by Shaun Lawton
Having just finished Alan Moore's lovely and fantastical meditation The Great When (A Long London Novel, or so at least my signed first edition proclaims) I can say that I feel it's my favorite book of his in a long while, on account of a few straightforward reasons.
For one, despite my difficulty getting into the rhythm of its opening section, and subsequent first chapter, I found that after several pages moving forward, and allowing myself to get enfolded deeper into the author's adopted voice, that it wasn't long before the book opened up to me, and I was eased into its distinct post WWII late 40s London atmosphere. It lifts off the pages from a fresh, newly minted Orwellian perspective tinged by the light from the Golden Dawn of decadence and the preliminary weird literary stylings of Arthur Machen, accentuated by the art noveau of Austin Osman Spare, who figures into the tale in the loveliest manner conceivable, all due mind you, to the extreme care with which our advancing warlock of letters has taken full measure of control, here. The reader is thus led by this world weary man's hands into 1949 London with uncanny finesse, through the eyes of our protagonist, eighteen year old Dennis Knuckleyard, one of my new favorite characters, courtesy of the author's generous recollections suffused by a welcome nostalgic light.
I'm not one to spoil the substance and spirit of the story, so I must proceed with my review from a safe distance, focusing on my own reactions and feelings more than the trappings of Moore's twisting tale. I was drawn into the book's trim eight chapters ultimately by virtue of the elegant simplicity of their arrangement and presentation. It's a deft trick the magician has pulled from his sleeve, with this book.
On the one hand, when begun it reads like anyone with a sound mind who's largely familiar with the author's previous work would assume, which is The Great When reads like a sub-chapter from his sprawling odyssey Jerusalem, and of course how couldn't it be, considering the breadth and scope of the former novel's expansiveness. It goes without saying that The Great When continues our exploration of the splendiferous British empire's capital city digging through time and tunneling into the idea of the primal London of the imagination, carved into messy being from the various machinations of painters and fantasists alike, a mass hallucinatory product shaped by the dreams and nightmares of both the church and state.
What I enjoyed is the rather compact succinctness of this every so often terrifying tale, its delivery being somewhat concealed in a format analogous to the trim presentation of a children's fairy tale story. In fact I find the whole elaborate body of the work to have been pieced together with extreme thoughtfulness by the author, with regards to keeping a sort of classicist form in a manner of speaking.
Whatever the case may be, I found myself ripping through its pages, caught up in the eddies and currents of its action, the vivid descriptions of the Pope of Blades and its significance to the wider realm of the imagination we've all come to grips with at certain different points of our life. The various forays into Long London which proceed apace accentuated by the literary device of italics, take particular freedom of expression to new levels of descriptiveness that will please many while losing others in a somewhat confusing web of words spun with a sense of delirious fun that manages to get across the gist of the sudden off shoots of para-literary excursions into ultra lit passages which in retrospect seem potentially loaded with a significance congruent with altered states of consciousness.
This charming chip off the old block of literature will surely win the patient reader over by the time it reaches its climactic end. An adventure yarn unparalleled in delivery, and breathtaking in execution, at reaching book's end I was left with the feeling that I'd like the chance to read it all over again, especially to see how it was that the musical prologue and opening chapter eluded my comprehension so, the first time I wandered in from around the bend. The very notion hints at jewels gleaming in the dark, beckoning one over for examination and perhaps, if no one's looking, theft. What glints and gleamings will I find that I missed, the first time around?
The best thing about The Great When is that its jampacked with just a few enough characters to make a tight ensemble for the reader to purvey. Another aspect of its elegant directness. After getting a sense of it, the reader begins to realize that after all, not a word is wasted in the delivery of this story. Which is saying something, considering many who may not have given it the chance I think it deserves are inferring otherwise (that it's the apotheosis of over wordy delivery). No, not really. Upon completion of the book, one finds that nothing could be further from the case. If anything, it was quite the exercise in compact action. This really is just the first quick volume in a simple series of convoluted fantastical excursions into the nether realm of all the fantasy lands conjured into our collective consciousness, from Peter Pan on through Notre Dame and every other novel with the words blurred together penned by the presumptuous panhandlers of fantasies we all grew up reading, churned into the literary butter we spread onto our dreams. By all rights this book should amount to a one sit reading.
One more thing. How the second book in the series connects with this first volume is the burning question left over in my mind. I can hardly explain to you just why that is without ruining the whole thing. So trust me, just get yourself to a copy of this book, spoken, electronic or in print; bought, borrowed or stolen; just force yourself to read it, and trust me: by chapter three, you'll be hooked.
It has a hell of a lot of heart and feeling packed into it, let me tell you. There's also a sense of inventiveness that I'm picking up on, after having finished it, and thinking about it long enough. More or less in the choice of cast of characters, both from the real or "short" London (our characters amid some historical figures) and in my point of view in particular with the Long London cast of denizens, a quite curious ensemble rife with the poetic dreadfulness of Dickens villains mixed in with a heady draught of primeval comic book homage that while I can't find surprising, I'm still left with a soft feeling of fondness marveling over it all. (There's a certain residue I associate with my long lost best friend, whose spirit ever lingers in my life amid loving memories of all the adventures we experienced together, and which we shared a deep love for the history of comics, back in those longer days where we entered into the quick of our fantasy world, together side by side, we were so adept at stepping in and out of the long neverlands, self-professed shadows of the eternal champion, we'd long ago taken for granted our status as psionic travelers of the multiverse. So of course, if a fractal of a spark of Greg Grub isn't in the Gog Blincoe character, then I don't know what is, and I've lost my way along the winding trajectories of the shifting passages which lead into the tall shadows of Long London's furthest echoes leaning in to haunt the byways of our imagination.)
One of the best things I'm left with that I love about The Great When remains the naked and undisclosed implication that we are all sidereal characters within its magnificent structure. The implicit residual effect of this even left me shuddering a few times, and feeling just a bit spooked. Now that's what I like to call a pretty decent book, in my view.
