Alan Moore has created a wonderful addition to the great tradition of English fantasy.
Alan Moore is a name more commonly associated with the writing of comics and graphic novels than prose fiction. Mr Moore has achieved legendary status in comic shops worldwide for works like V For Vendetta, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and the seminal Watchmen. For the past few years, he has dipped a toe into less graphical waters, publishing the novel Jerusalem and a book of short stories, Illuminations. He returns to the shelves with the first in a new series about an alternate London: The Great When.
The story follows young Dennis Knuckleyard, a teenage orphan under the dubious guardianship of Coffin Ada, a secondhand bookseller in London in 1949. Immediately, Moore’s graphic writing skills are on display as he fleshes out this world: a grey, decrepit place, bereft of joy or wonder, a shell of its former self. Dennis is sent on an errand by Ada to buy some books as a job lot. One of the books turns out to be impossible: a book that shouldn’t exist. Dennis has somehow bought a book that until now only existed as a reference in a short story by Arthur Machen. So Dennis becomes a pariah, turned out by a horrified Ada and unable to return the book to its former owner, who has met with an unfortunate, violent, and unexpected demise. Dennis soon learns the same fate is in store for him unless he returns the book to Its home, an alternate London where reality is not the same as it is in Dennis’ world. We follow Dennis as he meets extraordinary characters, falls in love, and learns much, much more about the occult than he ever thought possible. Long London (the ‘Great When’ of the title) hearkened back to the grand old English tradition of fairyland, another world that is just ‘across the fields we know’ or, in Moore’s gritty urban reality, around the corner and under the Bovril billboard.
The Great When is an easy read, helped along by Moore’s vivid prose and his decision (in stark contrast to his other work) to have a real and definable antagonist. Most of Moore’s work sees his heroes (or, generally, anti-heroes) fighting not against a recognisable someone, but rather a vague, amorphous threat, which can be disappointing at times. In The Great When, he avoids this by presenting Dennis with not one but two real, actual villains to fight against. This adds a dash of conflict in all the right places and helps move the story along whenever it is in danger of flagging.
Moore’s work has always had a whiff of misogyny, and The Great When is no exception. There are only two female characters in the story, the aforementioned bookseller Coffin Ada, and Grace Shilling, a prostitute with a heart of gold. Through the book it is established that Coffin Ada earned her nickname by murdering someone and burying them under the vegetable patch behind the bookshop. This sordid backstory has nothing whatsoever to do with the plot. Likewise Grace’s profession is meaningless in the context of the story. She could have been a shopgirl or a clerk for all it mattered but Moore, for reasons of his own, chose to make her a prostitute.
As mentioned before, Alan Moore’s great strength is his imagery, and he conjures up a post-war London that is so vivid it seems real. The filth and grime of Dennis’ lower-class existence is writ large, surging around him in counterpoint to the scenes within the Great When. Moore makes this world so grey, so gritty, that sometimes he threatens to lapse into caricature and cliche (such as when one character glumly wonders whether they actually won the war). Interspersed with this grey existence are scenes of great imagination and colour within Long London, as everything that is seen, heard, and felt by Dennis threatens to overwhelm the reader just as it does him.
The Great When is expected to be the first in a series of books about Long London. In its pages, Alan Moore has created a wonderful addition to the great tradition of English fantasy. Recommended.
Reviewed by DC White
The views expressed in this review belong to the author and not Glam Adelaide, its affiliates, or employees.
Distributed by: Bloomsbury
Released: October 2024
RRP: $32.99
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