{"id":4023,"date":"2024-10-01T20:25:34","date_gmt":"2024-10-01T20:25:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/?p=4023"},"modified":"2024-12-27T20:33:54","modified_gmt":"2024-12-27T20:33:54","slug":"a-robust-sausage-sandwich","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/?p=4023","title":{"rendered":"A robust sausage sandwich"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Reading Alan Moore’s The Great When for the Telegraph<\/a><\/p>\n

Londoners! There is another city behind your city, or above it, or within it. This other place, known as Long London, belongs to the Great When, a super-real realm that lurks behind your common-or-garden reality. Whenever there are shenanigans over there \u2013 caused by Jungian archetypes called Arcana, who jockey for esoteric advantage \u2013 it stirs mundane events over here. An artist-magician called Austin Spare puts it this way: \u201cIf this London is what they call the Smoke, then that place is the Fire, you follow me?\u201d A bruiser called Jack \u201cSpot\u201d Comer is more forthright: \u201cThis other London, that\u2019s the organ grinder, an\u2019 our London\u2019s just the fackin\u2019 monkey.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sometimes one of these Arcana even stumbles from Long London into the real. In 1936, the Beauty of Riots \u2013 think Eug\u00e8ne Delacroix\u2019s bare-breasted Liberty Leading the People, only 10 feet tall \u2013 finds herself picking through the battle of Cable Street. Sometimes a visit is arranged across the divide. In 1949, Harry Lud, \u201cthe red-handed soul of crime itself\u201d, comes at Spot\u2019s beckoning to sort out some bother with the gangster Billy Hill.<\/p>\n

If Spare, Spot and the rest \u2013 in fact, everything I\u2019ve written above \u2013 are unfamiliar to you, look the names up. Alan Moore obsessives, of whom there are many, will be used to how his wildest yarns emerge from the mouths of London\u2019s more colourful historical figures. Yes, this is the oldest, cheapest trick in the arsenal of the London novelist \u2013 but, as The Great When proves, Moore keeps getting away with it.<\/p>\n

The plot: a few years after the Second World War, underachieving Dennis Knuckleyard has been effectively adopted by Coffin Ada, the nastiest second-hand book-dealer in Shoreditch. Having accidentally purchased a book that doesn\u2019t exist \u2013 at least, not in this realm \u2013 Dennis finds himself caught between worlds. Can he return the book to Long London and its severed, vitrine-dwelling City Heads, and maintain the wall between the realms? Will his adventures make a man of him? Will he win the favours of tart-with-a-heart Grace Shilling?<\/p>\n

Moore\u2019s not doing anything new here. Readers of urban fantasy \u2013 and I\u2019m among them \u2013 have fallen or forced our way along so many Diagon Alleys over the years, have waited so very long for that bus to Viriconium, or Neverwhere, or Un Lun Dun, that it\u2019s a wonder we have an appetite for (ahem) more. In this, the first of a promised series, what does Moore bring to what is by now a familiar itinerary? More Moore for a start, which is to say characters as if by Dickens, and set dressing as if by Iain Sinclair. It\u2019s a heady brew. His esoteric Long London, when Dennis runs into it at last, is rendered in language so unhinged it teeters on the unreadable, so sure is Moore that the reader will be hooked. His maximalist prose isn\u2019t for everyone. Will you join Dennis as he \u201cglories in a robust sausage sandwich \u2013 slabs of fresh bread, soft and baked to flaking umber at the edges, soaking up the hot grease of the bangers\u201d? I did not, though I admit that the \u201cglossy chunks\u201d of chip-shop cod \u201cthat slid apart like pages in a poorly stapled magazine\u201d were nicely done.<\/p>\n

More impressive is the control Moore has over his architecture. His straightforward story harbours a surprising degree of pathos: when the plot around the misplaced book resolves unexpectedly, halfway through, it leaves Dennis with a couple of hundred pages in which to make ordinary human mistakes, chiefly mistaking friends for enemies, and friendliness for sexual attraction. So our uncomplicated young hero grows up as kinked and keeled-over as the rest of us, while the war, long over, continues to unhinge the world, financing its criminal class and normalising its violence.<\/p>\n

You can catch a glimpse of where Moore\u2019s new series is going. His London is too complicated to explain simply. Simple reasons have become a thing of the past, \u201cand we shan\u2019t be seeing \u2019em again.\u201d Magical thinking is not just possible for Moore\u2019s characters; it\u2019s reasonable. It\u2019s inconceivable that the writer of the 1990s comic sensation From Hell won\u2019t find himself wandering through Victorian Whitechapel at some point. Still, I would like to think that The Great When is edging away from Ripper territory into a wider and more generous vision of what London was, is, and may become.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reading Alan Moore’s The Great When for the Telegraph Londoners! There is another city behind your city, or above it, or within it. This other place, known as Long London, belongs to the Great When, a super-real realm that lurks … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617,78],"tags":[680,543,57],"class_list":["post-4023","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books-reviews-and-opinion","category-reviews-and-opinion","tag-fantasy","tag-fiction","tag-london"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4023","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4023"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4023\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4025,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4023\/revisions\/4025"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4023"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4023"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4023"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}