The Great When by Alan Moore review — the king of comics returns with a novel
The Great When by Alan Moore review — the king of comics returns with a novel
The Watchmen writer loses the speech bubbles in his gothic vision of postwar London
cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/18077375
A well-known comics writer once told me that the mistake almost every conventional novelist who takes a turn writing comics initially makes is trying to put too many words into a panel. I wonder whether the opposite applies to writers who hop art forms in the other direction: freed at last from the rigid discipline of the speech bubble, they go bananas.
When Alan Moore, the graphic novelist best known for Watchmen, wrote his 2016 novel Jerusalem it was 1,200 pages long. Although his latest book, The Great When — the first in a projected series of “Long London” novels — is a manageable 300-odd pages, the style has something about it of a man who has spent a career writing in a medium where you don’t get to use similes or adjectives much and is now making up for lost time.
So, when a character smiles, we discover that “her smile was sunrise on a renderer’s yard, its dire light creeping into every crevice and uncovering each gruesome spectacle. The corners of her mouth crawled back towards pendulous ears, exposing the magnolia cemetery of her dentition.”
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The Great When, then, is both gothic and baroque. But so is its subject: the jostling, chaotic, crosspatch, antic and overstuffed city where it is set. It’s 1949. Moore’s version of postwar London is a landscape of bombsites furzed with wildflowers (“London rocket”), smoky pubs, voluble whelk-vendors, Oxo ads, Lyons Corner Houses and men in fawn raincoats, where a cup of weak tea and a sausage sandwich or a dinner of pilchards on toast is never far away.
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The plot kicks off when Dennis is sent to Soho to collect a handful of old Arthur Machen editions from a dealer. He returns to Coffin Ada to discover that, slipped among these volumes, is a copy of A London Walk by the Rev Thomas Hampole. Coffin Ada goes nuts. A London Walk is a book that shouldn’t exist — a book that appears in one of Machen’s stories. It has come from Somewhere Else. And it’s trouble.
The premise of The Great When is that the London we know is shadowed by — or, to be more precise, is the shadow of — a boisterous and dangerous eldritch counterpart, The Great When or Long London, peopled with hallucinatory demigods. The unfortunate or deranged can tumble into Long London through hidden portals when they’re not paying attention. Worse, other things sometimes tumble out. The Ripper murders, we learn en passant, were the result of a “Pope of Blades” (a hideous insectoid thingy) escaping into our London in 1888. The book that shouldn’t exist belongs to that realm, and if it isn’t returned quickly something very bad will happen. The last time a book escaped, the person into whose possession it came was turned inside out.
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The cast hops in and out of Long London — and in and out of their wits. It’s a romp, and it’s full of loving attention to the past. That postwar London is deeply imagined and Moore’s literary influences — as well as Machen, he tips the hat to Iain Sinclair and Michael Moorcock in an afterword — are warmly acknowledged.
As for the style, the reader will find of it, I think, what Dennis finds of Machen: “At first, he struggled with what he perceived as stuffiness in the tale’s presentation, although by the time he’d read a page or two, the burnish of its language and its atmospherics had seduced him.” Just like the old pulps that are so close to the author’s heart (torn pages of Sax Rohmer people the gutter outside Ada’s shop), there’s a delirious and generous campness to The Great When. Freed from the tyranny of the speech bubble, you sense Moore is really, really having fun.