Dissecting the Present

Arbaz M. Khan reviews Alan Moore’s “The Great When: A Long London Novel.”

By Arbaz M. KhanDecember 27, 2024

• SF

PLATO’S ALLEGORY of the cave famously depicts prisoners shackled underground, their only understanding of reality shaped by shadows cast on a wall. For these prisoners, the shadows are the only truth they know. Were one prisoner to escape and glimpse the world beyond the cave, the truth they encountered might compel them to return and liberate their fellows. Yet, as Plato’s Socrates posits, such liberation often comes at a cost. The other prisoners, clinging to the comfort of their shadow-bound reality, might resist—even violently—the intrusion of this new perspective.

Aldous Huxley, in The Doors of Perception (1954), offers a counterpoint to this resistance: “To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and the inner world … as they are apprehended, directly and unconditionally, by Mind at Large—this is an experience of inestimable value.” For Huxley, the act of breaking free from constrained perception is not just valuable but also transformative, revealing a deeper reality beyond the mundane. Similarly, David Foster Wallace describes reading as an “exchange of consciousnesses,” a way of stepping into another’s reality and expanding our own. Both thinkers underline the importance of engaging with perspectives that challenge and enrich our understanding of the world.

Alan Moore’s The Great When: A Long London Novel (2024) operates within this tradition of exploring perception, reality, and the shadow worlds we inhabit. In Moore’s historical fantasy, the reader is introduced to Long London, an alternate version of the city in 1949 that exists beyond conventional time. Within this surreal landscape, where concepts like Crime and Poetry take on physical forms, Moore crafts a world that challenges the boundaries between imagination and reality. His narrative echoes the philosophical quandaries of the cave allegory but adds his signature layer of magick and metafictional complexity. Where Plato invites us to consider the liberating power of truth, and Huxley and Wallace celebrate the value of altered perception, Moore asks what it means to exist in a reality shaped by stories, symbols, and the occult.

Much like the allegory’s shadows, books themselves create a “shadow world” where readers engage with realities beyond their own. Moore’s novel doesn’t merely invite this engagement; the book demands it. Drawing upon his extensive career as a comics auteur, Moore infuses The Great When with themes of history’s lingering presence, the mutable nature of reality, and the transformative power of storytelling. In his richly imagined Long London, Moore constructs a world that blurs the lines between the seen and unseen, tethering his vision to both historical touchstones and a magickal alternate dimension. This is not just a story; it is also an act of literary alchemy that challenges readers to question the realities they take for granted—and to revel in the shadow world of their own imaginations.

Within the novel, Moore explores themes that have defined his career: history’s impact on the present, the interplay of perception and reality, the magic of storytelling, and the occult. The act of engaging with this text demands an exercise of imagination—a venture into the shadow world of the mind, where the boundaries between reality and the unbound creativity of the imagination blur. For the reader, this shadow world takes shape as they lose themselves in the fiction, filling in the narrative dream Moore establishes through his prose.

Moore uses the touchstones of the occult and magick to craft a scintillating world steeped in historical detail. Central to this is Welsh author Arthur Machen, specifically his 1936 book N, which explores the idea of a truer world concealed beneath our present reality. Moore borrows the MacGuffin of N: a fictitious book called A London Walk by Reverend Thomas Hampole. In Moore’s novel, this book—a creation of Machen’s imagination—is discovered by 18-year-old Dennis Knuckleyard as he runs errands for his boss. This discovery sets the narrative in motion.

While Moore’s penultimate narrative comics work in Providence (2015–17) found him exploring H. P. Lovecraft’s bibliography, here Moore uses Machen as his representative for all things mystical and magickal within postwar London while also including historical figures such as the occultist and surrealist painter Austin Osman Spare and the self-styled Prince Monolulu, a horse-racing tipster. These historical elements ground the novel’s magickal narrative in a tangible historical context, creating a rich interplay between the real and the fantastical.

In Moore’s novel, the fictitious London Walk suddenly manifests as a real artifact, crossing from the alternate dimension of Long London into Dennis’s hands. Working in a bookstore owned by Coffin Ada, Dennis learns that possessing the book could be dangerous. Ada, in a moment of grim humor, warns him: “When I say this book’s not real, I mean it don’t cough cough cough cough exist. It’s not in catalogues. It’s not in libraries. Arthur fucking Machen made it up in a cough cough cough novel, then used it again in a short story, and there’s not a trace of it past that, not fucking anywhere.”

This metafictional twist invites readers to explore Machen’s work and revel in the layered interplay of reality and fiction. Moore masterfully combines real-world figures with the fantastical world of Long London to create a believable alternate reality. In doing so, he constructs a shadow world that draws readers in, challenging their perspectives and engaging their imaginations.

In order to avoid a dark fate, Dennis must venture into the Great When and return the book to the world it belongs in. Moore employs vibrant purple prose whenever Dennis enters the Great When, masterfully distinguishing the familiar world from this shadow one through passages of flowing, evocative language, as seen in the following excerpt:

Unable to arrest his tumbling momentum, he plunged forward and then 

he is on his knees and puking in pellucid heaven, spattering the gutters made from gold, where scuttling to his vomit’s thin meniscus on those auric cobbles, there are bottle caps with brewery insignias and spider legs of silvered cork, crimped edges glinting, tinkling as they lap the bile and beer … immediately upright with revulsion, he sways, reeling in an overwhelming something.

Moore stretches sentences for pages, evoking the styles of William Faulkner and James Joyce. Each instance demands the reader’s full attention, rewarding them with the richness of his prose. While Moore is celebrated as an auteur in the comics medium, here he is completely unleashed. Like similar Joycean passages in Jerusalem (2016), every such sentence in The Great When requires focus, drawing readers into the shadow world of Long London itself. By forcing readers to read, reread, and examine the text closely, Moore mirrors the allegory of the cave—compelling us to confront shadow puppets while the true thrust of the story emerges gradually, concealed in the narrative’s progression.

While the concept of an alternate city has been explored in Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere (1996) and China Miéville’s The City & the City (2009), Moore takes what has been done before and simply adds his own polish to the plot. His entire oeuvre is known for acknowledging intertextual ideas and building off of them. But instead of settling for just a pastiche of others’ work, he elevates his contributions with a metafictional twist instead. Moore extrapolates what we know about the culture of postwar London, then upends that knowledge by revealing a parallel London to show us the era in a new light. He employs such paradigm-shifting twists throughout his bibliography, from Miracleman (1982) to his last comic in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Tempest (2018–19).

Moore has made this buildup of ideas his bread and butter. Following his masterful deconstruction of superhero concepts through Watchmen (1987), Moore entered a more constructive phase with his work. He created his own comics imprint, America’s Best Comics, in order to release his own original works: Promethea (1999), a Wonder Woman pastiche that explores the occult and mysticism through a female superhero; Tom Strong (1999–2006), a modernized take on 1940s pulp that epitomizes Moore’s constructivist era; and then, finally, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (1999–2019), which follows a fictional group of Victorian adventurers in a swashbuckling tale. Moore concluded the America’s Best Comics line with an apocalypse in Promethea, one in which the barriers that separated humanity were shed to construct a more enlightened version of the world. 

However, Moore did not finish his comics work there. To raise funds to pay his taxes, Moore accepted a commission to write comics for Avatar Press, which led to The Courtyard (2003) and Neonomicon (2010), modern stories where Lovecraftian works come to life in the real world. In his second-to-last comics work, Providence, Moore triggers the end of the world, allowing humanity to fall into the deepest Lovecraftian darkness. 

In his final work for The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Moore truly reaches the culmination of his entire comics career. What started as an ensemble of Victorian-era adventurers evolved into a shared universe for all of the Western world’s fiction. In the final iteration of the book, The Tempest, Moore concludes with another apocalypse. This time, the finale arrives as a reflection on the superhero genre. However, when the world ends, Moore uses this development to posit questions about the present and what we learn from it. He makes readers think deeper about fandoms, superheroes, and modern trends. In exploring the present, Moore brings alive the past and encourages readers to examine nostalgia for simpler times. In The Tempest, Moore and his esteemed collaborator Kevin O’Neill end the world in solidarity for those who lost their own worlds. 

Now, in The Great When, Moore explores our history within the magickal world. In exploring our civilization’s past, he metatextually dissects our present. The way Dennis Knuckleyard interacts with Long London is a metaphor for our own interactions with the internet, with the digital sphere. Moore creates a metatextual dialogue between himself and the reader to make us more aware of ourselves. While the prose is demanding, it requires readers to notice their own attention spans and reflect on the text at present. This awareness brought on by fiction is the break we need from our disparate realities created by the internet. Here he breaks us from our shadow world into a reality we did not know before. 

Throughout the novel, in Long London, Dennis encounters a character inspired by the Cheshire Cat. It’s something that clearly tethers the meta Alice in Wonderland nature of Moore’s storytelling. At the novel’s conclusion, Dennis observes a cat, remarking, “But it’s just an ordinary cat.” In this seemingly small moment, Moore wraps up his alternate-dimension version of London, finishing with something mundane and real. The novel allows Moore to explore how we perceive reality as forces us to ask what lies beyond our current view of the world.

But it’s just an ordinary book.