Alan Moore is, it goes without saying, a genius. Head and shoulders above every comic book writer that has ever existed, in my opinion (and the opinion of many others). But as a novel writer, this wasn’t good.
The premise was enough to intrigue me even without Alan Moore’s name on the cover. Set in a still-bombed-out London of the late 1940s, the protagonist Dennis Knuckleyard stumbles on a book that is mentioned in a few works of fiction by an author, but shouldn’t exist in reality. This leads him on a path that takes him to the Great When, Long London, the true reality of which ours is only a reflection. It’s a chaotic place, accessible here and there in Dennis’ London for those who know where to look. It’s a place where things like Crime, Riots, and Poetry are incarnated as beautiful but terrible beings. Plato’s Cave is mentioned more than once: Long London is the true thing, and the London from our world is only a pale reflection on a cave wall.
It’s a cliche to say that a picture is worth a thousand words, and it felt sometimes like Moore was taking that a bit too literally and felt the need to make up for the lack of artwork. The sentences are long and many-claused; it was a struggle to read. By trying to force my way through this, I figured out that I tend to read by paragraphs. I’ll generally process one paragraph at a time when I read; here, I had to make myself stick to a single sentence at a time in order to be able to comprehend it.
Another issue was accents. England has a huge diversity of accents, and there are plenty within London itself. It used to be common practice to try to reproduce accents as accurately as possible, but that’s fallen by the wayside in recent decades. It’s unnecessary, and it’s as a rule classist and/or racist; the pronunciations of the lower rungs of society would be phonetically captured in excruciating detail, but you’d never see a rich gentleman saying “years” written as “hyeas.” This book features a great deal of lower-class Londoners, meaning there’s a whole lot of dialogue like:
‘ere, Jack, ‘ave a dekko over ‘ere! It’s Dennis and a woman ’oo’s too good for ‘im. Smashin’ to see yer, young ‘un.
It just gets tiring.
The parts set in Long London are a challenge to read for a different reason. It’s a chaotic, surreal landscape, and one that I think would be awesome in the hands of a talented comic book artist. But reading Moore’s descriptions of it was another matter. This is the main reason for my picture-is-worth-a-thousand-words line earlier in this review; all the description here brought the narrative to a dead halt at the heart of what should have been some of the most action-packed and fast-paced moments of the book.
The last thing I want to mention is the chief secondary character, Grace Shilling. She’s a prostitute that gets caught up in all of Dennis’ affairs, and he develops a strong crush on her. None of this is a problem as such, but if you’re going to use something as cliche as the problematic “hooker with the heart of gold” trope, I do expect you to do something interesting with it. None of what Moore did with Grace felt interesting to me. She’s quick-witted, clever, well-read, unashamed of her job, yet aspiring to rise above it as well. And she’s a redhead, because of course she is. Nothing about her was surprising, except for one moment at the end of the book that left a bad taste in my mouth and was the final nail in my desire to continue this series.
Not really recommended, I’m sorry to say.
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