The Great When by Alan Moore

I suppose one little month can’t get much worse than this past November. Following soon after the depressing election came a bureaucratic nightmare threatening health insurance, a case of shingles and, by far the worst of all, the death of a close relative after a long illness. But the one book that brought back a strange sense of life and humor in that damaging time was Alan Moore’s The Great When. This was my introduction to Moore’s fiction, apart from his graphic novels, and I was happy to learn that The Great When is the first of a projected series of five stories about Long London, that deliriously explosive surreal place accessible through various doorways in the old city.

At the heart of the story, set in 1949 London, still recovering from the blitz of 1940, is the awkward 18 year-old Dennis Knuckleyard, of a uniquely unfortunate name and a personality he does his best to hide amid teenage insecurities and self-deprecation. He is almost an anti-hero, who seems to have no talents and who is stuck for the time being as the assistant to a bookseller of rare distemper named Coffin Ada. One day, amidst her fits of coughing, she charges him to go to another bookseller and purchase a box of books by the early twentieth century writer of horror and fantasy, Arthur Machen (a real, if largely forgotten literary figure).

When he returns, Ada discovers in the collection something that should not be there, a nondescript book called A London Walk. The problem is that this book doesn’t really exist in our world. It is only mentioned in a work of fiction by Machen, and it is highly dangerous to possess. It is something that has only slipped into this world by accident and needs to be returned as fast as possible either to that other world or to another unsuspecting person who must accept it willingly.

That setup is quickly complicated when a local gang leader wants to get hold of the special item Dennis has, imagining he could gain special powers from it. So Dennis, barely able to keep his idea of himself in one piece, is soon on the run, aided by sharply drawn portraits of a young prostitute, an artist/sorcerer, a newspaper writer, a lawyer friend, a man with an iron shoe, another kindly fellow made of wood, the Prince Monolulu, draped in long robes and with plumes adding to his formidable appearance – and a lot more, many of whom appear in that other London that only a few people can get access to.

But what really sets The Great When apart for me is Moore’s style and his structuring of the story, especially its beginning. The story opens with a musical prelude in five sections, labeled Woodwinds, Brass, Timpani, Strings and Percussion. In the first Woodwinds scene, two elderly sorcerers discuss over tea in the midst of World War II how “there’s going to be a frightful crack in England” when the war is over and “a hole in magic when we’re gone.” Their indirect references to the other London and some characters moving from it into the normal city help set the stage for what is to come.

The Brass section throws us into the middle of a riot of fascists in 1936 London fighting an army of police while through the mass of bodies strides a nine-foot tall woman, curiously ignored by everyone fighting. The Timpani booms as the towering black figure of Prince Monolulu roars out his pick of a horse to win, after getting his tip from a peculiar woman on a horse of bones. Then a fantastical bladed, mantis-like creature with optical glasswork in its thorax, in the scene called Strings, seems to open a door into London streets from the district where it is known as the Pope of Blades. Lastly in Percussion, we meet Dennis Knuckleyard at nine years of age in 1940 trying to steal coins from a gas heater in the midst of the blitz as Cripplegate is destroyed. He gets a brief glimpse of an arch that couldn’t be where it is with a man standing there, his wild eyes, massive like owls’, surveying the destruction and deeply upset. But that glimpse of another world in London is one he can’t understand and puts behind him, unsure if he had really seen anything at all.

Each of these sections sets the tone for what is to follow by offering brief glimpses of the events that are shaping the experience of post-war London. The next chapter, in which the 18 year-old Dennis purchases the dangerous box of books, is structured around his lurching back to his home with the ungainly box. It’s as if the load, which he can barely manage, is emblematic of his young life which he isn’t yet in charge of. The load pushes him into the people and corners of the city that will shortly redefine his whole existence. Yet he remains for the time quite unaware of what might await him.

“He carried on past Glasshouse Yard without a thought for how he’d sheltered from the air raid there, preoccupied with the increasingly unmanageable box and his increasingly unmanageable life. He wasn’t certain of his hold on either of these things, and felt like both could slip at any minute. What kind of a future had he got, or how was he supposed to build one for himself with just these bombed and bankrupt raw materials to hand? … it struck him that both he and London shared the same predicament, with neither able to imagine anything beyond the bombsites; beyond the paralysis and life arrest of shell shock;…”

^{The Great When, Kindle edition, Location 831}

Moore constantly intertwines Dennis’s introduction to Long London with the fate of the postwar city, as if it encapsulates everything that is happening in British society. When Dennis bursts through a portal on the run and has his first exhausting and bewildering experience of that other world, it swarms about him with a too intense reality that captures thousands of details from the real world, blooming in colors and threatening shapes that are too much for him to grasp. A guide helps him along, as if he had been expected, but that man, whom Dennis recognizes as a fashion trend-setter in normal or short London, seems to inflate like a balloon and is also desperate to bring his charge to a place where he can re-enter the real city.

Along the way, he is surrounded by bottle caps like live beetles, shapes and structures too large and strange to understand, bold colors and luminescent surfaces, peony lampposts, crabs of broken crate, everything alive and in motion. His guide explains this is “real” London, or the city in theory, not in practice, with its own rules, leadership and means of administering its sense of justice.

Moore’s Long London is a magnificent surreal rendering of the lives of a crowded place from all its ages and peoples roiled together in an overflowing mass of lurid color and constant motion. The Great When is full of sharply drawn, unforgettable characters and moves quickly with a propulsive plot. I hope the next volume comes out soon. Once immersed in that other reality, I want to see and experience a lot more of it. But I’m also there for the everyday London and its people that Moore creates with all the vividness of Dickens.