eARC Review: The Great When by Alan Moore
Release date: 1 October 2024
Rating: 4/5
Synopsis: From the New York Times bestselling author and legendary storyteller Alan Moore, the first book in an enthralling new fantasy series about murder, magic, and madness in post-WWII London.
Dennis Knuckleyard is a hapless eighteen-year-old who works and lives in a second-hand bookstore. One day, his boss and landlady, Coffin Ada, sends him to retrieve some rare books, one of which, Dennis discovers, should not exist. A London Walk by Rev. Thomas Hampole is a fictitious book that appears in a real novel by another author. Yet A London Walk is physically there in his hands, nonetheless.
Coffin Ada tells Dennis the book comes from the other London, the Great When, a version of the city that is beyond time. In the Great When, epochs blend and realities and unrealities blur, while concepts such as Crime and Poetry are incarnated as wondrous and terrible beings. But, Coffin Ada tells Dennis, if he does not return the book to this other London, he will be killed.
So begins Dennis' adventure in Long London. Delving deep into the city's occult underbelly and tarrying with an eccentric cast of sorcerers, gangsters, and murderers, Dennis finds himself at the center of an explosive series of events that may endanger both Londons.
Mystical, hilarious, and magnificently imagined, The Great When is an unforgettable introduction to the consciousness-altering world of Long London.
Review
If you’ve ever had nightmares about returning a book late to a library, this book will definitely resonate with those deep-seated dorkian fears. I’m not sure what I was expecting here. Alan Moore precedes Alan Moore when picking up a book by the one and same, but this was an experience of the weird and stagnant. The writing style impressed and exhausted me. The plot went everywhere and nowhere. The characters were all head scratchers. I loved it; at the same time, it was a chore to read. I’ve got serious review bifurcation and no good way of resolving it except rating this thing a four (it’s Alan Moore for book’s sake) and attempting to put my ponderings about it into words.
Primarily, nothing much happens for about 80% of the book. We meet Dennis and Ada, Dennis gets the radioactive otherworldly book, and then he sets about trying to return it—by meeting up with different people in different places. He gets chased around a bit, but then it’s right back to London and someone’s place and another long conversation. And the conversations are looong. Like the series name. We get a bit of action in the last 35-40 pages of the book, after we punch all the work of the first 300 or so on our reading timecards.
Dennis isn’t so much the protagonist as London is—and its different iterations act upon him. If you’re looking for action-packed goings-on with a character like V or Rorschach, you won’t get them so much here. Our hero Knuckleyard meanders through London rubble post-WWII in a daze, shiftless and bullied by his boss, Coffin Ada, chased around London by all sorts of people. He makes a couple of friends, talks to a wonky cat, has another conversation. It’s really cyclical.
The saving grace with this book comes with its absolute weirdness. The world is already post-apocalyptic, and it’s been lived through, so very close to reality (which makes the alienation worse), and then readers are thrust into another London with italics and psychedelic haze that turns words into colors. Oh, and what’s with all the phalluses?
Moore certainly has a way with words, which is why this book comes in at a 4 for me instead of a sleepy 2-3. If not for the slick artistry with wordsmithery, the myriad and sundry conversations that make up the narrative would have bored me to absolute tears. It takes quite the storyteller to make a slow pace keep a reader’s attention. Moore certainly does it here.
Ideally, one can’t understand the conundrum of The Great When until one reads it, and I recommend readers who search for fantasy they maybe haven’t read before to pick this one up. If they make it through the book, they’ll definitely have a new experience to just sit and think on.
My sincere thanks to Bloomsbury, holy cow I got approved, for the eARC, for which I willingly give my own, honest opinion.
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