The Great When,
Alan Moore,
Bloomsbury

The great, bearded Magus of Albion commences a new prose series of fantasy works from Bloomsbury, the Long London series, following last year’s collection of short stories, Illuminations, from the same publisher. I’ll confess I was a bit wary when I was sent an advance copy of The Great When – much as I love Moore’s comics work and much of his other media creations, his previous prose novels like Voice of the Fire, and the enormous Jerusalem, really didn’t work for me at all (I’m sure I can hear my friend Padraig grinding his teeth at my temerity in not liking everything Alan writes, as I type!). However, I found this to be more accessible to my tastes and rather enjoyed it.

The wonderfully-monikered Dennis Knuckleyard is a young orphan in post-war London, struggling to make even a meagre existence in the grey, bombed-out streets of a city and country worn out by the Second World War. He’s an interesting choice for a main character – of course having a character who is fairly lacking in experience and knowledge at the start of a fantasy work is hardly unusual, but poor Dennis really is limited, not just in abilities, he really doesn’t even have much in the way of any drive to improve himself (other than a vague notion of being a “secret agent”, mostly because of the old Dick Barton radio show).

Scraping a living in a very down-at-heels bookshop, in an even more worn-down street (or what’s left of that street, after years of Luftwaffe visits rearranging the architecture, such as it was), run by the formidable and terrifying Ada, who may, or may not, have dispatched someone who wronged her years before and buried them in the dead soil that passes for a garden, with both of them living above the shop.

It’s when Ada sends Dennis on an errand across town to pick up a consignment of old books from a seller that his dismal and hopeless teenage life starts to take a very peculiar turn. He makes his pick-up okay, even makes the transaction for a better than expected price, saving money, which may make Ada slightly less grumpy (happy is unlikely). Except among the books in his box, there is an unusual one. Very unusual. It shouldn’t exist. At least, not in our reality…

This ties back to a very effective prologue, in which Moore brilliantly describes the child version of Dennis, caught outside during an air raid a few years earlier, the prose bringing forward the horror of entire neighbourhoods vanishing into flame, smoke and rubble, and a child amid it all, with nowhere safe to hide, catching a glimpse of something very strange, but later dismissing it as fevered imagination and trick of the light, brought on by the fires and explosions and trauma to his young mind.

Except, of course, it wasn’t imagination, he’s glimpsed a doorway into another realm, another version of the city, the Great When. And this book, it appears, comes from that fantastical and frequently disturbing version of the city. It is mentioned in a novel from our own version of reality, but it is a fictional work mentioned in a work of fiction… And yet here it is, a real book. Ada’s highly alarmed reaction scares Dennis, and it should – she knows enough to realise nothing from the Great When should be in our world, and it will attract some very unwelcome attention. She effectively kicks out a totally lost Dennis to try and either sink or swim, guessing the sink option is the more likely outcome for the unfortunate youth.

I don’t want to go into too much more of the plot for fear of spoilers; suffice to say Dennis has to find a way of having the book returned to where it belongs, preferably without being maimed or killed first, either by all-too-worldly people from our world (noticeably some East End gangsters, vaguely aware of its potential power), or from emissaries from that other realm, who won’t really care that none of this is his fault.

Moore takes us around locations in 1940s London, mixing in allusions to real events with the fictional (for example, the famous street battle against the black-shirted fascists), gangsters who hint at the celebrity mobsters to come, like the Krays, and most of all he uses the places and their histories, adding depth to the story. More than a few times you can feel the influence of his friend, Iain Sinclair and his psychogeography, and this really adds to to both the story, and to the feel of both this historic period of the London we know, but also the other London, because they reflect qualities of one another, old stories, characters, events.

Fears that an alternate city may be too similar to the likes of Gaiman’s Neverwhere, or Mieville’s City and the City prove unfounded – of course Moore is far too experienced a storyteller for that. His Great When has recognisable London elements, but so distorted and disturbing to our eyes, sometimes like a Surrealist acid trip. It’s unusual and fascinating, and although this is the first in a series, it felt very much like it also worked perfectly as a stand-alone novel.