Book review: There are a lot of stories about London in World War II: the Blitz, rationing, evacuations. People coming together to defeat a common enemy. These stories are nation-building and they all end with a single phrase: “We won.” Then life goes on, and the stories become more tentative. There’s less of the victory march in them. No end point, no real conclusion, and the people who have always lived in the city, and the people who have come back to it after a war spent somewhere else … they come back changed. Their ideas of city, of community, have changed as well.
The Great When, an urban fantasy novel by revered comics writer Alan Moore, is a story of the different Londons: the ones that are created by history, by imagination and by violence. The premise is a familiar one: there is the city that people see every day, the one that they think is real. Then there is the other London and it exists as a surrealist horror, “a symbolist substratum, as yer might say, what our London’s standin’ on”. The streets eat people there. The city heads exist in glass jars, a local council of decapitations.
If this reminds you of Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, you’d be right, except The Great When is what Neverwhere might be if Charles Dickens had overwritten it. The prose, in places, tends to the purple. I confess I read the worst of the sentences out loud to whoever happened to be sitting around me at the time.
In contrast to this occasionally violet presentation, however, is the terrible limpness of the protagonist, Dennis Knuckleyard. In his author’s note, Moore gives special thanks to the “misfiring synapse” that woke him up, laughing, in the dead of night with that ridiculous name. It absolutely suits him.
Poor Dennis is ridiculous. He’s human flotsam, with all the spine of a soggy sandwich, and his characterisation is by far the best and most entertaining thing about the novel. Barely 18, an orphan for four years, he’s employed as dogsbody by Coffin Ada, a foul old woman with a second-hand bookshop, a body buried in the back garden and probable tuberculosis. To make life worse, Ada is also his landlady.
When Dennis is sent to buy some stock written by Welsh horror writer and mystic Arthur Machen (1863-1947), he also picks up a book that shouldn’t exist. Invented by Machen – who mentioned it in one of his stories, N – the book has come from the other London, and unless Dennis can get it back there he’s going to end up rather horribly dead.
Dennis is the heart of this story, and it’s no coincidence that when he’s the focus, instead of the other London, which is most of the time, the prose improves out of sight: it gets crisper, more focused, more blackly humorous. The other London is honestly the least interesting thing about this book.
What’s really effective is the portrait of a hopeless loser who might have something in him after all, who lives in a city that’s only begun to recover from devastation. All those people coming out of a war and wondering: do we really have to go back to what it was like before? The social inequality, the sense of empire. The stories that propped everything up. London as the solid centre of the world – except, how can it be, when it’s constantly undermined and continually recreated by bombs and symbols as it is? Dennis, no matter which city he slumps through, is perhaps the most representative part of it. In that, he’s compellingly familiar.
The Great When, by Alan Moore (Bloomsbury, $37), is out now.
