Review: The Great When by Alan Moore

Alan Moore.

Thanks to Harry Borden for giving me permission to use this fantastic portrait.

As a Northamptonian that name will always grab my attention. A legend of comics and graphic novels, a creative genius, and a hater of poor adaptations.

It's well known in Northampton that if you wander into the post office on St Giles street you have a reasonable chance of seeing the legend himself.

His latest work is The Great When, the first in his new series of Long London novels. It is astoundingly good.

The beautiful edition from Bloomsbury that I got for Christmas

Long London is a shadow city. Sitting over and amongst the recovering London of 1949. A place where manifestations of crime, poetic visions, and streams of consciousness meld and rise up from streets of gold.

The novel follows Denis Knuckleyard, one of a host of great character names, an orphan working for Coffin Ada, a chain smoking, belligerent, potentially murderous book seller who would rather destroy a book than haggle over it's price.

The action truly kicks into gear with Denis's discovery of a book that doesn't exist. A book that is itself fictional. The book drags Dennis into a race to return it.

He collides with gangsters, prostitutes, killers, artists, and magicians. As Moore's world explodes into metaphors and magic around him.

One of the aspects I truly loved in this is Moore's command of the English language. Phrases and words just tumble from the pages wrapping you into the story and the bones of this old London.

More than anything his use of language highlights the otherness of Long London. It's almost overwhelming, the amount of detail and strangeness Moore describes leaving you with almost an outline in your mind that you can't fill in.

Moore uses the language to give his characters exceptional depth. There are no background characters here, they are all three dimensional, living, breathing people. It's an incredible triumph to write a book where any character that appears could be followed and would make an interesting tale.

To be frank, I loved this and I cannot wait for the next Long London novel.

Rating: 9

"Unable to recall a time of ever being in his depth, Dennis was nonetheless aware that he was getting out of it."