(courtesy Bloomsbury Publishing)
Let’s be honest – when it’s not being sensationalist or downright scary (and there’s a lot of that right now courtesy of one very large North American country’s new ruler), the real world can be more a little boring.
We get on trains when commuting, we get off trains. We submit taxes. We cook dinner. We do housework. YAWN.
While the routine can be weirdly reassuring, if that’s all there is, and especially when the day-to-day is toxically banal, as it is for the lead character in Alan Moore‘s novel, The Great When (A Long London novel), then it’s understandable when we long for a little more excitement to be ejected into reality’s sluggishly familiar veins.
But as World War Two orphan, eighteen-year-old Dennis Knuckleyard discovers in the bombed-out remains of 1949 London, you should be very much careful what you unconsciously wish for.
One day, as he’s running an important errand for his employer, the gloriously and aptly named Coffin Ada – she’s a heavy smoker and her voice reflects every last gratingly coughing moment of her addiction – who’s a toxic brew of nastiness who also acts as Dennis’s negligent guardian of sorts, he is handed a novel by a clearly anxious seller that can’t possibly exist in the real world.
It has only ever been referred to in the context of an actual novel by fantasy/horror author Arther Machen and it has never found physical form as a book of its own.
It didn’t register immediately, but when it did, he [Dennis] was reduced to mewling paste beneath a rockslide of soul-rending comprehension. Away down the landing, Ada oscillated between choke and cackle, which was more demoralising than George Orwell’s rat-cage helmet. Empty-eyed and starting into empty space, Dennis conjectured that it was, by far, the worst day of his life.
So, what the hell is Dennis holding in his hand?
Ah, that is the promise, magic and terror of The Great When, a brilliantly and astonishingly compelling novel from the comics legend which posits, with a vivacity that practically leaps off the very turnable pages, that right alongside the London we know exists one where the fantastical and the amazing exist in Alice in Wonderland-ish profusion.
Known as the titular Great When – according to an article on Moore and his new novel, the title comes from a well-established source (see below) – this London is every bit as real as the one from which Dennis hails; in fact, it is, in fact, better condition than its traumatised and bombed-to-bits counterpart, although to Dennis, at first, it feels like a living, waking nightmare sprung menacingly to life.
… the title of Moore’s latest work is a play on “The Great Wen”, a denigrating nickname for England’s capital, coined in the late 19th century by radical pamphleteer William Cobbett. (A “wen” is a sebaceous cyst.)
In this London within a London, the magical and the real move in and out of each other which speaks to the belief Moore has that words have power and can create all kinds of realities that feel ever bit as tangible as the ones in which we exist.
Any reader will back that up; when you are immersed in a book, the idea that what you are reading isn’t palpably real is anathema and these worlds often stay with you long after the final page is turned, something Moore himself attests to:
By way of example, Moore says he read Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy back when he was 13 or 14, but the world of those books has stayed with him to this day.
‘I still have Gormenghast in my head very clearly, whereas places that are actually real and which I’ve visited, I have completely forgotten,’ he says. (ABC News)
(courtesy Bloomsbury Publishing)
One of the many superlatively good aspects of The Great When is how it seamlessly moves you between the two versions of London.
One method used to make sure you know which reality you’re in is stylistic; the Great When sections are in italics but they also flow in almost stream of consciousness style, reflecting the fact that this London variant, while it makes sense to its weird and wonderful inhabitants, is overwhelmingly different to the flawed order of our own.
The world-building is superbly, completely and compelling done, and as Dennis is drawn ever further into how a fictitious book exists in his London and what it staying there could do to life we know it, we are treated to footpaths that come alive and try to consume and ideas of Crime and Poetry bursting forth as beings capable of both great beauty and terror.
While Dennis often finds it all too much – it’s an assault on the senses for mere non-magical mortals and most people are never the same after they encounter the Great When in all its maddening glory – he comes to know some of its less dangerous inhabitants who take him on a grand adventure which comes to change his life in all kinds of good and monumentally fundamental ways.
he [Dennis] is immediately somewhere else, amid skyscraper blossoms that have tender green stems bigger than the trunks of elms, and fragrance so thick he can cut it with a knife … behind, the doorway inconceivable is closed once more, leaving a blacker black between the redwood irises, an interruption of decanted starlight …
But not before he finds himself at the mercy of all kinds of strange forces in London’s occult underbelly, a place where a certain logics applies but not one which even eighteen-year-old aspiring writers can even reasonably grapple with and which defy anyone’s ability to make sense of it.
Though, thankfully, Dennis encounters kind souls on either side of the divide between the two Londons who help him make sense of what he is holding in his hand, what must be done with it, and how he can bring everything to some sort of decent and rational conclusion.
Surging with imagination, passion, and a fervent love for the imaginatively rendered written word, The Great When is one of those books that consumes you utterly and which, as Moore no doubt envisaged, creates a reality so potent and believable that you will find yourself looking for hidden portals and strange doorways to realms which may exist in and under your own city or home region.
Exciting, adventurous, intense and full of vividly-realised characters both good and bad, and a lovely sense of found family and connectivity which is Dennis’s real gift from a riotously full-on adventure full of portentous fate, threats and possibility, The Great When (part of a planned series of novels) is a gloriously alive and vital read which will exercise your imagination, thrill your soul and maybe even get into your heart as you realise how much can change from the most unexpected of events.