Cover art by Nico Delort

I wasn’t sure at first whether I was going to read The Great When, but bought it on a impulse pretty much the day it came out. I haven’t read Moore’s previous novel, the imposing Jerusalem, and stalled on his short story collection Illuminations at the super-long “short story” satirising the comic industry (I’ll wait for the edition with footnotes, if there is one). But I’m glad I read The Great When; it was just right. It kicks off “The Long London”, a five book series that, I’m sure, Moore has got mapped out already, so there’s bound to be elements in this first book whose significance will become evident as the series progresses.

After a somewhat confusing prologue with glimpses of various characters and scenes from World War II Britain (some of whom don’t appear in the rest of the novel, though I can’t really complain about that because I like the opening chapter of A Voyage to Arcturus), the story settles down to one main character, 18-year-old Dennis Knuckleyard, a war-orphan now (1949) living and working at Lowell’s Books & Magazines, which is owned and run by the terrifying Ada Benson — or Coffin Ada, as she’s known, and not entirely because of the consumptive coughing that peppers her every sentence.

Ada sends Dennis on a seemingly simple task: to buy a box of Arthur Machen books from a fellow dealer, saying he can keep the change if he manages to haggle it down below £15. Imagine his joy when the dealer all-too-quickly offers the lot for £5. Included in the box is a book not by Machen, the Reverend Thomas’s A London Walk: Meditations in the Streets of the Metropolis — a book, it turns out, that’s not supposed to exist. It was invented by Machen, and mentioned in one of his more intriguing and subtle tales, “N”. Dennis, of course, doesn’t realise this, he just thinks Coffin Ada will only be pleased with him (or, knowing her, be a little less angry with him) for getting such a bargain. As soon as she discovers the rogue volume, though, she sends him back out with it, saying he’s not to return — and she means she absolutely does not want to see him again — till he’s got the book back to the dealer by any means possible. Of course, when Dennis tries, he not only finds the dealer now dead, but gets chased by a couple of heavies.

Running desperately, he takes an unusual turn — and finds himself somewhere else. Somewhere that shouldn’t be there. Almost as if there’s another version of London, lurking behind the scenes, and he’s somehow found his way into it. Which isn’t to say things have improved. He may have lost his thuggish pursuers, but the street itself — though paved with actual gold — keeps opening its crocodile jaws to try and eat him, while fragments of broken crates and litter begin to animate in a decidedly predatory manner…

Dennis has, it turns out, ended up in a particularly lively area — a “vividistrict”, in fact — of a place that’s variously known as the Great When, Real London, “the superior London”, “London’s theory, not its practice”, “the imaginary o’ London”, “London’s sacred essence”, “the Theoria”, “the Higher Town”. It is, one character explains, “a Symbolist substratum” of our London, “an ’idden attic o’ mankind’s imagination, what’s only accessible to them oo’s stairs go up that ’igh.” It’s the realm of “the Arcana”, as they’re known — living archetypes or aspects of London’s life and history — and my favourite summation is that it’s a “matter-phor”: a metaphor, only one that happens to actually exist, “built up across the centuries from dreams o’ London”.

The Reverend Thomas’s shouldn’t-exist book was a “breach” — an instance of that London leaking into this one. And that London takes such breaches seriously. The last time such a thing happened, when one Teddy Wilson somehow acquired a copy of the should-be-fictional Fungoids by Enoch Soames, he was subsequently found… inside-out.

Austin Osman Spare

Dennis’s quest to return the book brings him into contact with a number of lively characters, from the up-and-coming crime boss Jack Spot to the bookish streetwalker Grace Shilling, and brings in a number of real-life figures from the time, including occult artist Austin Osman Spare, Ironfoot Jack Neave, and Prince Monolulu — “the greatest racing forecaster this land has ever seen”, who claims to be an Abyssinian Prince. Moore, you can be sure, has done his research.

There’s something of an air of Mythago Wood about the relationship between London and its higher/archetypal other — something perhaps exaggerated in my mind because I’m also reading the mythago-themed anthology Heartwood at the moment, and one of the early stories there, Adrian Tchaikovsky’s “Paved with Gold”, treats the capital as a mythago-generating landscape. Both Tchaikovsky and Moore make use of one of London’s most evident archetypes, Jack the Ripper. Moore, of course, has dealt with the Ripper before, in From Hell, and I’m wondering if one of the themes that will play out in the Long London series is the existence of such killers, who murder coldly, and at random, or at least for seemingly impersonal reasons. One of Dennis’s friends, the reporter Tolerable John McAllister, remarks that “the war put paid to simple reasons, and we shan’t be seeing ’em again”, which is perhaps another theme the series might be exploring.

Moore’s style is playful throughout, and though that can make for confusing moments — as in the prologue, where it was occasionally hard to work out, at first, wether Moore was being playfully metaphorical or was describing something actually weird going on, which is one of the downsides of using a heightened style when the reality being described isn’t behaving as it should — but after that the narrative style got along nicely, leading to the one sentence that, for me, justified the entire novel:

“He was too full of unfamiliar voltage to consider sleeping straight away.”

— one of those so-it’s-not-only-me moments you get from a writer who tries.

The story itself did seem to conclude a couple of chapters short of the end of the book, and though it was pleasant enough to tag along with Moore’s cast of postwar Bohemians — to attend, for instance, an Austin Osman Spare exhibition — it did mean that an extra ending had to be achieved, and one that felt (to me) insufficiently foregrounded by the rest of the novel, so a little bit tagged on. But, no matter. I felt The Great When was basically there to introduce us to Moore’s other London, and perhaps a character or two. The fact that it works as a novel on its own — meaning you can read it without having to commit to the entire series — is a bonus.

The next book, apparently, is going to be called I Hear A New World, which, along with the mention of Joe Meek in the epilogue, makes me sure the legendary pop producer will be appearing in it. (And, I wonder, as it’s presumably going to be set in the 1950s, will Colin Wilson be popping up too?)