Alan Moore is best known for his comics Watchmen, V for Vendetta, and From Hell, all of which were turned into movies either that way or (in his opinion) by no major studio. For me, though, he reached the pinnacle with his 2006 essay Unearthing, a tribute to Steve Moore, the creator of the UK's first comics fandom. Here he describes his guide's house on Shooters Hill as part of a “dreaming London”, “the remains of fossilized night-sweat crown the tumulus”, “a life-sump of colored stone-age swill, a pallid Morlock stain”.
It's Alan Moore in full-on psychogeologist mode, imagining deep time – its luminous, mesmerizing violence – beneath the surface of everything that looks like the present. It gives a V-identity to literary realism and the twee beauty of modern landscape writing. This London is so real and so escapist. And the language! Steve was not born; Instead, he escapes “the luminous colanderate complexity that is his mother.”
In many ways Unearthing reads as an extended preface to The Great Wen, the first volume of a planned “Long London Quintet,” whose title is a pun on William Cobbett's belief that the early 19th-century English capital becomes “wen” – a boil, a sebaceous cyst. It's set in Steve Moore's year of birth: 1949. London is a bomb site, its streets empty, its people in a state of PTSD. The battle was won, but the city's magic faded. The welfare state involves a meritocratic stagnation, creeping standardization. Where is the bohemianism?
In this fractured in-between zone lives Dennis Nagliard – his name, like other characters like Flabby Harrison and Tolerable John, evokes the world of comics and bash street mayhem. He is 18 years old, an orphan, and hopes to become a writer. More than that, he would like a girlfriend. As it is, he works in a Shoreditch bookshop run by Caffin Ada, who may or may not have been a star in her youth, but is now a foul-mouthed, chain-smoking, pink-dressing-gown-wearing harridan. Rather than haggling with a customer on its price, a block must be ripped off.
One day Ada sends Dennis to Soho to buy titles from another seller, Arthur Machen, associated with “weird fiction” and loved by the likes of HP Lovecraft, China Mieville and Mark Fisher. Among the young man's purchases is a book that Machen created for one of his stories – a heretical treatise on “Heavenly Chaos”, said to have been written by a Victorian churchman. He shows it to Ada, who immediately kicks him out and warns him to return it. What brutal power does it have?
The book leads to terrifying encounters with “Long London,” a mutated, imaginary place full of “gastropodous chariots” and “huge clans.” J.G. There are shades here of the fever-dream fiction of Ballard and Brian Gatling, of Thomas De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, of the metropolitan mysticism of William Blake and Ian Sinclair, and of the Surrealists and the rebellious republicans inspired by circumstances. Reality is a refuge, an illusion. This London, AZ is said to be “fire” to the mere “smoke” of London: “music” rather than “echo”.
Animated and anarchic, it features paradoxes, meadows and fringe people. Jewish gangster and self-styled King of the underworld Jack Spot; An “auto-legendary racetrack oracle” – an “auto-legendary racetrack oracle” who gave anti-baldness tips and anti-baldness tips on Petticoat Lane – and exotically plumed Ross Prince Monolulu, who claimed to be from Abyssinia. and “Black man for luck!” John Gawsworth was described by critic John Sutherland as “the most minor poet” and horror writer M.P. Scheelen is also described as a literary activist whose ashes he sprinkled on dishes served to dinner guests. After all, a reporter profiled Austin Osman Spare, the esoteric artist and mystic, “The Father of Surrealism – He's a Cockney!”
There are set-pieces involving self-inflicting giants that serve as catnip for the makers of the mega-budget film adaptation of Moore Abors; A romantic subplot too. The main characters reveal themselves to be much younger than they initially appear. Narratively, it can sometimes be stop-start, often choosing exposition and exposition. Divisions over theological terms like “perichoresis” are superfluous. A final episode set in the late 1990s may be a bridge to later volumes in the series, but, with its disturbing references to Joe Meek, prefab Sprout and Margaret Thatcher, is a touch diminuendo.
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At his often best, however, Moore, well, also. In Unearthing he indicts Tolkien, CS Lewis, JK Rowling: linguistic cheats whose work has been “pasteurized for general consumption”. In The Great When, his own language burns, a beautiful riot. Onomatopoeia, rhyming slang, wicked anachronisms, slap-happy metaphors: it's the antidote to the Ozempic prose of modern, MFA-incubated novels. Sometimes it falls flat, but mostly it's an enduring feat of daring ingenuity. Bring on the next installment.
