“So it’s all true then. I suppose I’ve always had a feeling in my stomach telling me it was, but if you’ve been there, then I can’t deny it, can I? Birmingham is real.” (p. 224)
Eighteen year-old Dennis Knuckleyard works in a grubby little London bookshop, where proprietor Coffin Ada — she is always coughin’ but her nickname relates to a murder — would rather tear up a book than haggle over the price. One day in 1949, she sends Dennis across town to buy a set of books by Arthur Machen from another dealer; if Dennis can negotiate a lower price, Ada says he can keep the proceeds. So, he haggles, pays just a fiver, and finds himself the owner of one particular book that doesn’t, that shouldn’t, exist.
This book turns out to be an artefact from the Great When, a London-of-the-imagination, a place of vivid dreams and nightmares, that lies beneath the London we know. Dennis must return the book to this place, following appropriate procedures, of face an awful fate. Then he must organise a meeting between a nefarious real-London criminal and a criminal from the Great When. And then he discovers that one of his trusted friends cannot be trusted at all…
Meanwhile, he falls for sex worker Grace Shilling, goes to an art show and learns various things about the people with whom he knocks about.
It’s a typically rich, strange adventure story from Alan Moore, chock full of bits of real history and literature, sometimes warped and twisted. In his acknowledgements, Moore speaks of the book’s “balance of coarseness and refinement” (p. 313), and much of the fun comes from juxtaposition: the comic and horrific, the mundane and the fantastic, the clash of people from very different worlds.
A lot hangs on made-up elements in the (real) short story “N” by Machen, and the ways that the past lives on in the present. But I was also really struck by the premonitions of the future, with a new world as yet to be forged after the horrors of war. For all the magic and fantasy stuff going on here, that put me in mind of Bookish — set in a bookshop not too long a walk from Ada’s, and at around the same time.
This is the first of a new series: the “Long London” novels, according to the cover. A prologue, involving elderly wizards, doesn’t seem related to the main story, but presumably lays clues for these subsequent adventures. But the Great When — the place, rather than the novel — is a domain of headache-inducing nightmares and not exactly fun. Scenes there, often lasting pages, are relayed all in italics, which this reader found a bit hard-going. I wonder how Moore will entice us back.
I also felt a bit disappointed by his handling of the two main women in the book, one a cross old lady who — big twist — used to be younger and more beautiful — and the other a young sex worker with a heart of gold. There’s a repeated joke in the penultimate chapter where Dennis learns something new about each of them, where what they share is that Dennis made assumptions based on how they both appear. In one case, he decides to end the relationship having learned the truth, and I thought less of him for it.
Having finished the book this morning, I poked about online to find discussion of male-skewed “mantasy” (clever Juliet E McKenna previously referred to “blokes in cloaks” and its counterpart “guy-fi”). Yes, that’s an issue for The Great When: a new, original and often thrilling story, but still too embedded in the cliches of the past.
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