Slenderhorse: Alan Moore's The Great When, a review

Original cover art illustration of The Great When (Nico Delort)

My relationship with Alan Moore and novels is odd. At first, I almost regretted that Alan was my favorite author, because I was never a "real" comics fan. My comics consumption entirely comprised of The Simpsons and Star Wars, Dark Horse titles bought on midweek nights from the local newstand. Nothing serious. Upon reading The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Volume II, a comic book series composed of classic novels and some oddball references in the back, I was enamored with a new medium, made familiar and real by a Medium. 

Such is the tone of The Great When, and I feel a lot like Dennis Knuckleyard until this day. You'd think the intervening years would matter, but I guess as the human conception of time is an illusion caused by our dimensional constraints, I'm still the cough cough cough slackjawed wishful secret agent I was when I was eighteen, and I wasn't even bombed. 

Moore's only novel when I began reading him was the extraordinarily gnomic Voice of the Fire, with it's famously prophylactic first chapter and geographically hyperspecific references. It took me a couple times and a few years to get much out of it other than crying during the John Clare chapter. Jerusalem was Something Else. Echoing and expanding upon Voice, the gargantuan novel was a haunting chrous of self-turned-universe. Reading it was like being rendered. From the first time I heard him read the Michael chapter in the Northampton Library and strenously, and still imperfectly, transcribed it and reread it as a personal treasure. A jewel of the future. But I digress...

The Great When takes place during what was perhaps the bleakest twentieth-century phase for London; in the shadow of the Second World War. Postwar London/Britain is a behemoth I've learned about in scriptures such as Moorcock's Mother London (cited in the Acknowledgements of the present novel) and John Higgs' luminary Live and Let Love. It's all paraffin stoves and washbasin baths, pilchard on toast and communal toilets. Miserable shit, ripe for the weedy growth of nostalgia. Moore has always excelled at building atmosphere, whether in the visual or verbal medium, and this is his greatest trick yet. One smells and feels unfamiliar senses, vividly. (The whole weighty atmosphere is enough to make the geo-political non-entity sistrum of British culture in the Sixties seem a breath of fresh air for a drowning person.) The characters, long and short, have some more heft that the usual combination of names and dialogue. From name to attribute, the reader doesn't have a moment to question who they're meeting at the moment. It just is. 

Moore, as he is at his best, has no shame showing off his mastery of his work. No character is described the same way twice and we're all the better for it. I found myself having to look up adjectives for their meaning, references for their provenance, for the first time in many years. The task is not tedious or pretentious, at all- rather, it is like the joy of discovery hearing some unfamiliar term is in our youth. This novel is the work of a Magician at the top of his Age, chronicling a city that isn't even his, in the most poignant and exciting way possible. Now that he has laid in the certain stone of the mind his beloved Northampton, Moore has turned his eye towards the metropolis...Behold, the real London!

I almost got to see him there once, in person. It was a show, a performance, on the behalf of Lex Records of his hagiography of Steve Moore in some disused tunnels that were once part of the London Underground. Unearthing- I won my tickets on the merit of my cough cough cough "essay" about why Alan was the greatest author. I didn't make the leap, couldn't have because of the bitter reality of logistics. But in my mind, I've been to Shooters Hill and Charing Cross. Shoreditch and Cripplegate are in my backyard. 

This is a non-spoiler review, if anyone would like for me to go further into depth into the book, let me know! 

[One of my students saw me reading the book and asked what I was reading. I simply replied it was the first book in a series of novels. They replied: "Is the next book going to be called The Great How?" 

I thought that was pretty good.]