review of The Great When

Alan Moore is the greatest English language writer of the last century. Pause for a second to hear the gasps of horror and revulsion from the audience. A comic book writer? Ghastly!

 

This is a review of The Great When, the first book of Alan Moore’s Long London series of fantasy novels. The second book, I Hear a New World, has recently been released and I will get to it some day.

 

The Great When is an incredible book that starts with a slightly fantastical version of the Battle of Cable Street and follows a bookseller attempting to get rid of a book that doesn’t exist, so as to not draw the attention from higher mystic powers. It’s an incredible fantasy novel written for adults.

 

Alan Moore is a working class Englishman from Northampon, England. He got his start writing for small newspapers and Marvel’s UK division, but after the success of his revamp of Marvelman, a minor British superhero from decades earlier, he was poached by Warner Bros to write for the Saga of the Swamp Thing.

 

He is most well known for writing the comic book Watchmen, along with art by Dave Gibbons and colors by John Higgins. This is from a cultural standpoint probably the single most important comic book since Action Comics #1 (the introduction of Superman). Every comic since Watchmen has been in some way a reaction to it; drawing on the same thematic pool, a childish attempt to ape it, a rejection of it’s themes and premises. No matter what a modern comic is about there’s an edge of it that is a reaction to Watchmen in some way, shape or form. Indeed, after Swamp Thing and Watchmen’s success Warner Bros created a new imprint to their DC Comics publishing line specifically to publish comics for an similar audience, Vertigo.

 

Wasn't this supposed to be a review of a book? Before I can solve the book I must solve the man who wrote the book.

 

Alan Moore is also a deranged crank. From his earliest beginnings he has held bold and uncompromising stances, and he is one of the few creatives that could manage such a thing. The rights for Watchmen are held by Warner Bros until such time as the comic book goes out of print, at which point they will revert to Moore and Gibbons. At the time the contract was signed there had never been a comic in print for more than a year, but Watchmen was different.

 

For the next decade Moore fucked off away from comics from major publishers. During that time he became a wizard and started to worship a fake sock puppet god (to paraphrase a certified early period Moore banger “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow,” Aren’t they all?). His more famous work from this era is From Hell (with art by Eddie Campbell), an epic historical comic solving the society that produced Jack the Ripper. He showed up to write for new upstart publishers, probably most notably Rob Liefeld’s Supreme, a character brave enough to ask: “What if Superman was horribly written and sucked real bad?” Alan Moore’s Supreme brought in influences from the mad adventures of 1960’s Superman in a bizarre metatext, itself a rejection of the narrative darkness that Watchmen had unleashed on comics.

 

I want to wax on about Alan Moore and America’s Best Comics, (Promethea is my favorite comic book of all time) but the story of how Warner Bros bought them out to force Moore to work for them once again is more of a Labor History of Comics story and too much of a derailment. But important to the context setting I’m building up, is the story of the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. It was written by Moore with art by Kevin O’Neill and lettering by Bill Oakley. It is an epic scale crossover between all fiction, especially those set in the late 1890’s early 1900’s. Warner Bros bought the film rights and attached them to an action movie with a vaugely similar premise. They ended up getting sued by a guy who pitched a movie with a similar premise, and Moore felt like he was being accused of writing the comic as some kind of cover for this horrible movie. The ultimate result was that Alan Moore had enough of Warner Bros’ fuckery, and he was disinclined to work in comics going forward.

 

Which… He had an incredible career by this point. V for Vendetta, Marvelman, Saga of the Swamp Thing, people like the Killing Joke, Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?, Supreme, Tom Strong, Promethea. Nobody would judge him if he just retired. He has dabbled in smaller projects since then, with a few major works, such as The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic, a work that he started writing with his friend Steve Moore (no relation) who introduced Alan to his tulpa moon GF, before he died. It’s an incredible art object. It’s one of those cool informational books for children, with prose and comics and cut-out models to make, except for slightly deranged adults.

 

But most importantly his major writing for the last couple decades have been novels. First there was Voice of the Fire, published just before his explosive final act in mainstream comics, tells the story of Northhampton itself, through the lens of twelve people from it’s history. Each chapter is intense and from a very different perspective, ranging from a caveman, to a revolutionary’s severed head mounted on a fence, to Alan Moore himself.

 

Jerusalem was itself a massive working. It is the story of all consciousness itself, told through the lens of the neighborhood Alan Moore grew up in. It presents a new mythology of reality. There are chapters written in the voice of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, all tightly tied in to the tiny patch of land Moore himself has lived his life in. It’s… too much for even me. I’m medium well read and have a pretty good at understanding narative, but Jerusalem is a metatextual and metafictional brick beyond my comprehension.

 

All of that is to say, this review is about The Great When.

 

My favorite writers are those that can write a number of very different books. I like William Burroughs writing because Queer is very different from Junky, which is very different from Naked Lunch. It is unfortunate that he spent the back half of his career doing new and different riffs on Naked Lunch, but at least he wrote several different books before that. Philip K Dick had two major poles to his work; slightly self aware standard science fiction, and mad esoteric new wave scifi. Each of his books is somewhere different on the continuum between the two. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is a fairly standard science fiction book, VALIS is a deranged esoteric new wave scifi book. Ubik has a few mad esoteric flourishes. Flow My Tears the Policeman Said is further along the esoteric spectrum. They’re not the same books. They don’t all follow the same themes and construction.

 

The writers I don’t like write essentially the same book over and over and over again.

 

All of the books I’ve cited from Moore are very very different. Even the ones that mine similar themes (such as say, Supreme, Tom Strong and Promethea) all go about it in a different manner. Fantasy is not an uncommon theme for Moore, nor is an overly researched historical setting, but The Great When is something new entirely.

 

The prologue introduces us to the world and grounds this book in real history. The most visceral of these scenes is The Battle of Cable Street where we are greeted by the appearance of the Goddess of Riot. We meet Prince Monolulu, a black man who sold tips for horse racing in a persona of a magical negro. This was a real guy and an actually accurate portrayal of him. All of this is in service of presenting characters who will show up later and showing them having a brush with the incomprehensible.

 

 

The most important of these is Dennis Knuckleyard. His first touch with the incomprehensible is when he’s caught in the Blitz but he is miraculously unharmed.

 

Knuckleyard survives the war, but he has no family. A few years later he is working for Coffin Ada,a terrifying pickled old lady who runs a book shop. He is a bit gormless as protagonists go, and this makes him an excellent viewpoint for peering into an otherworld similar to our own, but at a strange angle.

 

Ada sends him to collect a batch of books by (real author of dark fantastic fiction) Arthur Machen from one of her contacts. The contact is unusually content to move this batch of books, but Dennis doesn’t pick up on this subtly. As soon as he brings the books back to Ada, however, the problem is revealed. One of the books doesn’t exist. It was never written. It as never published. And yet there it is.

 

The first half of the book is dedicated to Knuckleyard trying to return the book, initially to the contact, and later when that fails back into The Long London from whence it came. You see, there’s an other realm, the world beyond understanding where the idea of things exist. It’s Plato’s World of Forms, it’s the otherworld, the fae. It’s the real, full London that we can only see the barest hints of from our limited three dimensional perspective. Many people have brushes with it in extreme situations, such as during a massive riot, surviving the Blitz, or winning an improbable horse race.

 

This is terrible, cursed knowledge. Connection with The Long London is what makes artists and magicians great, but it is also a source of madness. Just knowing about it will make you a little bit crazy, and you’re best off not knowing any details. This is why so many artists and magicians become madmen.

 

Knuckleyard doesn’t have a lot of friends to start with. His two friends are a law student, Clive Amery and journalist John McAllister. Telling Clive about his adventures is the first time Clive has seemed to respect Dennis, meanwhile McAllister has heard rumors of mystic happenings and doesn’t want to risk contamination.

 

Initially, the problem of the story is that Jack Spot, a local gang leader, wants the book and more importantly, wants to make contact with the powerful beings inside The Long London for his own purposes.

 

Ada wants no part of the growing problem of the book that doesn’t exist. It’s already attracted Jack Spot and it will likely attract even worse entities if it remains where it does not exist. Dennis meets and immediately falls for a young woman he meets, Grace Shilling, who works as a prostitute and is much more mature and collected than young Knuckleyard. She shows him kindness, initially out of pity but slowly it becomes apparent that something very interesting indeed is happening to Knuckleyard and he’s slowly coming to terms with how to deal with it.

 

Knuckleyard has to delve into the Long London to return the book that doesn’t exist. To that end he ends up enlisting Austin Spare, another real historical personage, an artist and magician.

 

By the middle of the book it appears that the conflict is resolved. A typical fantasy story would make that the story. Dennis has the McGuffin. Dennis has problems because of the McGuffin. The McGuffin is gonna destroy the world. Dennis returns the McGuffin and the day is saved. This is not the sort of story Alan Moore writes.

 

While the conflict with Jack Spot is neutralized, it is neither exciting nor fantastical. He’s just a weird, sad little man, not a monster from another world.

 

Contact with the incomprehensible holds a terrible weight on Dennis Knuckleyard, even as he tries to move back into his normal old life. Work at Coffin Ada’s shop. Maybe get closer to Grace if he can. But also his struggles make him a stronger and more fleshed out character. And his friends are changed by his experiences, too, often not in positive ways.

 

The ending is a series of gut punches. You grow to like old Knuckleyard over the course of the book. Everyone he’s close to harbors secrets, Coffin Ada, Clive, and Grace. The reveal of these secrets flows out over the back half of the book, each more painful than the last. And it does indeed come to an exciting action climax where the ghost of Knuckleyard’s foolishness reaches back up from the darkness and tries to drag him down.

 

When I think back to The Great When I feel a tickle in my heart, and I look forward to when I can dig into the next in the series, I Hear a New World.