Alan Moore, page 1 of 3

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.

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?)

The second book in Campbell’s Three Births of Daoloth trilogy is set thirty years on from the first. Dominic Sheldrake, a child in The Searching Dead, is now a lecturer on film, and married, with a child of his own. Young Toby, though, suffers from “nocturnal absences” — a sort of nighttime paralysis — and when a paediatrician recommends a new treatment offered by the Safe to Sleep clinic, Dominic and his wife are at first delighted, as it seems to work. But Dominic becomes suspicious of the sort of dreams Toby has under the influence of this new treatment, which sound as though they could have come straight out of the journal of Christian Noble, the man who, in The Searching Dead, found a new way to raise the dead.

Set in the 1980s, Born to the Dark recalls aspects of Ramsey Campbell’s 80s novels, which were often concerned with the vulnerability of children, and in particular the anxiety about a parent’s care of, and potential misuse of power over, their child. This, of course, comes about because of Dominic’s stage of life, but part of me looked for, and found, other (perhaps deliberate) echoes of Campbell’s 1980s novels. For instance, there’s the idea of dreams/sleep being studied by an institute or research project and resulting in supernatural forces leaking into our world (as in 1983’s Incarnate). I think it was in that novel, too, that Campbell used the police as an expression of the protagonist’s helplessness and humiliation by a powerful authority, and in Born to the Dark we have the sinister double act of officers Farr and Black, whose darkly cosmic double-entendres are the closest this novel gets to the sort of absurdist horror-comedy of Campbell’s most recent Lovecraftian work, the 2013 novella, The Last Revelations of Gla’aki. Campbell even allows himself an in-joke reference to Rose Tierney (the protagonist of his 1980 novel, To Wake the Dead/The Parasite), who’s mentioned here as being a former lecturer at Dominic’s university’s film studies division.

More than The Searching Dead — which mostly concerned itself with dead things lingering too long in the land of the living — Born to the Dark opens itself up to cosmic horror, thanks to the visions Safe to Sleep induces as part of its treatment. And there are hints of a coming transformation or apocalypse, after which human life as we know it will be over forever, though not necessarily extinguished. In this, Born to the Dark reminded me of Alan Moore’s Providence, another 21st century take on Lovecraftian horror which ended in our world being fully exposed to cosmic realities that make a nonsense of life at the human level.

(Born to the Dark also recalls Providence in the way its occultists, like Moore’s, are more willing than Lovecraft’s to explain their beliefs to outsiders. 1980s Britain, with its openness to New Age ideas and alternative medicine, is just the sort of place where the likes of Christian Noble and his family can be open about their cosmic beliefs, and be allowed to practise their esoteric arts as a treatment — even within the bounds of the NHS!)

A slight disappointment, for me, was that the narrator, Dominic, has grown up into a somewhat blinkered adult, who has difficulty realising just how mad his accusations against Safe to Sleep sound to anyone but himself, and can’t understand it when people don’t immediately accept his wild claims as the truth. But it does lead to a heartbreaking admission partway through the novel:

“However misunderstood and solitary I’d sometimes felt as a child, I would never have expected growing up to bring that back.”

It’s impossible to properly review the second book of a trilogy — and an as-yet uncompleted trilogy, at that. Born the Dark takes events on from The Searching Dead and, far more than that first volume (which could, I think, be enjoyed on its own), leaves me feeling we’re heading for a properly Lovecraftian conclusion. Will the ending be quite as bleak as that of Moore’s Providence? The final volume, The Way of the Worm, will presumably reveal all — or, at least, all we mere humans can grasp.

There’s a good interview with Campbell about Born to the Dark at Gary Fry’s website.

Halfway through the run of Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows’s 12-issue comic, Providence, I re-read all of Lovecraft’s stories (as well as S T Joshi’s monumental Lovecraft biography, I Am Providence), and suddenly the comic made a lot more sense. It’s not that Moore makes a lot of references to Lovecraft’s work — being pretty familiar with Lovecraft, I’m confident I’ll get most broad-brush references to his stories — it’s that the interplay between Providence and Lovecraft’s work (and life) can be quite subtle, and the deeper you can go into those subtleties, the more connections you can spot, and the more you’ll get out of the series. (The annotations at Facts in the Case of Alan Moore’s Providence helped a lot, too.)

Now I’m going to completely eat my own words about something I went into only a few Mewsings ago. Talking about Alien: Covenant, I said how prequels, particularly those that delve into a series’ background mythology, are pretty much doomed to failure, unless, like Star Wars: Rogue One, they do their best to keep their entanglements with the further reaches of the mythology as minimal as possible. Well, Providence is a prequel to Moore’s two other Lovecraftian comics — The Courtyard and Neonomicon — and it wallows in mythology (mostly Lovecraft’s, but at the end you need to know Moore’s, too). Not only that, but it attempts to make all of Lovecraft’s ramshackle mythology tie up, and — ye Eldritch Gods! — it even tries to explain it all.

But, it works.

Perhaps it works because this twelve-issue series isn’t also trying to be a cinema-audience-pleasing ninety minute thrill-ride at the same time, but can take its time to tell the story as it needs to be told. Considering this is a horror comic, very little happens in the first few issues — unless, that is, you’re busy making Lovecraftian connections, in which case the implications will be building. But also, of course, this is Alan Moore, and Moore is particularly good at not only sorting out other people’s narrative tangles, but at adding his own — often awe-inspiring — sense for them to make.

In fact, I’d say Moore is energised by a creative challenge, and the bigger and more impossible-seeming, the better. He stated his aim for Providence in a 2015 article on Previews World:

“…Providence is an attempt to marry Lovecraft’s history with a mosaic of his fictions, setting the man and his monsters in a persuasively real America during the pivotal year of 1919: before Prohibition and Weird Tales, before Votes for Women or the marriage to Sonia, before the Boston Police Strike and Cthulhu. This is a story of the birth of modern America, and the birth of modern American terror.”

The comic follows Robert Black, a reporter from New York who, upon the suicide of his lover (in a suicide booth — this is a slightly different world to ours, in this case owing a little to Chambers’ King in Yellow), leaves his job to pursue his dream (“some day, if Providence allows”) of writing a novel. Scholarly, nervous, and by no means an action hero, Black is the typical Lovecraft protagonist — in all but being both Jewish and gay. Intrigued by the mention of a translated Arab alchemical text that made its way to the US, Black begins tracking down the various individuals and occult groups who have made use of it in their beliefs.

These individuals and groups are Moore’s renamed versions of Lovecraft characters, and the main fun of the first half of Providence is in tying up Moore’s characters with Lovecraft’s, and seeing what twist Moore has put on them. Usually, the effect is to emphasise the historical and social context in which their stories are being told, and to — at first at least — make us feel that perhaps Lovecraft’s presentation of them as figures of horror is a misunderstanding because of their status as social, racial, religious, or sexual outsiders. Because of this, Black doesn’t even start to glimpse the implications of what they’re saying (Moore’s dialogue has a wonderful way of playing with double meanings), and I, as a reader, started to feel that perhaps the whole point of Providence was to redeem Lovecraft’s secretive, evil-intentioned cultists from any horrific interpretation at all.

The first character Black meets, for instance, is a Doctor Alvarez, Moore’s version of Lovecraft’s Dr. Muñoz, from “Cool Air”. Like Lovecraft’s Muñoz, Alvarez is seeking to preserve his life beyond the natural point of death, which requires him to live in a controlled, artificially cold environment. He doesn’t hide that he’s doing this, but neither does he state it outright:

“For myself, I must not complain. Here, for a time, I can be comfortable… Life does not trouble me.”

It’s as though Alvarez might be quite willing to admit the truth about what he’s doing, if only Black were to ask the right question. But Black never does, because — who would? Who would suspect that the quiet-voiced, well-mannered Alvarez is actually a walking corpse, preserved by ammonia and low temperatures? Also unlike Lovecraft’s character, Alvarez is fully human, even compassionate, as revealed in a very un-Lovecraftian line:

“…to not love is to waste the existence. Even life is a small matter beside it.”

But there is a real horror, and Black’s journey takes him right to the heart of it. The Arab alchemical text, the Kitab Al Hikmah Al Najmiyya, includes a prophecy of two figures, a Herald and a Redeemer, who are to bring about the end of our world — or its transformation. Moore’s refusal to provide a Lovecraftian moral judgement of his characters extends to a refusal to judge the coming transformation.

So, you start by thinking this Dr Alvarez is, in fact, a pretty nice chap; then that those Innsmouth folk are maybe odd-looking but they’re just folk from a different culture; then that Garland Wheatley (Moore’s version of Wizard Whateley from “The Dunwich Horror”) is, well, dangerously backward, perhaps best left alone, but not a world-shattering evil… Then you find yourself at issue 6, the halfway point, where it is, finally, made clear to Black that he is in the midst of something really bad, and in deep, and it’s way too late to do anything about it.

The ideas Moore presents undergo a similar shift. At first, it seems as though he’s presenting Lovecraft’s horrors and his dream-world stories as evidence of a real but separate dream-reality, which brushes up against our world and which can even be accessed by dreamers such as Randall Carver (Moore’s version of Lovecraft’s Randolph Carter, which confusingly is also Lovecraft’s fictional version of Lovecraft himself, which makes it triply strange when Moore presents us with his versions of Carver and Lovecraft living in the same town). Black has a few such brushes, but initially dismisses them as hallucinations. His issue 6 experience, though, is too deeply traumatic to be dismissed even if it can be thought of as a hallucination, and it sets the tone for an increasing bleakness throughout the second half of the series, which on a first read left me with as much a feeling of nihilism as Ridley Scott’s Prometheus did on a first viewing. There’s a real sense, in the closing issues of Providence, just how little human life and our illusions of free will matter in the face of the coming transformation:

“We are words on papyrus, a thousand years ago.”

In its final issues, Providence is at times quite moving — issue 11, for instance with its rapid skim through the history of Lovecraft, his circle, and his growing impact on culture — but, at the end, it’s also terribly bleak. Robert Black turns out to be yet another Moore version of a Lovecraft character, so you know he can’t come to a good end, but in its final issue, Providence brings in characters from The Courtyard and Neonomicon (which I also found horrendously bleak, after its protagonist underwent a similarly horrific and traumatic experience as Robert Black does) and resolves the whole three-title series.

Most of the issues of Providence included a lengthy text extract from Black’s diary, and I have to admit that, on my re-read of the series, I skipped these. In part because, although they provided Black’s innocent interpretation of the events in the comic part of the story, they didn’t really add much, as it was pretty easy to guess what Black thought was going on anyway. But also I skipped them because they were pages and pages of single-column, long-paragraph, small-size handwritten text and were just plain difficult to read. Aside from the wonderfully punnish extracts from an Innsmouth parish newsletter in issue 3, I really don’t think I missed much by skipping them.

It’s an excellent series, if bleak, though one I think you really need to know your Lovecraft to get the most out of. As such, it might not have wide appeal, but I’d certainly rank it with the best of Moore’s work, and Jacen Burrows is to be applauded for the amount of work he’s put into realising so many historically accurate locations and Lovecraftian characters, as well as providing some neat visualisations of sometimes transdimensional concepts.