With the first volume of a new series and an instructional book on magic, the “Watchmen” author wants an imaginary revolution.
“Have you got a name or should I just keep thinking of you as ‘the liability?’” a beautiful young woman named Grace asks the protagonist of Alan Moore’s THE GREAT WHEN (Bloomsbury, 315 pp., $29.99).
He does indeed: Our hero rejoices in the name of Dennis Knuckleyard, and that’s the least of his problems. Dennis, a miserable teenager who works in a bookshop for a phlegmy old crone named Coffin Ada, has been sold a dangerous book — “A London Walk,” which ought not to exist outside the fiction of horror writer Arthur Machen, but has somehow left the world of ideas and entered his possession. He must properly dispose of it or be drawn into a magical world called Long London that exists parallel to the Shoreditch of 1949 where Dennis usually resides. Also, at least some of Long London’s inhabitants possess the ability and possibly the inclination to turn Dennis inside out.
“The Great When,” a book with a keen sense of the uncanny, has a pleasant lightness. At his 40th birthday party in 1993, Moore announced after what he later described as “more beers than I should have had” that he was going to become a magician, and his work has changed dramatically in the intervening not-quite 31 years. He is still the same formally daring writer who, in “Watchmen” with the artist Dave Gibbons, dealt American superhero comics a blow from which they never really recovered.
But his goals have become far loftier. His final comics project and arguably his masterpiece, “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” with Kevin O’Neill, ballooned into a MAD-style parody of … well, of everything. His last novel, “Jerusalem,” was a work of similarly staggering ambition and density, part historical survey of Northampton — his lifelong hometown — and part meditation on the afterlife, with smatterings of literary homage, autobiography and semiotics. “The Great When” is a third as long as “Jerusalem,” paced like the kind of adventure story at which Moore so excelled in his comics scripts, and written in an urbane voice rich with jokes and memorable names and turns of phrase. It’s a sort of reversal of Waugh or Wodehouse — the witty narration is retained but instead of a realistic novel about the marriageable upper classes, we have a monster-filled fantasy about a virginal working-class sad sack.
“The Great When” is one of two new books — both clad in purple covers — from Moore this October, the other being a long-awaited gold-encrusted grimoire called THE MOON AND SERPENT BUMPER BOOK OF MAGIC (Top Shelf, 350 pp., $49.99), which is best described as an instruction manual for getting into the magical realm in “The Great When” by yourself and having a look around. The “Bumper Book” is written with Steve Moore, who died in 2014, six years after the pair announced the project, and illustrated by Rick Veitch, Ben Wickey, John Coulthart and Kevin O’Neill. Steve (no relation) was Alan’s partner in his occult studies and an editor of a little magazine about the strangest fringes of the news called “The Fortean Times” (named for Charles Fort, the turn-of-the-century journalist who became popular writing about dubious phenomena like spontaneous human combustion and ball lightning).
This post was originally published on here
