Does art matter? And I don’t mean does art mean something because of course it does; instead, does art materialize? Does it bring into being a material artifact with weight, substance, agency? Is it purely representational? None of these questions are new, and as an English teacher I find myself pondering the value (a loaded, unsettled term) of art with my students all of the time. Because the pupils certainly wonder: why are we reading this? Why does this matter? Again, nothing new, and the general responses of the humanities are staid as well: aesthetics and beauty, ethical instruction, learned sympathy, encountering difference and otherness, shared understanding of human experience, etc. The loftier devotees of classical humanities proclaim something about changing the world and developing the soul while the more cynical practitioners stress the importance of countercultural resistance to hegemony. And, depending on my mood, I have mounted rigorous defenses for these positions. But does art matter? Does it, fundamentally, create the world? I have my doubts. I am not a wizard able to peer into the infinities of someone’s soul and its entanglement with the world in order to determine whether an expression of artistic representation produced a discernible effect. Alan Moore, however, is a wizard, and with him there is no doubt: art makes matter.

The Great When, Moore’s first in his Long London quintet series, is a portal fantasy, which is a bit like saying Hamlet is a revenge story or Beloved is a ghost story: correct, technically, but flattening, perhaps even insulting, and certainly missing the point. But labels can be useful, so: The Great When establishes a portal-London, an alternate dimension of London where metaphors and symbols take on material weight—as one character remarks, “It’s London’s theory, not its practice” (p. 79). Our protagonist, Dennis Knuckleyard, stumbles across a book from the Great When (one of several names for Other London) and is thrust into a world teeming with the likes of Arthur Machen, London gangsters, personifications of collective psyches, crazed booksellers and veil-splitting artists, earnest desires for acceptance, ruminations on the individual capacity for evil, and beings referred to as the “Popes o’ Blades” (p. 147). All of this takes place in London, 1949, four years after the bombs have stopped. The world has changed and England finds itself in the position of “letting old Britannia go” (p. 298). A new epistemology of evil has descended on the world, scattering the old, now-nostalgic certainties, and Moore and his characters scramble to determine new orientations amidst the rubble.

The plot is deceptively straightforward: Dennis needs to return a book to the Great When or suffer hideous consequences. But the ensuing machinations unfold with Shakespearian complexity, with characters floating in and around each other’s influence, new relationships unlocking and evolving, and Romance and Tragedy and History and Comedy sharing the stage (this book is surprisingly funny); italics coming in to signal that we’re in the Other London now, and it all works wonderfully.

Dennis himself is an eighteen-year-old listless dud who, when we first meet him, holds out hope of one day being a secret agent. Imbued with “all the substance of a beanbag,” he is perhaps the least capable person to deal with reality, let alone surreality (p. 180). He helps a crazed madwoman run a bookstore, and in whatever spare time he can manage, he masturbates. Like all of the surviving Londoners, Dennis carries the trauma of relentless bombings, and “shattered fragments couldn’t be expected to have aims or plans” (p. 191). But of course there’s a girl, Grace Shilling, “the nicest, most substantial person he’d ever met,” and their serendipitous meeting sends Dennis spiraling towards her, another world, and, of course, self-discovery. Dennis is achingly earnest, almost desperately pathetic, yet endearing and kind-hearted. Part of the novel’s pleasure comes in watching how Moore takes his protagonist and devises a distorted bildungsroman, so that, at novel’s end—when a character comments that Dennis looks to have been “knitted out of fucking steam”—we feel a similar sense of drawn out, stretched-too-thin growth (p. 293). Moore attaches to Dennis a surprising sense of morality, as well: His final reflections on his own culpability in someone’s death will likely jar against the reader’s own reading of the situation, reminding us that, for all of Moore’s seeming cynicism, he treats his characters and their foibles with a remarkable humanity that calls to mind the best of Terry Pratchett or Kurt Vonnegut. With The Great When I expected Moore’s maximalist prose, the languorous pace that pores over every succulent detail, the cosmic scope and vivid imagination; but I did not expect this kind of moral clarity.

Make no mistake, Moore’s worlds are infected with villainy, his characters largely a bundle of misshapen flaws and questionable decisions, and at no point does he wag his finger at the reader as if to say, “Straighten up, you foolish people, and save this dying world.” But he might come close.

All of Moore’s characters are delightful Dickensian inventions, but several are historical figures inflected with Moore’s trademark maximalism. None of these are more compelling than the artist Austin Spare, “a figure built from dust who nonetheless filled the small room to bursting with the thrumming pylon of his presence” (p. 107). Through Spare, Moore is afforded the opportunity to directly comment on art and its influence on the world. Through “magnesium-flare eyes,” Spare expounds on the “Symbolist substratum” of the Great When, likening it to the “Theoria … the divine essence of a thing” (pp. 108, 110, 109). Again, no surprises here, coming from an author who has long been invested in and interrogated the power of symbols. But then Moore gives us Spare’s art show, containing a self-portrait titled Self-re-Hitler. The portrait bears a striking resemblance to Hitler, who, pre-WWII, commissioned Spare. The artist refused: “Only from negations can I wholesomely conceive you. For I know of not courage sufficient to stomach your aspirations and ultimates. If you are superman, let me be forever animal” (p. 255). Dennis admires the stirring story, but Moore invites the reader to consider further, to consider whether “Spare was asking himself whether he had anything in common with the Fuhrer … wasn’t the picture asking the same thing of everybody?” (p. 254).

Given certain circumstances, how capable are we of evil? This question haunts Dennis, and it correspondingly hovers over the rest of the novel. And the implications are twinned in this madcap world of Moore’s because it is not only reality that our actions ripple through—it’s our imaginations, the way that we perceive the world itself: the possibility of evil, of catastrophic harm, lurks behind every wayward glance, every word let slip, every hastily scrawled line. “It’s the vision what’s in charge,” Spare explains, reminding us that, yes, of course, art matters (it’s a “matter-phor, as yer might say”), of course it rewrites the world and cultural consciousness—everything matters (pp. 256-7). If anything, one might accuse Moore of being a bit too earnest, a bit too humanist-y. Art changing the world? The novel resists easy answers—“the war put paid to simple reasons and we shan’t be seeing ‘em again. It’s complicated reasons these days … everything’s tangled up”—but the critique might be lofted all the same (p. 225).

An element beyond critique, however, is Moore’s delightful, obvious love for language: His prose, on every page, with every line, is dense, bursting with vitality, sparking off the page. Okay, there are some who will be put off by Moore’s seeming obsession with the question, “But what if every sentence might be a spell cast upon the reader?” Dennis doesn’t rub his eyes and walk down the stairs; instead, “knuckling a residue of dream from clotted sockets, he somnambulated his way down the stairs” (pp. 20-21). Fish becomes “glossy chunks that slid apart like pages in a poorly stabled magazine,” the newspaper holding the food taking on an alliterative quality to become “glassy with grease” (pp. 47-48). Stumbling into the Great When, “filtered through twinkles, he sees urban landscape writhing at the brink of ravenous biology … eye-corner movement, rustlings in a turf of quivering litter, caterpillar Durex, not a thing that is not animate” (p. 77). And so on for a little over three hundred pages. I have tried throughout the review to quote liberally from the text to give you an idea of the flavor, but it pales in comparison to the sheer virtuoso display on every page. “The poet wonders,” Moore has a character reflect near the novel’s open, “if surrealism tries too hard, or doesn’t try enough,” which can only beg the question: is Moore’s prose trying “too hard?” (p. 6). I suppose it depends on your disposition toward experimentation. Because Moore, if anything, is always experimenting, slapping seemingly disparate words and ideas together with so much reckless abandon the whole enterprise takes on a breathless, sweeping quality. And I love it. It’s the number one quality that attracts me to each of his works. Moore loves words: he loves the way that they sound, the way that they feel when you say them out loud (like any good poetry, you will be tempted to say these sentences aloud to yourself); he loves the way that they can conjure an image so unforgettable the reader is left entangled, caught in the mesh, unable to return to a world without “caterpillar Durex.” The Great When, like all Moore’s work, is invested in language as such; if you, Strange Horizons reader, are also invested in language, you will find much to love in this work. And if a particular diction or syntax choice doesn’t ring true for you, don’t worry: Moore has a million more to try out.

I have found Moore a fascinating artist for years, and with each new work he has managed to both confirm my belief that he’s got the stuff and give me something wholly unexpected. Yes, Moore wrote Watchmen (1986-7). And Swamp Thing (1982). And V for Vendetta (1982-5) and From Hell (1989-98) and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (1999-2019) and Promethea (1999-2005) and Providence (2015-17). Likely to his own chagrin and surely debatably to many, he is lauded as comics’ greatest writer. Academic monographs have been published on his singular, medium-defining influence. But he also gave us Voice of the Fire (1996), a polyphonic novel-in-parts that spans the centuries, dizzying in its prose, haunting, and deeply human. In 2016, Moore published Jerusalem and showed us how angels speak. And in 2022’s collection Illuminations, he snuck in a short novel about the gravitational suck of the comics industry and its whirlpool of corrupting influence. It’s too early to tell if Moore’s Long London sequence will eclipse the artistic accomplishment and ambition of Jerusalem, but The Great When contains enough genuine craft, care, and surprise that it’s definitely in contention. Yes, Moore wrote comics—and alongside his creative partners (Kevin O’Neill, Dave Gibbons, Steve Bissette, Eddie Campbell, and Melinda Gebbie, to name a few), they are some of the greatest comics the form has seen. But the collective critical attention afforded to Moore as a writer is arrested by this myopic attention to his comics work, neglecting, since at least the 1990s, his possibly superior skill as a novelist.