The Great When
Alan Moore
The Great When
Alan Moore
The year is 1949, the city London. Amidst the smog of the capital is Dennis Knuckleyard, a hapless eighteen-year-old employed by a second-hand bookshop. One day, on an errand to acquire books for sale, Dennis discovers a novel that simply does not exist. It is a fictitious book, a figment from another novel. Yet it is physically there in his hands. How?
Dennis has stumbled on a book from the Great When, a magical version of London beyond time and space, where reality blurs with fiction and concepts such as Crime and Poetry are incarnated as wondrous, terrible beings. But this other, magical London must remain a secret: if Dennis cannot find a way to return this book to where it belongs, he risks bizarre and disastrous repercussions, such as his body being turned inside out (or worse).
So begins a journey delving deep into the city's occult underbelly and tarrying with an eccentric cast of sorcerers, gangsters, and murderers - some from legend, some all too real, and all with plans of their own. Soon Dennis finds himself at the centre of an explosive series of events that may alter and endanger both Londons forever.
Thrilling, lyrical and sparkling with dark humour, The Great When is the first book in a new series by Sunday Times-bestseller and icon, Alan Moore.
Review
Bernard Caleo
1949: in a still-Blitzed and shell-shocked London, the hapless and gormless Dennis Knuckleyard works as a bookseller (as a bookseller with subpar levels of hap and gorm myself, I can sympathise). A straightforward stroll into Soho to buy up some old Arthur Machen titles for the shop splays into nightmare when a dealer foists a physical book upon him that has previously only existed within Machen’s fiction.
So begins Knuckleyard’s initiation into the Other London or ‘Long London’: the mythic, magic city that burbles alongside the timebound, messy, everyday version – our version. Dennis stumbles his frightened and overwhelmed way into this hallucinogenic, fever-dream-haunted Other London, intent on ridding himself of the disturbing volume and returning to the ‘Short London’ of his normal life, as ugly and prosaic and unprepossessing as that life is.
But via his misadventures, he meets denizens of Short London, such as the charming Grace Shilling and the straitened Austin Osman Spare, the real world artist/magician whom Alan Moore has included in previous fictions. Although Dennis’s experiences in the Other London threaten and horrify him, its proximity pulls colour and friendship into his heretofore grey and lonely life.
Moore, best known for his literary approach to writing comic books (Watchmen, From Hell), has more recently turned to prose, including expansive novels (Voice of the Fire, Jerusalem) and conceptually rich short stories (Illuminations). His comics background persists into The Great When, with physical descriptions of the worlds of Short and Long Londons springing to life in both A–Z Guide to London street accuracy and acid-trip detail. Moore’s verbal sense of fun is in full flight, too: if I had my druthers, I’d shelve this book in our myth/geography/fiction/humour/history/occult area, if we had one. And the best bit? There are four more Long London novels to come: fall into this book and embrace a world of hilarious Cockney magic realism, with a roaring ‘To Be Continued’ emblazoned across the last page …
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