Alan Moore’s The Great When is a fabulous story for lovers of mythic London. The title is a play on the disparaging 19th-century nickname for London, The Great Wen, and the book is filled with Moore’s characteristic dense allusions and literary and historical references.

The prologue in five parts, entitled The Music at the Beginning, uses clever wordplay to introduce the protagonists and antagonists as Woodwind, Brass, Timpani, Strings and Percussion.

The first chapter, entitled The Best Way to Start a Book, begins with the line:

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen,

which is the opening line of Orwell’s 1984.

Another literary reference is to Arthur Machen’s short story, N (1934), which imagines what would happen if the mystical were to intrude into mundane world, a theme picked up by Moore and central to The Great When. Machen’s story is collected in Between Two Worlds: The Weird Tales of Arthur Machen (Tales of Mystery & Supernatural), available in the EBC collection.

N refers to a fictional book entitled, A London Walk:  Meditations in the Streets of the Metropolis by Rev. Thomas Hampole. In Moore’s novel, A London Walk shows up in a box of books acquired by a second-hand bookshop, causing consternation to owner Ada Benson, as the book comes from “another London” and is not meant to exist.

Like all of Moore’s works, he expects his readers to be widely-read, but The Great When (315 pages) is a lot less demanding than Jerusalem (1296 pages) which took me many months to finish. Nonetheless, he employs the same device of describing a place as a multilayered metaphysical reality (London in The Great When, his home town of Northampton in the case of Jerusalem).

In the acknowledgements, Moore pays tribute to Michael Moorcock:

It would have been impossible to write a fantasy about London without an awareness of intruding on the turf of writers who’ve made the imagined city their own … any metropolitan fantasy commencing in the 1940s is inevitably going to be constructed in the shadow of Mike’s stupendous Mother London.

Mother London is also in the EBC collection and is highly recommended (full book review pending)!