There’s no doubting the scale of ferocity of Alan Moore’s imagination, but whether it’s captured effectively on the page is a different matter. The Great When is in turns witty, disorienting and frustrating. There are many, many great lines, but they’re not drawn into much of a coherent narrative. Perhaps fittingly, I’m left not really sure what I just read.

A novel novel, set in the real and imaginary Londons running in parallel.

Dennis is drawn into an unbelievable world on receiving an incongruous book.

A compelling read, with characters that develop with the story.

Firstly - thanks to NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Where do I begin with The Great When?

I cannot avoid talking about Moore's writing style. Or the narrator's choice of words. So often, nonsensical metaphors and similes detract so much from the story and goings-on, that it is so difficult to get through the book.

Genuinely - I cannot emphasise enough how much unnecessary (and all too often incorrectly used and archaic) language frequented this story. There were genuinely periods in the first half of this book that had I not received an ARC and needed to submit a review for it, I'd have given up and DNFd.

That said, the pretentious writing seemed to ease off as we neared the final third, engrossing me in a well-paced narrative - which was an enjoyable tale of a young, impressionable, and slightly dense London lad who becomes embroiled in another fantastically grotesque world.

As a stand-alone story, this was good. Not great. I've read other aspects of Moore and love his Graphic Novels and comic-book writing, and having read some of his Illuminations stories, was immeasurably excited to get stuck into this.

Sorry, but this one was not for me. Hopefully, the other stories in The Long London Quintet are written with a smoother flow.

2.3/5

I really enjoyed this novel. I have just realised I don’t get the prologue but hey ho it was a great ride. A large cast of differentiated characters and an appealing central protagonist, Dennis Knuckleyard ( yes that is his curious name).

Read this if you enjoy fantasy mixed with humour and with jeopardy for the 18 year old Dennis. It is well written and I was quickly rooting for him.

Publisher: I don’t like reading pages and pages written in italics. I understand why the decision was made but maybe a change of font instead?

I read a copy provided by the publishers and NetGalley.

I decided to drift way from the normal reading matter and hoped that this one would keep me content for a few days, but unfortunately found it lacking in the necessary plus factor. Decent enough read, but…

Alan Moore knows the score. Thanks to the exceptional likes of Watchmen, V for Vendetta and From Hell, Alan Moore has been for over forty years now the great bearded Northampton God of the British comics industry. Here, he ventures into the prose arena. I personally didn't take to it.

I eagerly awaited Alan Moore's latest novel, The Great When, and it certainly lived up to my expectations. Moore's work provides a captivating glimpse into post-war London, skillfully depicting the aftermath of war and the uncertainty that lingers in the air. His portrayal of London is a seamless fusion of its historical, contemporary, and potential future. The Great When is a novel that truly compels you to savor every page.

The Great When regularly had me thinking back to Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere, a tale of another London bubbling under the very surface of the everyday City. It also recalled Moore's From Hell, with its setting, reference to Jack the Ripper's victims and its suggestion of an alternative explanation for those deaths. Moore's description of Dennis Knuckleyard's meandering walks through London are crammed full of detail and despite the fantastical elements of some of the plot, are extremely evocative of traversing a busy metropolis. The majority of characters are well fleshed-out, with Coffin Ada, Prince Monolulu and Jack Spot being particularly memorable; that some of these are underused is a shame when more time is spent with the underdeveloped and more one-dimensional 'hooker with a heart of gold' Grace and some of Knuckleyard's best friends. The main plot, of a nefarious text which has links with The Great When and which has criminals trying to get hold of it is engaging however a latter plot involving some unexplained deaths felt somewhat underdone and wasn't explained ore resolved to this reader's satisfaction. Regardless of the criticisms within this review, the city is superbly realised, with rich detail and descriptions throughout aided by Moore's wonderful descriptions. It felt truly alive and a place that was both enticing and terrifying. If this is the first of 4 novels set in this world then I'm keen to spend more time with it in the future.

This was decent but it's definitely not Moore's best. I quite liked the story but I felt like it was lacking, as it related to the characters.

I am both familiar with and a huge fan of Alan Moore’s graphic novels; ; most notably The League Of Extraordinary Gentleman, weaving the English culture of literature into reality. This book has its roots in that, but suffers narrative difficulties that make it hard to engage with.

In post-war London, the fabulously named Dennis Knuckleyard is a dissolute youth. He discovers an alternate, fantastical London under London and his life is in danger as a result, let alone our universe. That central idea of parallel universe has been done before, but this is where the best, lyrical passages of the book work. We also have Pratchettian wizards and the goddess of riots appearing in The Battle Of Cable Street.

Unfortunately, most of he book is made up of nods to Greene and Orwell, some more obvious than others. That sort of world is vividly sketched, but doesn’t really fit in with the more fantastical narrative. It’s a patchwork of two, possibly three books and it never really seems to settle.

Moore completists will love it. I found it too fantastical to be effective and too effective to be fantastical. It’s published by Bloomsbury by October 1st and I thank them for a preview copy. #thegreatwhen

I have mixed feelings about The Great When.

I certainly appreciate the concept and the premise, as well as the setting and the interesting characters. Dennis, the MC is likeable and relatable.

The multiple versions of London, multiple possibilities and time epochs were what will stay with me, however the balance between these Londons and plot lines and the overall execution felt odd, and were not to my taste. I like Moore’s work, and I might have arrived at this book with expecting a different plot and story shape.

That being said, this is the first book in this series, and the other books will likely delve into this curious world further.

After his first novel did the span of human history without leaving Northampton, and the second took in Heaven, Hell and beyond while largely confining itself to Moore's own neighbourhood, I'd assumed the acknowledged third would be the multiverse as applied to his kitchen, but no; instead we get the first of a projected quintet set in London, or rather Londons. I say all of this observing the polite fiction that What We Can Know About Thunderman wasn't a novel, of course, even though 240 pages is no more a novella than it's my aunt, but in fact The Great When has definite similarities to that one. Not that Jerusalem in particular was free of grubbiness - remember the way that, as it ranged back and forth in time and space, we kept glimpsing that one trodden-on turd? But the exhausted post-War London here, half of it bombed flat and the rest so shabby and seamy it might as well have been, definitely reminded me of the determinedly sordid mood of Thunderman. There's even another spectacularly mortifying wank mag scene, albeit only one this time, rather than geological accumulations of the sods.

Still, that instance of restraint is rare. Sometimes, the excess is absolutely deliberate; whenever we're in Long London, the Fire to our world's Smoke, the intentionally overstuffed prose does an exuberant job of conveying the sheer too-much-ness that threatens to overwhelm unprepared mortal minds. But for that effect to fully come off, Moore would need to rein himself in on the Short London scenes. And, sure, if Alan Moore had once in his life thought 'Is this a bit much?', then he'd probably never have remade a whole medium, so to some extent following his work is all about taking the rough with the smooth. Obviously, lots of what he comes up with does work, because, as we've established, he's Alan bloody Moore. But the profusion risks swamping the dynamics of the novel, not to mention the reader. Every so often there's an absolute clunker of an image; even if you are referring to the progress of a racing tipster who presents himself as exotic royalty, "as stately and involved with gambling as a riverboat" is always going to be an awkward phrase - and yes, this is the worst offender, and yes, it is during a Long London scene, but even so. Elsewhere, little details of the time (salt instead of toothpaste, for instance) sometimes feel crowbarred in; foreshadowing the present in historical novels is always a minefield, and this one keeps losing its feet; most surprisingly, a few times characters deliver exposition to camera in speeches that feel oddly clumsy for how much experience Moore has had getting away with explaining far sillier situations in less forgiving formats over the years.

Or perhaps the exposition felt more glaring to me because I already knew a fair chunk of it. Even in the prologue, with Crowley and Dion Fortune, and the apocalyptic erasing of Cripplegate, I was often on familiar turf, whereas when I'm in Moore's Northampton, I'm being led around terra incognita by a native. I'm aware this is a deeply ungrateful diamond shoes sort of complaint, especially given From Hell was one of my starter texts in the occult history of London, but once the plot proper starts, with heavy reference to Arthur Machen and especially his story N, I started to get twitchy. Oh no, one of my favourite living writers is addressing one of my favourite topics, with particular attention to one of my favourite stories by one of my favourite dead writers! I must be consoled immediately! Part of the problem, obviously, is that since From Hell, there has been some heavy traffic on those ley lines, Gaiman and Mieville only two of the more obvious names to have given us mystical reflected Londons into which the unwary might stumble. When we're back in regular London, the starting point is the book trade, and that just recalls Moore's old mucker Iain Sinclair (credited in the delightful acknowledgements, obviously, alongside Michael Moorcock, one of whose districts is on loan for a couple of cameos). To some extent this feels deliberate; part of Moore's genius has always been polishing up existing materials and finding new life in them, and part of the idea of Long London is that everyone's London is secondhand, third, more, overlaid by every half-remembered tale of the city, which between them are far more real than the mere stones of the place. But even so, and of course this may change in subsequent books, at this point I'm still feeling the familiarity more than the fresh angles.

Exacerbating that, we have the characters. Given the long grudges nursed against Moore by some, I suspect a lot of the criticism will focus on the women, what with the two main female characters being a gargoyle of a landlady, and a gorgeous streetwalker with a heart of gold. But the men, historical and mythical figures aside, are also straight out of central casting, and for the most part reveal fewer further nuances as the novel progresses: the hangdog hack, the witty barrister, and of course our gawky lead, Dennis Knuckleyard. I won't say that he's the least convincing of the lot; yes, it might seem a stretch that he can remember odd little folkloric details he once heard, at the same time as getting instructions on things he absolutely must or must not do back to front, but I have met (and indeed married) the ADHD, so regretfully, I can believe that. But fundamentally, I'm not sure that hapless leads play to Moore's strengths. Or at least, not leads openly presented as hapless; plenty of his previous protagonists were eventually revealed as such, but that's a very different proposition. Obviously there's an element of flipping that here, a fairly straightforward hero's journey under all the debris and urban psychohistory, but he can still be exasperating company at times, and never more so than at the end when his apparent trajectory is brought down to earth by what looks a lot like a punchline that undercuts the story, crossed with a reset button.

That's after the resolution of a second plot, which takes up the slack in the book's final third, once the introductory one has been resolved, and which I suspect will feel familiar to more readers than just the Machen fans. And as I write that, I realise how negative a lot of this review has been. Yeah, it's not the best Alan Moore novel - but that's an extremely high bar, and (as long as we remember Thunderman) it's certainly not the worst either. There's plenty here that's insightful, funny, beautiful, chilling - even some that are all four at once (an extended bit of business with a knife comes to mind). I'm definitely going to give the series one more book, and almost certainly all four, especially after the teasing flash-forward in the epilogue. I just hold wizards to higher standards than everyday writers.

(Netgalley ARC)

"The Great When" marks the debut of a new urban fantasy series by Alan Moore, renowned for his work in comic books and graphic novels. Set in 1949 London, the novel follows 18-year-old Dennis Knuckleyard, who, orphaned during the war, works and resides in a bookshop owned by a peculiar woman named Coffin Ada. One day, Dennis stumbles upon a strange book that seems to originate from another London, known as the Great When. He soon discovers that returning the book is imperative, as failure to do so poses a threat to his life. With the aid of friends and strangers alike, Dennis embarks on a journey into an unfamiliar world filled with surprises beyond his wildest imagination.

What I liked most about this book, paradoxically, was not its speculative elements and the existence of a parallel, fantastical London, but rather its setting. It's worth noting that while the book contains elements of high fantasy, most of the action takes place in the ordinary world, namely London in the late '40s. Although several years had passed since the end of the war, the lingering effects of the conflict are palpable and very present in people's daily lives. The author skillfully portrays the realities of the time and place, blending them seamlessly into the narrative.

As for the plot itself, it struck me as somewhat uneven. The first half of the book is quite slow, with the dynamic action kicking in more prominently after the halfway point. This slower pace paradoxically diminished the stakes for me, making the urgency of the situation feel somewhat muted. While I found the main character, Dennis, and his newfound friend and love interest, Grace, compelling, I struggled to connect with the other characters, who, apart from Coffin Ada, felt somewhat one-dimensional and thinly woven into the plot. This made it difficult for me to keep track of who was who. Additionally, the book's narrative style, characterized by lengthy descriptions, abstract language, and minimal dialogue, may not be to everyone's taste. Personally, I found it somewhat dense and at times detracted from my enjoyment of the story. Nevertheless, I did appreciate the abundant humor.

Despite these reservations, I think "The Great When" is a fair start to a new urban fantasy series, and it's worth giving the book a chance. I hope that subsequent volumes will offer a more fast-paced and dynamic narrative.